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Top Ten // Deer Resistant Plants in Central Florida

Top Ten Deer-Resistant Plants For Your Lawn In Central Florida

Creating a beautiful and deer-resistant greenspace for your home in Central Florida can be a challenging task. However, the team at Maverick’s Landscaping, has curated a list of eleven hardy plants that thrive in Central Florida while deterring deer. These carefully selected plants, known for their beauty and resilience, will transform your landscaping into a haven of growth and tranquility. Let’s explore our top eleven selections for the Central Florida lawn.

Lantana (Lantana camara): Maverick’s Landscaping recommends Lantana for its year-round colorful clusters of flowers, adding vibrancy to your garden. Maverick’s deploys Lantana at many of it’s client locations as it has a beautiful fragrance and vibrant hues that are unappealing to deer, making it an excellent choice for Central Florida gardens.
Blue Plumbego (Plumbago auriculata): Another favored selection by Maverick’s Landscaping is Blue Plumbego, renowned for its sky-blue flowers and glossy green leaves. This versatile shrub adds beauty to any garden and its slightly bitter taste deters deer from feasting on it.
Walter’s Viburnum (Viburnum obovatum): Maverick’s Landscaping recognizes the appeal of Walter’s Viburnum, a native shrub that showcases dense foliage and lovely white flowers in spring. With its deer-resistant properties and ability to withstand drought, this shrub is perfect for creating hedges or enhancing your landscape backdrop.
Japanese Boxwood (Buxus microphylla japonica): Japanese Boxwood has year-round appeal, with dense foliage and a compact growth area. This evergreen shrub not only adds beauty to borders and formal gardens but also deters deer from browsing on its foliage.
Podocarpus (Podocarpus spp.): Maverick’s Landscaping suggests including Podocarpus, also known as Japanese Yew, in your Central Florida garden. This versatile evergreen tree or shrub features dense foliage and an unappetizing texture for deer, offering both structure and privacy to your outdoor space.
Podocarpus Pringles (Podocarpus macrophyllus ‘Pringles’): For a compact version of Podocarpus, Maverick’s Landscaping recommends Podocarpus Pringles. With its dense, dark green foliage and slower growth rate, this variety can be easily shaped and is ideal for creating hedges or adding elegance to container plantings.
Holly Burfordi (Ilex cornuta ‘Burfordi’): While this plant is deer-resistant it also provides an impressive addition to any lawn or bed. Holly Burfordi fits the bill with its glossy, dark green leaves and clusters of red berries. This evergreen shrub adds a touch of elegance to your garden while deterring deer from nibbling on its foliage.
Blue Daze Blue My Mind (Evolvulus glomeratus ‘Blue My Mind’): To enhance your landscape with a low-growing perennial, Maverick’s Landscaping recommends Blue Daze Blue My Mind. Its vibrant blue flowers and silver-green foliage create an enchanting ground cover or complement hanging baskets, while its deer-resistant nature ensures its longevity.
Society Garlic (Tulbaghia violacea): Incorporating Society Garlic into your Central Florida garden will provide a refreshing pop of color. Known for its tubular purple flowers and garlic-scented foliage, this hardy perennial is both visually appealing and a natural deer deterrent, making it an excellent choice for borders or rock gardens.
Ilex Shilling (Ilex cornuta ‘Shilling’): For a visually striking and deer-resistant choice, Maverick’s Landscaping recommends Ilex Shilling, a variety of Chinese Holly. Its glossy, spiny leaves and dense growth habit offer year-round interest and make it a perfect hedge or specimen plant for your Central Florida garden.

Confidently create a stunning and deer-resistant garden with these top selections from Maverick’s Landscaping. By incorporating these top eleven deer-resistant plants, you’ll enjoy a flourishing landscape that remains untouched by deer, and we can’t wait to see your results.

Wishing you great growth,

-Team Maverick’s Landscaping

Spring: A Time For Growth.

A Time For Growth:
Spring is a lush season! After a season of cold and damp weather conditions, the earth bursts to life with an abundance of colors, smells, and spectacular beauty. The grass is multiplying, the flowers are blooming, and the trees are stretching their limbs skyward in a striking display of photosynthesis in action.

Among the plants present in Spring is something we all never want to see: weeds. Dollarweed, Dandelions, and Thistles are all the usual suspects and can invade en masse.

Proper weed mitigation practices are critical in humid climates like Florida. Weed defense requires a holistic approach and demands a level of collaboration between the landscaper and the homeowner. Many things affect the growth of weeds including soil acidity, humidity, weather patterns, and more. Proper weed control depends on a few critical variables including watering schedule (homeowner-controlled), weed and feed, and replace and resod.

Watering Schedule:
Maintaining a watering schedule is critical to not giving weeds a chance to take over your lawn.

How Much To Water: Overwatering your lawn is one of the most common ways to incur widespread issues. Overwatering specifically leads to the growth of dollarweed. In Central Florida, Maverick’s recommends a watering schedule based around a daily-savings schedule. As of publishing this article, this plan is in line with local municipalities and city irrigation regulations.*

When clocks move forward an hour: homeowners should water two days a week. Local municipalities will specify which days of the week you should water. These days are based on your address.

When clocks move back an hour: homeowners should water one day a week. Local municipalities will specify this day to homeowners as well.

Coverage: Each zone should cover the affected area with a minimum of 1 inch per hour of watering. Running at a higher frequency is acceptable, however running below this rate will be detrimental to the lawn. Running at lower rates essentially keeps too little water on the lawn. Running a little, for longer periods, and/or watering daily is poor practice.

Inspecting What You Expect: snowbirds are often caught by surprise in unseasonably rainy times as their best-laid plans result in oversaturation of irrigation and a bumper crop of weeds. Hurricanes and rainy seasons will obviously impact your schedule and will require adjustments.

High Heat: During times of high heat and lower humidity, we recommend adjusting your watering schedule to increase run times per zone to prevent hot spots.

Weed and Feed:
Maverick’s follows a science-based approach to weed and feed and soil nutrition. Great landscaping and greenery begin in the soil therefore we test the soil using a third-party laboratory to determine the exact mixtures needed to help your sod thrive.

Using too much or too little herbicides and treatments can kill your sod. We then design our weed and feed to be all-inclusive and discourage homeowners from adding additional nutrients, chemicals, and treatments to their lawns as it can burn the sod out. We cannot ensure positive outcomes once overtreatment occurs.

Maverick’s Science-Based Weed and Feed Schedule:

January: Liquid Feed

March: Ornamental Feed

May: Insecticide

July: Fungicide / Feed / Insecticide

September: Feed / Fungicide / and more if needed

November: Feed / and more if needed

Replace and Resod:
Your lawn, like everything in life, is affected by age. The older sod gets, the more susceptible it is to disease, damage, and ultimately death. Sod that is older than 15 years is very vulnerable to these negative factors which allow weeds to expand and grow exponentially. At the 8-10 years point in a yard’s life we begin discussing resod plans to allow for all-new growth to bloom. If you are ready to start with a fresh slate and ‘reboot and refresh’ your yard, please reach out today and we can provide a competitive quote on your resod.

We hope this Maverick’s Blog provided valuable information about weed control and Maverick’s science-based approach to caring for your lawn.

As always, we hope you enjoy your landscaping projects and that they bring you, your family, and your friends together.

Wishing you great growth.

-Team Mavericks

*Always check local municipalities and city regulations to ensure compliance and mandated irrigation schedules.

Crepe Murder – How Not To Trim Your Crepe Myrtles

Welcome to Maverick’s Landscaping’s ‘Top Cut Blog, where we’ll be discussing all things landscaping: irrigation, maintenance, weather, and more. In this blog, we’ll give homeowners best practices and recommendations as it relates to caring for and making the most of your home and community green spaces. Today’s topic is a heavy and harmful horticultural crime: Crepe Murder. Yes, you read that right- Crepe Murder (not Myrtle).

What Is It: Crepe Murder is a rampant crime that occurs throughout Central Florida. Usually, the murderer is a well-intended homeowner attempting to trim their Crepe Myrtle. Good intentions and a bad understanding of how Crepe Myrtles should be trimmed result in the beloved tree being severely butchered and sometimes even murdered.

How It Happens: Well-intending homeowners butcher their Crepe Myrtles indiscriminately, usually by cutting them flat across the top of the tree. This ‘buzz cut’ results in a once gorgeous tree being reduced to short, thick ugly knobs. (see above picture)

Crepe Murder: The beautiful Crepe Myrtle is a tree, not a bush. Therefore, it shouldn’t be pruned or trimmed aggressively. When Crepe Murder occurs, it leaves unsightly and knobby ‘knuckles’ which is a defensive response of the plant to the attempted murder that occurred. As a result, patches of ‘whips’ or switch-like growths sprout from these knuckles. The weak whips aren’t strong enough to stand on their own. When flowering occurs, they collapse even further in an ultimate sign of defeat and bad times looming for the tree.

How To Prune Crepe Correctly: Maverick’s Landscaping expert arborists recommend: selective pruning, trimming outer and lower limbs, misdirected limbs, and thinning existing limbs. Here are some best practices Do’s and

Don’t:
✗ Do not indiscriminately cut all branches off in a buzz-cut.
✗ Don’t allow your neighbor to coach you on how to trim your Crepe Myrtle.

Do’s:
✓ Trim branches that are crossing or rubbing against each other.
✓ Prune in late Winter (February)
✓ Cut low shoots first
✓ Trim branches growing inward
✓ Cut all trims to the main branch, don’t trim branches fractionally.
✓ Shape younger saplings by trimming smaller limbs away.
✓ Always try to trim progressively (50% in the first trimming, 50% in the final) and avoid
removing too much of the tree at once.

We hope today’s “Top Cut Blog” provided value about your Crepe Myrtles and their care. As always, we hope you enjoy your landscaping and lawn projects and that they bring you and your family together.
Wishing you great growth.

-Team Mavericks