Almost every piece of lawn and garden advice online was written for somewhere with a winter. Here there isn't one — grass grows all twelve months, nothing goes dormant in a way you can rely on, and the calendar is built around water rather than cold. The year splits into a dry half and a wet half, and knowing which half you are in explains most of what your yard is doing.
November through April is the dry season, and it is the working half of the year. Growth slows enough that mowing can drop to every other week, which frees the time to do everything that is awkward when things are growing hard: this is when to lay a new bed, re-cut edges, install stone, run lighting, plant anything substantial, and take a hedge back further than a routine cut. It is also the right window for a hard renovation prune on ficus, clusia or podocarpus, because the plant has months of mild growing weather ahead to fill back in. The catch is irrigation — it genuinely does not rain for weeks at a stretch, and new planting put in during February needs watering like it means it.
February and March are the best months of the year to plant. Soil is warm, the sun is not yet brutal, and anything that goes in now has a full season to root before it is asked to survive August. This is also when to feed St. Augustine for the first time — not in January, when the grass is not growing and the fertiliser mostly runs off, and not in the middle of summer, when Miami-Dade's rainy-season fertiliser restrictions apply. Check the current county rule before anyone puts nitrogen down; it is a real ordinance, not a guideline.
May through October is the wet season, and the yard changes personality. St. Augustine goes from steady to explosive: two weeks between cuts in July is long enough to lose the height, and mowing a lawn that has got away from you removes so much leaf at once that the whole thing yellows for a fortnight. Weekly is not us upselling — it is the interval that keeps you from ever taking off more than a third at a time. Cut high while you are at it, three and a half to four inches. Everyone cuts St. Augustine too short, and short grass is precisely what lets in the two things that ruin lawns here: chinch bugs in the sunny stress patches, and weed seed in the gaps.
The wet season is also fungus season. Grey leaf spot and brown patch arrive on the back of warm nights and standing humidity, and the way you make them worse is by watering in the evening — the lawn then stays wet for ten hours in the dark. Water early, water deeply, and water less often. Two long soaks a week beat six short ones every time, and in the middle of the wet season you often should not be watering at all.
June through November is hurricane season, and the preparation is not what most people think. The worst thing done to South Florida palms is the hurricane cut — stripping the crown back to a handful of upright fronds because it looks like it will catch less wind. It does the opposite: the crown is what supports the bud, an over-cut palm is weaker in wind and spends the next two years recovering, and the fronds people remove are the ones the tree was about to draw nutrients back out of. Remove dead fronds and seed pods, leave the green ones alone. Do check tree canopies for dead or crossing limbs, do secure anything loose, and do clear the drains and the gutter lines before the first named storm rather than during it.
October and November are the turn, and the most satisfying weeks of the year to work in. The rain stops, the humidity breaks, everything that spent August surviving starts growing properly again, and it is the moment to cut hedges back to a crisp line, top up stone and mulch, and wash the drive and the cage before the season when you are actually outside using them.
MariErich Landscaping & Design runs weekly and biweekly maintenance across Miami Springs, Hialeah, Doral, Kendall, Coral Gables and southern Broward. Free estimates — call (786) 985-5921.