HOW FLORIDA-FRIENDLY PLANTS AND REDUCING TURF CAN HELP SAVE BOTH THE PLANET AND YOUR WALLET
Did you know that utilizing Florida-friendly native plants in your home landscape can save you money AND help offset the effects of climate change? That’s right! Florida-friendly plants are well adapted for the scorching heat, drought, and rainy, humid conditions we get here in the Sunshine State.
After all, native plants have evolved alongside their native habitat for thousands of years. So, they know a thing or two about surviving the extreme weather we experience in Florida. These plants are hardier, drought tolerant, require less water, fertilizer, and overall inputs once established! More and more people are making the switch to low-maintenance, cost-effective native landscaping and realizing how unsustainable and costly green turf lawns are.
Did you know that Americans use 9 billion gallons of water daily to irrigate turf lawns? Not to mention, spend billions of dollars in maintenance each year to maintain lawns that are ultimately polluting our ecosystems and contributing to massive ecological decline.
Want to save money and play an active role in mitigating climate change by supporting your native ecology? Read on!
What are Florida-Friendly Plants?
Florida-friendly plants are typically native plants that are well adapted to the extreme weather conditions we experience here in Florida. In some cases, Florida-friendly plants are NON-INVASIVE exotic plants that are native to locations around the globe with a similar subtropical climate, such as parts of Africa, Asia, and South America. However, to be clear, the MOST Florida-friendly plants are native species as they have evolved within the Floridian landscape and have beneficial relationships with our native wildlife!
Florida-friendly landscaping is a style of landscape design that centers conservation. It aims to protect our natural resources, conserve water, reduce chemical use and pollution, and help prevent erosion while creating a biodiverse habitat that uplifts native flora and fauna.
Technically, there are nine principles of Florida-friendly landscaping that ultimately define a Florida-friendly landscape:
9 Principles of Florida Friendly Gardening
Right Plant, Right Place - Grouping plants together with similar light, soil, and water requirements is an eco-conscious design style that reduces water usage and overall inputs.
Water Efficiently - Utilize smart irrigation practices by calibrating your irrigation accordingly. Only use it where absolutely necessary and consider proper placement relative to the landscape, considering any dips, swales, or areas susceptible to drought.
Fertilize Appropriately - Did you know that the US uses 90 million pounds of fertilizer and 78 million pounds of pesticides to maintain lawns yearly? Furthermore, when creating a Florida-friendly landscape, it is vital to reduce fertilizer use and, if need be, use it correctly to best deliver nutrients to the plants without creating harmful runoff that pollutes our waterways. Compost and other natural fertilizers and soil amendments are best.
Mulch - Mulch helps retain moisture while building topsoil, leading to healthier plants.
Attract Wildlife - Wild Florida and all the beings that depend on it are at risk due to rapid overdevelopment and habitat loss. When you utilize Florida native plants in your landscape that attract birds, insects, and pollinators, your backyard can act as a much-needed oasis for Florida’s unique wildlife!
Responsibly Manage Yard Pests - Use plants that are pest-resistant and natural methods of removing pests as opposed to pesticides that are catastrophic to our native ecology, flora, fauna, and collective health as a planet!
Recycle Yard Waste - Close the loop in your garden by recycling and composting your yard waste. Leave fallen leaves and other yard waste as mulch for your yard to help improve soil quality. Also, leave your grass clippings in place as they act as a natural (and free!) fertilizer for your lawn.
Manage Your Stormwater Runoff - Incorporate rainfall into your design by creating swales, using porous pavers, creating rain gardens, or using rain barrels.
Protect the Waterfront - Be sure to create a maintenance-free zone 10 feet between your yard and the water. This helps prevent harmful chemicals like fertilizer and pesticides from entering our precious waterways.
How replacing turf grass with native plants and Florida Friendly plants can help mitigate climate change
Sure, a green manicured lawn is a picturesque status symbol, but at what cost? Let’s get into it. Traditional lawns use more than one-third of our available freshwater in the US. Yup. You read that right. That’s not all, either…
The traditional American lawn uses more water than conventional wheat and corn farmers growing at a commercial level! Also, green turf lawns in the US cover more than 40 million acres of land– which is more than any commercial crop in the US!
Not only do grass lawns require astronomical amounts of water to keep them looking green and pristine, but turf also depletes soil health. This leads to, you guessed it, an enormous amount of pesticides and fertilizers used in order to keep the grass looking green. Maintaining grass lawns also increases greenhouse gasses due to the amount of fossil fuels used to mow and the massive amounts of toxic chemicals used to maintain these high-maintenance lawns.
Furthermore, turf grasses commonly used across the US are typically not native grasses. Almost always, invasive species of grasses that have not evolved in the North American climate are used. Not only do these non-native grasses need a lot of resources to stay alive, but they can also be incredibly invasive and devastate native ecology.
Additionally, with rapid development in Florida and the clearing of biodiverse wild spaces into turf lawns, the wildlife that sustains balance in our ecosystem has nowhere to go. Green grass turf lawns provide zero benefit to local wildlife and end up causing way more ecological damage than good. Using Florida-friendly native plants and replacing turf with ecological landscaping helps reduce water usage and prevent pollutants from entering our watershed while providing beneficial habitat for threatened wildlife species.
Reducing turf lawns across the US will help save our drinking water and waterways, reduce greenhouse gasses, severely cut pollution (on numerous fronts), and help provide crucial habitat for wildlife.
How using native plants and Florida-friendly plants is more cost-effective than turf grass
There’s no question that in 2023, things are more expensive than they used to be. Conventional lawn care/maintenance is most definitely not exempt from this inflated reality. Your lawn/backyard should not cost you an arm and a leg; to take it even further, it should not contribute to climate change and ecological degradation either…
Combine record-breaking heat and rising costs for all the inputs required for maintaining green turf, like mowing, irrigation, electricity, labor, and what do you get? A lawn that requires way more money and energy than it’s worth, plus, it’s not helping to offset that record-breaking heat, either!
When you replace a high-maintenance, non-native green grass lawn with low-maintenance native plants, you get to save money AND save the planet. But how? Native plants have evolved for thousands of years in their natural habitat. Thus, they are often more drought-tolerant and provide plenty of forage and sustenance for threatened native wildlife and pollinators.
While turf may be one of the cheapest landscaping plants, the long-term cost is astronomical. Here are some of the main ways that you can save money by converting your yard from a green desert to a low-maintenance ecological oasis:
Reduce or eliminate irrigation - Once established, hardy native plants require less irrigation as they are acclimated to the climate and seasonal changes of their natural habitat.
Eliminate the need for chemical fertilizers + pesticides - Native plants or Florida-friendly plants DO NOT require any application of synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. Now, applying compost or other organic and natural amendments will undoubtedly benefit the plants. However, these amendments are not even remotely comparable to the damage that synthetic fertilizers cause.
Reduce turf and reduce maintenance costs - Once turf is removed and replaced with native plants, you can say goodbye to the expensive cost of mowing and maintaining that part of the yard!
Ultimately, reducing the need for intensive irrigation is one of the most significant factors regarding cost savings. Using Florida-friendly landscaping principles, you can conserve up to 40% to 60% of your overall water usage compared to traditional landscapes.
While native plantings still require some maintenance, it is far less costly than the maintenance required for turf lawns. Check out this study where a group of ecologists calculated cost savings analysis for reducing turf and replacing it with native prairie plants in public parks to learn more about how they saved money in the long term by using native plants over turf grass!
Florida-friendly plants & turf reduction: the sustainable, cost-saving path to a *truly* greener future!
Since the 1950s, the green turf lawn has long been a symbol of the ‘American Dream.’ However, its roots date back to an antiquated Victorian era as a status symbol of wealth– primarily because it requires a certain level of wealth to afford the labor that goes into maintaining a sterile, pristine green lawn accented by topiaries.
Furthermore, turf lawns, or green deserts, are tremendously dated, to say the least. Fast forward to 2023, and turf lawns continue to be tremendously expensive, damaging to our wildlife, native ecology, waterways, and the planet as a whole.
If we can help to create more wildlife habitats in our yards, reduce our ecological footprint, and learn to share the space with the species that keep everything in a sacred balance, we are headed in the right direction to protect our planet for future generations to come.
Your yard can make a difference in the world. In fact, it’s the small changes that make for big change! 🌍
Ready to flip your yard into a sustainable ecological oasis? Click here to schedule a consultation with our experienced design team!
