Grass a problematic but encouraged pest

Charlotte Sun
Aug. 31, 2008

By NEIL HUGHES
Staff Writer

ENGLEWOOD — One of Florida’s biggest plant problems is also one of its most common: Sod.

In most neighborhoods, grass is a requirement from the homeowners association. If it’s so common, can grass be an environmental pest?

Think about the entire infrastructure of sprinklers and fertilizer in most Florida lawns, designed just to keep the grass alive. Or how much time (or money) do you spend every year mowing grass. And if you think it’s hard to keep your grass alive in the hot summer, try removing grass, or preventing the spread of it.

“Put sod where you need it,” said Bobbi Rodgers, of the Charlotte Harbor Environmental Center and Cedar Point Environmental Park. “If you have kids and you need a little playground area, fine. If you have a dog and you want to have a little grassy area, fine. But this whole concept of sodding the entire front and back yard of homes has to change. It takes too much water.”

Some of Florida’s most popular grasses, like St. Augustine, are water hogs.

Sod and its mandatory ubiquity is representative of the larger problem in Florida neighborhoods, encouraging and often forcing problem plants into homeowners’ yards.

That’s why Fiddler’s Green II, a residential community in Englewood, is exploring Florida-friendly landscaping.

Pete Petersen, president of the community’s homeowners association, said due to the costs of native landscaping, the long-term project will likely be done one building at a time. The pool will likely be the first to be redone in 2009.

With 174 units over 16 acres, maintaining grass is an especially costly part of the Fiddler’s Green II landscaping.

“We probably have more grass area than any other complex around here,” Petersen said.

When Ed Freeman moved into his home in downtown Sarasota 14 years ago, the first thing he did, he joked, was kill the lawn and give away the mower.

Freeman, the director of land protection for the nonprofit Sarasota-based environmental group Wildlands Conservation, has a yard he calls “98 percent native.”

“I’ve gotten awards; I’ve been on a tour of homes,” he said. “It’s a pretty landscape, I think, and obviously other people do too.”

In his yard’s shady areas, Freeman has ferns, peperomia and other assorted thick ground cover. In the sunny parts of his lawn, he has a mixture of love grasses and lopsided Indian grass.

“They’re the plants that evolved here,” he said. “They’re going to do best here if you put the right plant in the right place.”

Homeowners shouldn’t overextend themselves, Freeman said.

“Most people don’t need an acre or five acres of yard,” he said. “That’s just a lot of maintenance. Unless you have a football team, you probably don’t need that much. If you need or want that much property, you should probably leave in a lot of native vegetation.”

And with 16 acres at Fiddler’s Green II, the community’s Landscape Advisory Committee hopes to do just that.

Members anticipate they could reduce the grounds budget by 25 percent by reducing grass around the residential areas. Further, they plan to create shade, and plant drought- and salt-tolerant plants and ground covers.

They hope to extend native landscaping to the entire community in the near future. The costs associated with new plants have forced the committee to seek out grants, though none have been acquired yet.

If the financial side can be worked out, Petersen said residents of Fiddler’s Green II are in full support of Florida-friendly landscaping.

“Only,” he said, “if it doesn’t cost them.”