Landscaping Tips Put my Worries to Rest

I had an interesting morning. A lady from the university extension came out and told me what to do about my landscaping.

When I moved here, I was very reluctant to second-guess the previous owners. They had been very sharp about designing, constructing, and maintaining the house. Their landscaping, on the other hand, looked crazy to me, but I assumed they knew more than I did, so I didn’t want to cause problems by trying to correct them.

I have three citrus trees. They looked bad to me when I moved here, and citrus is disappearing all over America because of an unstoppable blight, but I gave the sellers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was possible to grow citrus in this isolated area, and I just needed the right chemicals. Guess what? My impression was correct. All three trees have citrus greening. There is no cure, and if I plant new trees, they’ll get it, too. It’s time to cut them and drag them away.

The extension agent agrees that some of the hedge choices were dumb, and lots of the plants are so old it’s time to pull them and get new ones. Now I can quit blaming myself for having crazy hedges. I’m going to rip a bunch of plants out with the tractor and replace them with things like podocarpus, which always look great and don’t get woody and hard to trim.

My irrigation system really is stupid; it’s not my imagination. In Miami, lawn sprinklers sprinkle…lawns. They water everything else, too. My system waters shrubs near the house, a small driveway island, and my front gate. The bulk of the yard gets no water. The agent said I should turn the system off, and there is no point in fixing it so it waters the grass. My grass isn’t thin because it’s dry; it’s thin because it’s a crummy type of grass, growing on sandy soil. My hedges don’t need watering.

This is all great news, because my system runs off the same pump that supplies my house. I don’t want to wear it out, and I don’t want to put so much demand on it that it sucks dirt and gravel into my pipes.

The grass is supposed to look bad, so what I thought was a terrible mess is only a moderate mess.

Areas I thought looked bad because of leaf accumulation actually look bad because of shade. The grass here needs a lot of sun. I can fix the rough areas by planting something called crown grass. It’s not real grass, if you ask me. It doesn’t spread. You get big, discrete clumps of three-foot-high grass that cover up your dirt. You can’t kill it, so it’s perfect for me.

She agreed that I had killed a lot of grass. I put ammonium sulfate on it, and she says it does not like that particular chemical. In more positive news, it will grow back.

I have a bare area among some trees in the front yard. She says I need something called “cast iron plants,” so named because they thrive no matter what. They’ll cover the area so I won’t have to go in with the mower and mow the dirt and few little bits of grass.

She confirmed that a mulberry tree will work here. That would be nice. I have a big area with nothing but grass, and a shade tree with edible fruit would be a big plus.

She didn’t like my idea of putting a bamboo wall between my neighbors and me, but under pressure, she admitted it would work. She recommends against it because some people get stuck with bamboo varieties that spread and ruin everything. If I’m confident that the variety I get is non-spreading, bamboo will be a big enhancement to the property.

I have an irritating horse lady across the fence, and she had the gall to suggest I should not shoot in my backyard because it upset her pets. Like would be better if she were invisible.

Now I have to find the plants the agent recommended and put them in my yard. Of course, Home Depot and Lowe’s don’t have them, so I have to look for nurseries. Once I find the plants, I can get to work, and my yard will be much less bother than it is now.