All around, people lookin’ half dead,
Walkin’ on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…
— ‘Summer in the City’ by John Sebastian
While Bill Hudson was visiting his daughter in Alaska, I took a hiatus from writing to save him the work of editing my column. The timing was serendipitous because I needed to expend more effort in hand-to-hand combat with the foliage in my yard — and we were experiencing a rare break in the daily downpours.
In case you haven’t heard, we’re having a heat wave with record high temperatures throughout the nation. For you in the high desert of Pagosa Springs, it’s hot and dry. Here in the sub-tropical humidity of Florida it’s “hot and wet” … reminding me of the summer I spent in southeast Asia.
But this column isn’t about the war in Vietnam. It’s about the war with the foliage on my property.
If you believe the real estate developer advertisements “your Florida dream home’ will have a manicured lawn. Well … yeah … you can have that… and the homeowners association (HOA) for the development the realtor will be happy to sell you into will harass you to maintain that phony image.
Having the advantage — by choice — of not living in a community under the diktats of an HOA run by petit tyrants with too much time on their hands, we have facilitated the natural growth of our yard. So far the only complaint we had was from a neighbor who subsequently got arrested for a sex crime.
The rest of the non-pervert neighbors like our natural landscaping just fine.
Maintaining one of those Florida real-estate agent approved, curb-appeal pristine St. Augustine grass lawns to keep the HOA off your ass, is labor intensive and requires regular chemical application. That ain’t cheap even if you do it yourself.
To keep the weeds, and insects, in those lawns at bay requires chemicals. Lawn treatment is big business here.
Then there is keeping it mowed to HOA standards. During the rainy season you need to mow at least weekly. Again lawn maintenance is big business.
Those home and garden magazine green St Augustine grass lawns the realtors like to show you also require a LOT of water. During the rainy season we have ample water, but not throughout the entire year – which means keeping that St Augustine grass looking like in the real estate ads year round is a burden on our source of water, the Floridan aquifer.
If your home is connected to a sewer system, the system fee will be based on your water usage. So the more you water your lawn to keep the HOA pacified, the higher your sewer fees — on top of your water bill!
The solution is drilling an irrigation-only, shallow well — if the HOA allows private wells. That will help — until the well goes dry or (if you are close to the coast) gets contaminated by salt water intrusion.
And after all that, guess what — that HOA-mandated manicured lawn is about as natural to Florida as polar bears. A natural Florida yard doesn’t look anything like that.
Real Florida foliage, and ground cover, doesn’t require any more water than what falls from the sky, and needs no chemicals to survive. It does, however, require regular effort to keep it from running amok and reverting to sub-tropical jungle. Our yard will go feral if we let it.
Because of my heart attack, and COVID, over the past two years I haven’t been able to devote much time to battling the foliage. But the ‘climate change’ being blamed for this heat wave has facilitated my recovery.
The heat and rain have shifted the jungle growth around my house into overdrive. One thing the climate cultists conveniently forget to mention in their diatribes about “climate change” is that increased heat and humidity accelerate plant growth — which in turn convert carbon dioxide to oxygen through photosynthesis.
As a result of all that extra oxygen in my yard I’m sufficiently recovered to once more venture “into the breach” of the battle for control of my foliage. Here I am literally up to my neck in it last week.
Everything green you see there is a “volunteer” — meaning it sprouted out of the ground naturally, and we let it grow. Volunteers require no intervention from humans to thrive.
If something pops up that we don’t want, it gets removed. (At least it did when I was healthy enough to deal with it.)
An example of unwanted growth is the air potato vine. Like too many current Florida residents, potato vines are exotic to Florida and crowd out the natives.
There are only two ways to get rid of them – potato vines that is. Either follow the vine to the root and dig up the rootball; introduce air potato leaf beetles (lilioceris cheni) to devour the leaves eventually killing the vine. The bugs require a lot less work — but they don’t kill the rootball.
Having naturally occurring foliage affords me the opportunity to a observe nature in all its raw brutality. The competition between various species of flora for access to sunlight is a matter of life and death for them.
All those vegans who think the plant kingdom is comprised of passive, cooperative life forms have never watched the struggle for access to the sun play out in a natural environment. Plants will literally strangle their competition.
Our patch of natural Florida is home to several species of fauna that would not survive in an environment surrounding chemically maintained lawns. We’ve lived here for over three decades, and since the average life span of Eastern Gray squirrels is about 10 years, we are now probably watching the great-grand kids of the ones living here when we built the house in 1988, as they engage in the perpetual effort to access our bird feeder.
We also have a plethora of lizards of various species, who do a pretty good mob of keeping the mosquitos in check. If we used chemicals, the lizards would not survive. The mosquitos would.
We have yet to encounter any iguanas. I’m ready if we do.
We also seem to attract trash pandas. I had to shoot a rabid one several years ago.
Then there are the armadillos. They like to root for grubs. I chase them off.
Armadillos are vectors for leprosy, and for the first time to my knowledge there are reports of cases of leprosy here in Florida. Those cases are appearing among border crosser from central America where, apparently, armadillo is a delicacy.
I once submitted a proposal to my state legislator to designate a dead armadillo on a roadside as the official state animal. I never heard back from him.
So before you buy a house in Florida, ask yourself this question: Do you want to spend time fighting a jungle to have real native Florida landscaping — with all the good mojo that comes with it?
Or do you want an expensive, high maintenance lawn to keep the other non-natives in your HOA happy?
Oh — and it’s Hot, damn hot, and wet down here!