Fort Myers, FL – Bailey Peer Discusses the Importance of Landscape Maintenance

Good morning everyone. It’s Bailey here with Peer Landscaping of Fort Myers, FL and Fort Myers Garden Service here in Fort Myers. We service all of the Lee county including Fort Myers, Alva, Bonita Springs, Estero, Cape Coral and any of the surrounding areas. My name is Bailey Peer and I am the owner of Peer Landscaping. Today I want to talk a little bit about landscape maintenance and upkeep.

I want to focus on what goes on with your landscaping after the installation has been done and how important some key factors are today. We’re going to review some things that are great and some things that are not so great. We all know mishaps can happen in a landscape but what’s important and what’s not. So first off, we’ll start off on a good note talking about this Jatropha. This landscape tree is a great ornamental tree. One of my favorite things about it is it can be at its full height of 12 feet tall if you’d like it to so it can be a very tall ornamental tree, or you can stunt the growth a little bit and keep it at about six feet tall. Like this one is, and this is kind of like an almost center point to give a little bit of privacy to the bathroom window. And it also adds a little bit of color. Now, this tree for a while was not being maintained correctly. It was just let go for a little bit too long. It was 11 feet tall or so, and it was very sporadic and the growth was not full. So what we did is we went ahead and did some reduction pruning to it to take it down in size.

As you can see, if you stand back from a little bit as a whole, the Jatropha tree looks pretty full so far. It’s got a little bit more shaping we need to do. Once it’s done pruning this there’s a last flush out. We’re going to bring it back in a little bit more condensed and make sure it looks great.

So that’s a little bit of recovery, how to do, how to bring something back after it has been maintained for awhile. Katie, if you will, if you want to go ahead and back on, up and scan the lawn here. We’re going to talk about this Georgia turf which is at about at 50% where it needs to be right now. You can see there’s a couple hotspots that are really bad, but what happened here is the client unplugged the landscape timer they had so it did not get the proper watering it needed.

Construction work is being done here. That is super important. We never want to unplug your irrigation timer, especially in the heat of the summer. Or even right before the summer, this time where we’re at, where it’s extremely hot and we’re not receiving as much rain. Your irrigation system is so vital to the health of your landscape.

Always make sure there’s a do not touch or do not unplug signed by your irrigation box where the power’s plugged in because with construction workers, you can’t be too sure what they may do. If you unplug it the decline can happen very quickly in about a week’s time. Your grass can go from about a 100% health down to about 50%, which is not good and will take time to recoup.

They did a couple of fertilizer applications and recovery techniques to try to revert the grass and bring it back to normal. But all we can do now is just wait and make sure the proper maintenance is done on it. So we’re going to wait a little bit longer till we cut on it, but yeah, that’s a mishap we want to avoid in the future.

Sometimes those things happen in landscapes and we got to figure out how we can react to those quickly to make sure that we don’t lose your entire investment. I want to talk a little bit about, let’s talk about these Birds of Paradise right here. These palms get really. And they can be overwhelming to trim, know when not to trim, we really want to figure out what the best thing to do and the best time of the year to do it.

First you have to determine what is the reason behind it. The reason behind this one is to offer an anchor piece over in the corner of the property and take a little bit distraction off of the house. The house here we have is very basic. It’s not a big, beautiful house that we want to tee up. We want to. You know, really make sure that the landscaping catches the eye for this house.

So this one, we want it to be nice, big and bold, but right now it’s a little bit too condensed as you see, there’s a couple of branches that can be pruned off, but there’s a couple of trunks in here that are just growing so condensed. I would even venture out into say this bigger trunk, right? I could go ahead and remove it.

Now we’d have to do that very carefully without damaging the landscape lights or any of the irrigation spots. But this bunch, this grouping right here really needs to be cleaned up. That is a cool piece of the landscape, but if it’s not maintained correctly and too many of the branches and new trunks grow together, then it will not be ideal. It will actually kind of create a rat rats nest.

I want to talk a little bit about the Clusia hedge over here. These Clusia hedges are a pretty good alternative to Areca Palms. Areca palms are becoming notorious for being very dirty, very messy, and high maintenance. And honestly, again, I’ll say the word “a rat’s nest”.

Now Areca’s do have their own place in place in the landscape, but we don’t recommend them, you know? I’d rather recommend something like a Clusia or Kerpis palm. I think that’s also a great one. That one does need to be hand pruned though. When the Clusia is not hand pruned, it will have basically a bunch of wounds in it from the gas pruners. And you don’t want that because. what happens when you have an open wound on your body? You basically, you clean it, put a band-aid over and cover it. This is big, what it does is it rips, it just like this. And now we have a bunch of open wounds throughout the entire hedge which damage the plant. Thousands and thousands upon thousands each time you prune it. So just keep that in mind when you’re pruning the Clusia is you always want to do it by hand with your hand Clippers or your loppers. Those are also a great technique to prune those with.

Just a little side note for the Tequila Agave, I really, really like this, but it’s scary for landscapes. You want to make sure that you don’t put it around too many kids, and if you’re going to, you want to make sure you always cut off all the sharp new tips, because not only will they pop you the soccer ball, but they’ll also get you those you want to be super careful about.

For more information on landscape maintenance or to have us help you design and maintain a beautiful outdoor space for your family to enjoy contact us at Peer Landscaping of Fort Myers, FL and we will be happy to come out and speak with you.