Lawn Maintenance in St. Petersburg, Florida

If you want to maintain the cleanliness and the greenery of your lawn and garden areas, the logical way is to do that use a maintenance schedule. Things are tough right now with the drought that we are enduring in the Deep South. Certain areas in and around St. Petersburg are being subjected to water rationing --- you can only water your lawn once a week --- so you have to figure out a way to keep your lawn from drying out. And that's only one aspect of lawn maintenance.

Most people wait until their lawn has gotten overgrown to mow it. Or they schedule their lawn mowing around the weather and do their mowing when it's not too cold or too hot outside. The problem is, neither one of these methods is a true lawn maintenance schedule. In fact, they're not even close.

Your lawn maintenance schedule can be broken down into time intervals between the scheduled tasks. In other words, those chores that are performed weekly, every two weeks, and monthly are what you would list on the schedule. It's probably a good idea to include the time that it normally takes to complete each task. You can base these factors on actual times that previously occurred, or you can use reasonable estimates.

Once you have this in order, start to list each one of the tasks in order of frequency. Keep in mind that there may be times when a certain task could not be taken care of because of unforeseen circumstances such as bad weather. Making a few minor adjustments to your lawn maintenance schedule can help remedy these situations. What is most important is that whatever task is placed on your lawn maintenance schedule gets completed within its parameters and time frames.

When you sit down to prepare your lawn maintenance schedule, there are certain aspects that you want to include, especially those that apply to the geographic area that you live in. For instance, living in St. Petersburg means that you can have a lush green St. Augustine lawn, whereas if you lived in Phoenix, you might be better off with Bermuda grass or a Summer Ryegrass.

Other aspects to consider are the size of your lawn, the amount of desire that you have when it comes to maintaining that lawn, and the budget that you have available to accomplish that. All that being said, the bottom line is that your lawn will require regular mowing, regular watering, and intermittent feedings (fertilizing). Periodic fertilizer applications need to be included in your lawn maintenance schedule.

You also need to have a contingency plan built in to the schedule for those climatic interruptions (i.e. unforeseen bad weather). No matter where you live, there is always going to be a change in the seasons, so you need to be prepared for this, rather than being sorry for not having planned better. Lawn maintenance is critical and so is scheduling that maintenance properly, especially if you want your grass to stay green and healthy year round.