Top 7 Landscape Maintenance Tips for Sarasota & Siesta Key Homeowners
Everybody loves a good pro tip. You feel special, like you have insider secrets that automatically make you a better person.
If you’re a homeowner craving impressive landscaping in Sarasota, you need all the tips you can get.
Landscaping faces a lot of challenges here: heat, salt, sandy soil, heavy rain, drought, tropical storms.
What are the best landscape maintenance tips for Sarasota? Fertilize often in smaller amounts. Battle stubborn weeds with both pre-emergent and post-emergent controls. Keep your grass taller than you might think. Stay on top of irrigation system maintenance. Give native plants a chance.
Let’s learn more about Florida landscaping best practices, including:
1. Fertilize a Bit at a Time
It’s tempting to pour on the fertilizer. Fertilizer is food, so if you get excited about a big bowl of chips, your lawn must love a big meal of fertilizer, right?
Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. (But if those chips are sour cream and onion, please share.)
Here in Sarasota, lawns prefer smaller amounts of fertilizer but more often. Kind of like you when you’re in a snackish mood for something small and tasty every couple hours.
Why? Our soil here in Sarasota is sandy, so it drains quickly. That means the important nutrients in your fertilizer are draining through quickly, too. Your hungry lawn barely has time to absorb them.
The solution: fertilize more often, in smaller amounts. Shoot for monthly fertilizing.
Even some professional lawn care companies don’t follow this handy Sarasota landscape maintenance tip.
But here at Tropical Gardens we offer a more frequent lawn fertilizer schedule, visiting your property once a month for 8-10 months of the year during your lawn’s hungriest months, applying smaller amounts of nutrients so they actually sink in and get to work.
2. Weed Control for Florida Lawns: Hit ‘Em Twice
You might have noticed weeds are the worst. They’re ugly and pushy and completely ignore that sign you posted on your lawn that says, “NO WEEDS ALLOWED!” Rude.
Here’s your battle plan: strike back with both pre-emergent and post-emergent weed control.
In everyday language, that means you prevent weeds from showing up in the first place, then kill the ones that are extra annoying and show up anyway.
Here’s how the science part works:
Pre-emergent weed control creates a barrier in the soil that prevents weed seeds from germinating and growing. But the right timing is important in order for it to work. The herbicide needs to be in the soil at the time of weed germination for it to be effective.
Post-emergent herbicides work when applied directly to weeds that are already growing. The product is absorbed through the leaves and stems, then moves through the plant’s system, causing it to die.
Weed control for Florida lawns requires a one-two punch. Here at Tropical Gardens, we use both pre-emergent and post-emergent weed control all year long. Florida’s combination of plenty of rain, lots of sun and year-round mild temperatures mean weeds love hanging out here all the time. Lucky us!
3. Don’t Mow Too Low
If you’re mowing your lawn so short it looks like those crew cuts guys wore in the 50’s you’re doing it wrong.
Taller grass is better when it comes to Florida landscaping best practices.
This is especially true for the St. Augustine grass that’s so popular here in Sarasota.
It needs to be kept at 4.5 to 5 inches tall, higher than other types of grass.
Why?
- Taller grass blades allow for better photosynthesis, which strengthens the root system and helps your grass endure heat and drought.
- Taller grass shades the soil, blocking the sunlight needed for weed seeds to germinate and grow.
- As that taller grass shades the soil, it reduces water evaporation, too.
4. Be Ready to Battle Bugs
If you had tiny microphones out there in your landscaping plants, you could probably hear all the bugs chewing. (Those of you who are annoyed by chewing sounds, don’t try this at home. You know who you are, and so do your spouses.)
Sap-sucking aphids, whiteflies, scale and spider mites are out there. So are leaf eaters like army worms and leaf miners.
It’s a real bug buffet out there and they can do a lot of damage.
Then, just when you’d think they’d be too full and lazy to do anything but nap, they lay a bunch of eggs and their obnoxious babies start feasting.
What to do? When it comes to Florida landscape maintenance best practices, 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.
It’s double trouble for bugs, less stress for you.
5. Sustainable Landscaping Tips: Consider Native Plants
If you’re wrinkling your nose at this pro tip, hear us out.
We love non-natives like bougainvillea and jasmine as much as the next guy, but they’re not the only pretty plants in the bed.
Drought-tolerant plants for Sarasota — as most natives are —
have some real beauty to share, and they’re a smart choice for so many reasons as we continue to face water conservation concerns:
- Native plants love their natural environment, which means they need less water, fertilizer and pesticides to thrive.
- They’re tough. Florida’s climate can be intense, with hot summers, torrential rain, high humidity, hurricanes and periods of drought. How can pretty plants survive all this? Not all of them can, but Florida native species have been doing it for thousands of years.
- Native plants help wildlife in so many ways. They offer pollen for struggling pollinators, nectar for hummingbirds, food for all sorts of critters and shelter for wildlife.
- When you landscape with native plants, you help prevent the spread of harmful invasive species. When plants are introduced that aren't native to our area, they can become invasive, choking out beneficial plants that birds and animals need to survive.
If you’re skeptical that native plants can bring real beauty to your landscaping, meet pink muhly grass, with its spectacular puffy plumes. Or the bright and cheerful beach sunflower. How about the classic Southern magnolia? If you want to hear more, let’s chat.
6. Be Particular About Pruning
Pruning plants is really important, both to keep them looking great and to keep them healthy. It’s also kind of a pain.
If we listed all the Florida landscaping best practices about when to prune what, including all the exceptions, you’d quit reading and return to that big bowl of chips we mentioned earlier.
Why is pruning so complicated? Blame lovely Sarasota weather.
The temperature and amounts of rain we get here help determine plant growth and when to prune. It’s kind of unpredictable.
Meanwhile, we prune throughout the year here, not just during designated seasons like spring or fall. Things grow super fast.
Adding to the complications: if you prune at the wrong time and unintentionally snip off crucial flower buds, your flowering shrub won’t have any flowers that year.
The best Sarasota landscape maintenance tip: leave the persnickety pruning to the professional plant nerds, and don’t worry about it.
7. Stay on Top of Irrigation System Maintenance
Imagine you just ate that big bowl of chips from earlier, then discovered there’s nothing in the house to drink. Not even water.
That’s how your landscaping feels when your irrigation system isn’t working right.
Among our favorite Sarasota landscape maintenance tips: Get on board with a regular irrigation maintenance program, so your system is inspected by irrigation pros either once a month or once every two months.
Ignore important maintenance, and you know exactly what will happen — your system will suddenly fail during the hottest, driest week of the year.
Cue the dead lawn and plants — the same weekend you volunteered to host the neighborhood cookout.
When you hire a company for regular irrigation system maintenance, they’ll 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.
If they find any issues, they should be able to fix little problems on the spot, but if the issues are more complex and require additional parts, they'll likely fill you in on your options and leave you with a quote.
No stress.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sarasota Landscape Maintenance
Q. How often should I water my tropical plants?
A. In general, water new plants seven days a week for the first two weeks, then three to four times a week for the next two weeks. Then settle into a more normal watering schedule of two days a week in the winter and three days a week in the summer. But some plants need less. It’s a great idea to read the care label when you buy a new plant.
Q. What’s the best time to water lawns in Florida?
A. Early in the morning, as close to sunrise as possible — before the sun gets hot and evaporates your precious water before it can soak into the soil.
Q. Should I fertilize my palm trees?
A. Yes! Palm trees need a granular, slow-release fertilizer applied to the ground around their trunks four times a year to ensure they get a constant supply of nutrients over time. That gives them the nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and magnesium they need to thrive. Some larger palms need extra nutrients injected directly into the trunk. (It sounds painful but trust us, they’ll be fine.)
Q. How many visits should a landscape maintenance program in Sarasota include?
More than you might think. There’s a lot to do out there. Tropical Gardens offers a 42-visit plan and a 52-visit plan.
The 42-visit program is designed for lower-maintenance properties without semi-deciduous trees. There are limited leaf cleanups in this plan and it doesn’t include heavy spring pruning.
The 52-visit plan, for properties with more trees, includes spring clean-up and heavy spring pruning.
Need the Best Sarasota Landscape Maintenance Tips? Talk to Us
Even if your yard is small, your landscape’s needs are big. Lawn care, weed control, bug worries, plant health care, hungry palm trees. It’s a lot, right?
Tropical Gardens provides tailored, full-service landscape maintenance services in Sarasota that ensure your Florida landscaping gets all the care it needs.
Need more? Updated landscaping? New irrigation? A fun tiki bar? Luxurious landscape lighting to get your glow on after dark?
We’d love to boost your backyard outdoor life with all the other great elements you need to really enjoy it.
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 get back to that bowl of tasty chips.
