Show #24/4411. Environmentally Friendly Gardening

Maintaining A “Green” Landscape

Maintaining a green landscape, keeping it looking beautiful is different than a conventional landscape. Because in a green landscape one is concentrating on lower volume as far a irrigation, things stay drier and that reduces a lot of maintenance effort. Regarding pests Craig utilizes an integrated pest management program. Understanding how the environment influences issues with pests is important. And controlling moisture levels is important. And they don't have a lot of pest issues. Occasionally they will have a scale issue with the citrus trees, sometimes a white fly issue but there are products on the market that can be utilized. Organic sprays, like dormant oil sprays work well as long as you follow the program. Horticultural soaps, a couple table spoons of Ivory soap in a gallon of water, spray that on a plant and it will do an amazing job on things such as aphids and some of those piercing, sucking insects. But the secret is to be repetitive because it doesn't have any repellent action, it has no real poison to it, it acts as a suffocant and kills the insect by suffocating it. Proper mulching is the key to good weed control. Otherwise they utilize hand weeding. They have tried salt water, kind of works, kind of doesn't, depends on the kind of weed. But proper mulching is the key. By doing that they don't have a real weed infestation problem. Look around at the plants, the exposed areas are covered with mulch therefore there's not the ability for weed seeds to become vibrant and viable and compete with the good plants. By mulching one good, solid mulch application per year, possibly some areas will require more, the mulch goes a long way in controlling weeds. For mulch they use leaf litter and shredded organic mulch which comes from compost places. It is beneficial not only for weed control but additionally recycles nitrogen back into the soil.