The Hidden Cost of Poor Landscape Maintenance on Luxury Homes in Sarasota
When you gaze out at your majestic live oak, your impressive triple bottle palm, your massive blooming bougainvillea, you see beautiful plants, not dollar signs.
Or maybe you do see dollar signs. After all, your luxury landscaping represents thousands of dollars in replacement costs.
Who’s in charge of these expensive beauties? Attentive horticulture experts? Or crews who treat your luxury landscaping the same as any old yard in town?
What’s the hidden cost of poor landscape maintenance? A weak, struggling lawn that might need expensive renovation or replacement. Ugly weeds that ruin your curb appeal. Wasted water from an inefficient irrigation system. Pest infestations that can kill your precious plants and require costly replacements.
Let’s learn more about the hidden cost of poor landscape maintenance, including:
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The Dangers of Bad Pruning for Sarasota Luxury Home Landscaping
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The Hidden Cost of Poor Landscape Maintenance: Plant-Gobbling Bugs
The Dangers of Bad Pruning for Sarasota Luxury Home Landscaping
Skilled and proper pruning of tropical plants is super important here in Florida, with so many plants that offer fantastic flowers.
And it’s a crucial part of high-end landscape maintenance. If inexperienced landscaping crews prune flowering shrubs at the wrong time, they risk cutting off all the buds — that means no beautiful blossoms. Let that sink in a minute. No flowers on your flowering shrubs. What’s the point?
Your pride-and-joy hibiscus should explode with spectacular 10-inch flowers. But not if some nimrod trims it every month, like some landscaping companies do, and constantly snips off the crucial buds.
You need experts on the job who know to trim hibiscus a foot from the ground in spring and a foot from the ground in fall to set the scene for bountiful blooms.
That amazing azalea you look forward to thrilling you in February and March won’t be so thrilling if a landscaper pruned it back in the summer. It needs those buds to bloom.
The hidden cost of poor landscape maintenance isn’t always so hidden. The absence of flowers in your Sarasota luxury home landscaping will be tragically obvious.
And it’s not just flowers that are at risk from poor pruning.
Many landscaping company crews storm in with hedge trimmers and automatically trim shrubs into unnatural looking balls. That's not high-end landscape maintenance.
Tropical Gardens pruning experts often use hand pruners to encourage your plants to grow into appealing, natural shapes.
A well-landscaped luxury property typically has a variety of plants and shrubs with different bloom cycles, so there’s something in bloom all the time. That means keeping track of lots of different pruning.
Make sure your landscaping partners are up to the task.
High-end Landscape Maintenance Prioritizes Irrigation
This one seems obvious. It’s crucial for your lawn and landscaping to get enough water, especially in extreme drought like we’re experiencing now in South Florida.
It seems obvious. Yet we have customers who leave town for the summer and instruct us to water just once a week because they don’t want to pay high water bills while they’re away.
Four words: your grass will die.
The same thing will happen if your
irrigation maintenance company doesn’t visit your Sarasota luxury home landscaping often enough.
Head to head irrigation coverage ensures every bit of your lawn and landscaping gets the water it needs, especially during periods of drought.
You need monthly checks to make
sure that coverage happens, but many Sarasota landscaping companies don’t do irrigation inspections that often.
Your Sarasota luxury home landscaping should be on a regular maintenance program, inspected by irrigation pros either once a month or at least once every two months. You don’t want your irrigation system suddenly failing during the hottest, driest week of the year.
Your luxury landscaping’s health is on the line.
High-end landscape maintenance includes regular irrigation system inspections, where skilled technicians manually test your entire system and do a walk through to make sure everything’s working properly.
They’ll see if any parts need to be replaced, test each watering zone, and check your timers and sensors to make sure everything is working correctly.
You also don’t want to waste precious water. Regular inspections will help prevent that hidden cost, too.
Timely repairs save money, conserve precious water, and protect your luxury landscape investment.
Sarasota luxury home landscaping often includes expansive lawns that can cost $20,000 or $30,000 to replace.
Make sure your irrigation pros are actually pros, trained and skilled in the art and science of irrigation. If they’re not experts in how much water your lawn actually needs, or in the intricacies of how irrigation systems work, you’ll be the one paying the price.
The Fallout from Poor Fertilizing
Your lush, healthy lawn is a hallmark of your Sarasota luxury home landscaping. It sets the tone for your whole property. If you’re doing it right, people might even slow down in front of your house to gawk.
It’s the impressive visual anchor for the rest of your luxury landscaping features, from your mature trees to your manicured garden beds.
One key to this impressive green display? Fertilizer. Is your lawn getting fed often enough?
When a Sarasota landscaping company tells you they’ll stop by to fertilizer four times a year, that sounds reasonable, right?
But that’s actually not often enough if you live in South Florida.
The soil here in Sarasota is sandy, which means it drains really well. That means the important nutrients in your fertilizer are draining right through, too. Your lawn barely has time to absorb them.
Sarasota lawns need more frequent fertilizing in smaller amounts, so that important lawn food actually feeds your lawn’s roots. Monthly fertilizing is ideal.
Tropical Gardens offers a more frequent lawn fertilizer schedule than many other Sarasota lawn care companies.
We visit once a month for 8-10 months of the year, applying smaller amounts of nutrients so they actually sink in and get to work.
What about those other few months?
Most counties in Florida ban the application of fertilizer that contains nitrogen or phosphorus between June 1 and Sept. 30. Why? It’s to reduce the amount of fertilizer that runs off of properties during summer rainstorms and finds its way into area waterways.
Fertilizers can harm aquatic life and spark algae blooms. You don’t want that on your hands, right?
So does your hungry lawn just get ignored all summer? That’s not high-end landscape maintenance.
We still show up, applying iron and helpful micronutrients like magnesium,zinc, copper, sulphur and manganese to your lawn. All these Florida lawn treatments are allowed during the nitrogen ban months.
We also adjust your fertilizer through the changing seasons, using a slow-release, high-nitrogen granular fertilizer that hangs in there through the spring rainy season.
But then we switch to a liquid formula after the rainy season to provide a steady push of green through your lawn’s dormant season, November through February.
Otherwise, your grass will be brown. Nobody gawks at brown grass, at least, not in a good way.
What’s the hidden cost of poor landscape maintenance when it comes to your lawn’s fertilizing?
Your lawn will lose its deep, vibrant green, shifting to a pale yellow or brown. You’ll notice stunted, sluggish growth, thinning grass, and an increase in bare patches, which leaves your lawn vulnerable to ugly invasive weeds. Weak turf makes it easy for aggressive weeds to take over your Sarasota luxury home landscaping.
Which brings us to…
High-end Landscape Maintenance Wins the War on Weeds
The hidden cost of poor landscape maintenance isn’t hidden at all when it comes to weeds.
There they are, taunting you, making you use all your best swear words, and destroying the pristine look of your luxury landscaping investment.
Crabgrass. Spurge. Dollar weed. Common Bermuda. Without a targeted weed control strategy, they’re impossible to control. A ho-hum landscaping company just won’t cut it.
High-end landscape maintenance puts pros on the job who know exactly when to apply the crucial pre-emergent herbicides to keep some weeds away, and how to quickly target others when they pop up.
It’s actually a year-round battle.
Different Florida weeds emerge at different times throughout the year, which means targeted weed control at just the right times is a crucial part of luxury home landscape maintenance Sarasota.
Invest in pre- and post-emergent weed control treatments to keep your property weed-free throughout the year.
Many luxury homeowners are worried about weed control harming the environment. We care about that, too. Here at Tropical Gardens, we don’t just blanket your lawn with herbicides. That actually stunts the growth of your grass and it’s terrible for the environment.
We use pre-emergent herbicides to stay on top of common Florida lawn weeds like crabgrass.
Then we spray weeds each month as needed. As lawn technicians walk back and forth across your lawn, they’re on the lookout for weeds. If they see weeds, they spray a product that targets that exact weed.
Bonus: these frequent visits mean we’ll spot any other issues in your Sarasota luxury home landscaping, too — early enough to address them before they become big costly problems.
The Hidden Cost of Poor Landscape Maintenance: Plant-Gobbling Bugs
Bugs actually are hidden — you’ll need to put on your best reading glasses to spot whiteflies, sap-sucking aphids, spider mites and scale.
But the damage they do if left to feast on your Sarasota luxury home landscaping is depressingly obvious. For such tiny creatures, they eat a lot, munching your plants down to the stems.
You need high-end landscape maintenance with expert bug-battlers who stay on top of the situation.
It’s complicated. There’s no one solution that kills all your backyard bugs. Different hungry pests eat in different ways — some eat the leaves, others feed through the plant’s vascular system.
Tropical Gardens crews use an insecticide that works both ways, targeting bugs that eat through a plant’s roots and through contact with the leaves.
That helps protect your Sarasota luxury home landscaping so you can enjoy it instead of worrying about it.
Ready for Sarasota High-end Landscape Maintenance to Protect Your Investment? Talk to Us
Luxury landscaping is a significant investment. (We can sense your eyes rolling — we probably don’t need to tell you that.) But it also needs ongoing protection — by experienced pros who value it as much as you do.
Tropical Gardens provides tailored, full-service luxury home landscape maintenance in Sarasota that ensures your landscaping gets all the care it needs.
Need more? Updated landscaping? New irrigation? Luxurious landscape lighting to highlight your investment after dark?
We can’t wait to get started.
Give us a call or fill out our form today! Leave all your landscaping needs to us, and be sure your luxury landscaping has the
