Gardening is perennial, so despite three polar vortexes that were the cause of my poor herbs & veggies dying, and one of my wooden raised garden beds damaged by the hurricanes, I am not letting Mother Nature get the last laugh. With a renewed sense of Spring excitement, I went to Peterson’s Nursery and picked up new roses for my garden. I am starting the herb and vegetable gardens over. This time, my focus will be better weatherproofing. I will be using extra-large black round plastic nursery tubs instead of building new wood raised beds. I will keep using my other two wood raised beds until they fall apart. I will be planting herbs, Bell peppers & tomatoes. 

We now have two turkey poults growing fast & it looks like more are on the way. I brought six turkey eggs to Teresa that Tony, her better half magically turned into delicious and creamy quiches.

Updates through “Lizzie Said What” socials. Remember, life can be a joyful journey. Enjoying all moments is up to You!  

What To Do In Your Backyard In March

Average temperature      High 79    Low 56

Rainfall 3.54 inches

Spring arrives: March 20th.

Move irrigation to 2x a week watering on Daylight Savings Time Day.

Time to plant

Vegetables: Bean, calabaza, cantaloupe, cassava, chayote, corn,  cucumbers, dasheen, eggplant, Jerusalem artichoke, jicama, luffa, malanga, New Zealand spinach, okra, pepper, pumpkin, southern peas, squash, tamarillo, tomato, and watermelon. 

Flowers: African daisy, ageratum, aster, azalea, bacopa, balsam, begonia, black-eyed Susan, blue daze, bush-daisy, celosia, cleome, coleus, coreopsis, cosmos, dahlia, Dahlberg daisy, daylily, diascia, dusty miller, four o'clock, gaillardia, gardenia, gazania, goldenrod, hibiscus, Hollywood Hibiscus™, impatiens, ixora, Joseph's coat, King’s mantle, licorice plant, marigold, melampodium, Mexican heather, million bells, moon vine, morning glory, New Guinea impatiens, nierembergia, pentas, plumbago, roses, salvia, strawflower, tithonia, torenia, verbena, vinca, Whirling Butterflies, and zinnia. 

Herbs: Anise, basil, bay laurel, borage, cardamon, chervil, chives, coriander, costmary, dill, fennel, ginger, lemon balm, sweet marjoram, Mexican tarragon, mint, oregano, rosemary, sage, thyme and watercress. 

Bulbs: Achimenes, African iris, African-lily, amaryllis, blood lily, bulbine, caladium, canna, crinum, crocosmia, dahlia, daylily, eucharis lily, gingers, gladiolus, gloriosa lily, Louisiana iris, rain lily, tuberose and walking iris.

Lawn Care

  • Winter weather has browned many lawns; they should regreen quickly this month.

  • Brown leaf blades do not have to be removed but can be raked out if you wish.

  • It’s seeding time for Bahia and Centipede lawns.

  • Get a soil test before fertilizing each Spring. 

  • UF AgriTech Soil Test Kit https://bit.ly/41N19B7

  •  St. Augustine, Bahia and Bermuda lawns are ready for a spring fertilizer application.

  • Delay feedings of centipede and zoysia lawns until they regreen in late March or April.

  • Identify weeds before using general herbicide.

  • Time for using pre-emergent herbicide products is over.

  • Apply separate herbicide for weeds if necessary. No need for weed and feed products.

  • Do not use glyphosate or other herbicides as an “edger.” Edge with garden edgers or spade.

  • Many weed control products cannot be used near trees and shrubs, check label restrictions.

  • Mow lawns at their normal height; there is no need to change blade height for spring. 

  • Hurry to remove patches of brown weeds and resod the areas.

  • Check for chinch bugs by using a hand-held vacuum cleaner. Apply insecticide if more than 20 chinch bugs are found.

  • Control fire ants in lawns; treat the entire lawn following label instructions.

  • Consider a substitute ground cover in areas smaller than 4’ wide, hard to mow, or problem areas where grass won’t grow.

  • Have lawn care equipment serviced; change oil, check air filters and sharpen blades. 

In the Landscape

  • Cold weather damaged many tender shrubs and perennials; do needed pruning this month. You can cut your shrub by ⅓ and not stress the plant too much. Water well before and after pruning.

  • Clear perennial plantings of debris and add new selections.

  • Control your landscape by trimming tree out of bounds shoots and limbs.

  • Wait to prune spring flowering shrubs until the blossoms fade.

  • No need to hack crape myrtles and commit ‘crape murder’. Remove only seed pods and twiggy portions smaller than little finger.

  • Consider needed tree trimming; have the work performed now before hurricane season.

  • Trim declining fronds and old flower stems from palms but leave any fronds that are green.

  • Complete pruning of bush-type roses; prune climbers when the spring blooms fade.

  • Trim and divide ornamental grasses before they begin spring growth.

  • Cool & warm seasons meet in March; continue to plant most cool and warm season flowers.

  • Add trees, palms, shrubs and vines to the landscape.

  • Water new plantings frequently until they grow roots into the surrounding soils.

  • Cool-season weeds are still growing; control before they become too plentiful.

  • Reapply mulch layers to bring mulch up to 3”.

  • Trim poinsettias to within 12” to 18” from ground and begin feedings.

  • Apply fertilizer to palms, shrubs and perennials.

  • Established shade and flowering trees normally do not need special feedings.

  • Check plants for scale insects and control with natural sprays as needed.

  • Water established plants only when they show signs of wilting or moisture stress

  • Divide and replant perennials.

  • Replant container gardens with spring flowers.

  • Divide outdoor orchids and begin every other week feedings with a diluted fertilizer solution.

  • Turn fallen leaves into compost or use as mulch.

  • Feed container gardens with a slow-release  fertilizer following label instructions.

  • Give power equipment a spring checkup.

  • Clean bird houses, bird baths and fountains.

  • Remove debris from water gardens and repot lilies. 

Vegetable and fruit care.

  • Early March is tomato, pepper, and eggplant planting time; set new plants in the ground.

  • Keep covers handy to protect cold sensitive crops until mid month.

  • Remove winter vegetables as they decline and plant warm season crops.

  • Select pest resistant varieties to avoid insect and disease problems.

  • Plant short rows every few weeks of seeded crops to extend the harvest season.

  • Use bush forming crops instead of vining types in crowded gardens.

  • Herbs flourish during the warmish weather; almost all do well now.

  • Garden pests including aphids, whiteflies and mites are active; use a natural control.

  • Spring growth is underway; complete all fruit tree pruning.

  • Prune cold damaged tropical fruits to remove brown leaves and declining stems.

  • Identify the type of grapes you are growing to obtain  proper pruning and care information.

  • Pineapples start flowering this month; maintain a good care program.

  • Feed all fruit bearing trees, shrubs and vines at this time.

  • Add new fruiting trees, shrubs, and vines to the landscape.

  • Select warm locations for new tropical fruits.

  • Maintain citrus tree vigor with the first of the new year feedings.

  • Apply a minor nutrient spray to citrus trees at each flush of new growth

  • Control Asian psyllids; apply an insecticide labeled for citrus at each flush of growth.

  • Add container herb and vegetable gardens to crowded landscapes.

  • Construct raised beds for easy maintenance.

  • Reapply mulch to fruit trees.

  • Fertilize vegetables lightly every 2 to 3 weeks or use a slow-release fertilizer.

  • Train vining vegetables to a trellis to save space.

  • Sprout sweet potatoes to produce transplants.

  • Install water conserving sprinklers in fruit and vegetable plantings. 

Foliage & indoor plants chores

  • Some foliage plants have been affected by the cold; trim and add more soil if needed.

  • Repot plants filling their containers with roots.

  • Replace declining plants with low light tolerant varieties.

  • Groom indoor plants to remove yellowing leaves and faded blooms.

  • Trim Christmas and holiday cactus and begin more frequent waterings and feedings.

  • Wash dust and pests from indoor plant foliage with a mild (not antibacterial) soapy solution.

  • Move orchids outdoors or to a bright area and begin every other week feedings.

  • Treat forced bulbs as temporary and add to compost pile when finished blooming.  

  • Check for mealy bugs, mites, and other pests. Treat according to label.

  • Visit your local independent nursery centers for new plant varieties.

Plants with Great Texture

a.      Fatsia Japonica ‘Spider’s Web’

b.      Arizona Cypress, Cupressus arizonica var. ‘Blue Ice’

c.      Alocasia amazonica ‘Polly’

d.      Round-leaf Calathea, Calathea orbifolia

e.      Colocasia esculenta ‘Pharoah’s mask’

Find the plants at your local box store or independent garden center or below:

Fatsia japonica at Southern Living Plant Collection.

Alocasia amazonica ‘Polly at Costa Farms.

Calathea orbifolia at Costa Farms

Sustainable Horticultural Environments of Orlando, Florida

Awarded Best of Houzz 2025

Annual award celebrates the top-rated and most admired home remodeling and design professionals across the global Houzz community

Orlando, FL, February 15, 2025 – Sustainable Horticultural Environments of Orlando, FL has won a “Best of Houzz” award for Customer Service on Houzz®, the leading platform for home remodeling and design, empowering industry professionals and their clients with all-in-one project management and design software. The 16-year-old landscape design and consulting company was chosen by the millions of homeowners that comprise the Houzz community from among more than 3 million active home building, remodeling and design industry professionals.

Best of Houzz is awarded annually in four categories:

● Design: Honors professionals whose work was the most popular among the Houzz community.

● Customer Service: Honors professionals for their overall rating on Houzz and positive client reviews for projects completed in 2024.

● Innovator: Honors professionals who win Best of Houzz Service, manage their projects with Houzz Pro software and are Houzz Pro Certified to provide a best-in-class client experience.

● Photography: Honors architecture and interior design photographers whose images were most popular among the Houzz community.

“Best of Houzz 2025” badges appear on winners’ profiles as a sign of their commitment to excellence. These badges help the more than 70 million homeowners and home design enthusiasts on Houzz to identify popular and top-rated home professionals for their projects.

“Teresa Watkins, owner of Sustainable Horticultural Environments (SHE-Consulting), her one-woman-owned design and consulting company, attributes her clients’ satisfaction to her hands-on management with her motto: “Who designed your landscape? “SHE did!”

Teresa’s personal design philosophy advocates “Finding your garden theme is as easy as seeing what brings a smile to your face.”

“Best of Houzz award winners exemplify the highest levels of design, quality and customer satisfaction among residential construction and design professionals,” said Liza Hausman, vice president of Industry Marketing for Houzz. “This year, we’re excited to introduce a new category that celebrates pros using our award-winning software, Houzz Pro, to help deliver a standout experience to their clients. We congratulate this year’s winners and look forward to seeing their continued success.”

You can see more of Sustainable Horticultural Environment’s work on Houzz at https://bit.ly/39JT0R1

Teresa Watkins, garden author, landscape designer, horticulturist, and host of Florida’s most popular syndicated garden radio show, iHeart’s Better Lawns and Gardens, designed the landscape for the first certified "green home" in Florida. Her landscape company, Sustainable Horticultural Environments designs unique, beautiful, and award-winning sustainable landscapes and has won the Best of Houzz Service award ten years in a row.

About Houzz

Houzz, the leading platform for home building, remodeling and design, empowers industry professionals and homeowners with the tools they need to make every project a success. The company’s cloud-based, AI-powered project management and design software, Houzz Pro (houzz.com/pro), helps pros win projects, collaborate with clients and teams, and run their businesses efficiently and profitably. Houzz Pro also provides their clients with 24/7 access to project information, 3D visualizations and financial tools. Using Houzz, people can find ideas and inspiration, hire professionals and buy products. The Houzz platform is used by more than 3 million construction and design industry professionals and over 70 million homeowners and home design enthusiasts around the world. Houzz and Houzz Pro are available on the web and as top-rated mobile apps.

“Love, exciting and new, come along, we welcome you.” Okay, so the theme song isn’t exactly about gardening, but if showcases my feeling. Welcome to all the new subscribers and listeners to my monthly newsletter, “In Your Backyard.” February is the time to gear up for gardening in Florida. It has definitely warmed up (thank you, La Niña), with new leaves pushing out and up, perennial flowers and shrubs available in the nurseries, and the urge to plant is in the air. Speaking of gardening and love, I want to send out love to all the garden clubs that I get to speak to. Talk about growing! Garden clubs are the place to be! Pictured above are one of the fun activities of holiday floral arrangements. The beautiful floral centerpieces were created by members of the New Smyrna Beach Garden Club for their February meeting. I mention garden clubs frequently in my talks and on my radio show, Better Lawns and Gardens, because garden clubs are so active, inside and outside, and welcoming. If you are new to Florida and interested in learning about gardening and learning about your landscape, join a local garden club! You can find a garden club near you on the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs website.

February is when showstopping pink Trumpet trees start to bloom. Appropriately named, the flowers of the Trumpet tree resemble the musical instruments. Fast-growing and relatively pest-free, Handroanthus impetiginosus, make a beautiful street tree. I think that a neighborhood of Trumpet trees would be a strong challenger of cherry blossom trees in Spring. Did you know that Trumpet trees, also called Ipê, Ironwood, and Brazilian walnut, is also one of the strongest and hardest woods on the globe. It is considered the best lumber to use for composite decking? Known for its fire, insect, and scratch resistance, Ipê decking is also cooler to bare feet. Ipê lumber sold in the United States is harvested legally and sustainably.

With the summer-like temperatures already upon us, you’ll love all the different flowers, herbs, trees, and vegetables you can plant in February. It’s also a short month to get those landscape chores done. Just a couple of quick tips: Don’t plant rye seed anymore – as the temperatures reach 80 degrees and above, it will quickly decline, and be leery of buying beautiful winter annuals blooming like delphiniums, foxgloves, and pansies. With the heat, if they last a month, you will be lucky. Read what you should do in February here.

Congratulations to Lizzie who has her hands full of love in this month’s adventure. You can read more to see her new bundles of joy.

My Plant of the Month is also one of my favorite tropical topics. It’s a low-maintenance, colorful plant that looks good in the ground, in the air, or as a thriller in your pool garden container. With over 2,700 species to choose from, it’s not hard to become addicted to collecting all the these beautiful varieties available in Florida.

Thinking of wearing white cottony outfits, summer trips to the beach, visiting coastal lighthouses, and promenade through beautiful gardens? Join me and other garden lovers as we tour the ‘Gilded Age’ vacation destination of the rich, Newport, Rhode Island. We will attend the premier Newport Flower Show at Rosecliff Mansion, stroll the coast on Narragansett Bay, take photos of yourself next to life-sized animal topiaries, and meander on the grounds of New England’s finest estate, Blithewold Mansion and Arboretum, where you can view Champion trees and Giant sequoias, relaxing with afternoon tea, and more. Only 6 more spots left. Dates are June 19th – June 23rd, 2025, 5 days, 4 nights. More Information.

Send me your garden questions and comments. Thank you for reading “In Your Backyard.” I love knowing you are out there!

In landscaping, size matters. I understand the current economic hardships with inflation, working with my own clients. Keeping costs low is a given with all projects, commercial and residential. But when renovating your landscape, clever design and phasing can help alleviate paying a lot of money upfront while still achieving a new and beautiful look for a new year.

My heart went out to the unknown manager(s) who wanted to update their landscape, but didn’t know how to achieve a clean, low-maintenance, property. In this case, the landscape has lots of oak trees throughout. While providing the benefit of shade, tree roots don’t work well with plants. The trees’ roots don’t allow space to grow plants. The roots also will not work with the plastic edging, pushing the plastic up and out as the roots grow. To save future costs, expensive rock mulch was installed.

The current perspective of the landscape conjures up visions of golf course sand traps, but with rocks. The lack of plants in these landscape beds means that over time weeds will be popping up through the rocks and will need expensive chemicals and more maintenance.

A better and less costly approach would have been to have a phased installation over time (as needed) to create larger beds, or even just one long bed in the center of the property frontage. No edging is needed unless you want to install a cement curb. Using a cheaper organic mulch, and spending more money on plants, such as succulents, bromeliads, and groundcovers for shade, like Asiatic jasmine, would look nice. The Asiatic jasmine can be trimmed easier than the hard-to-grow turfgrass and can expand to cover (over two to three years) the entire frontage. Groupings of saw palmettos, cycads, sagos, and even caladiums and African irises, could be alternative species that would be attractive, provide wildlife resources, conserve water, with labor once or twice a year. No more need for fertilizers, lower use of supplemental water, or chemicals.

While bromeliads and larger succulents cost more, they multiple very easily, and planting them on the outside of the circular beds would look much nicer. For these sized beds, I would have placed 10 to 15 plants in each bed.

The protruding gutters look like a battleship with cannons sticking into the beds. Burying or running the gutters along the foundation and then going out to the side would look much better and deliver the rain to the landscape where it’s needed much more than around the foundation or evaporate from the pavement.

I sometimes look for opportunities to stop and help properties when I see landscape malpractice. Unfortunately, I don’t think my efforts would be listened to or welcomed. Landscapes don’t have to be built in one day. Taking the time to create a landscape that enhances the property while providing for wildlife, with lower maintenance should be a goal. Remember not only does size matter, quantities, and quality count, too!

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