Green Industry Best Management Practices, and Why We Carry the Certification

Just about every property we take care of sits a short distance from water. That is just how it is in our part of Florida. Rain that lands on a lawn does not stay there. It runs across driveways and down swales, into storm drains, and from there it heads for the Indian

River Lagoon. What happens on the ground has a straight line to what ends up in the water. That is the reason Green Industry Best Management

Practices exist, and the reason we are certified in them.

What GI-BMP actually is

Green Industries Best Management Practices, or GI-BMP, is a training and certification program developed by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, together with the

landscape industry itself. Its purpose is narrow and clear: reduce the pollution that runs off maintained landscapes into Florida's ground and surface water.

The certification covers how fertilizer is handled, how irrigation is managed, how clippings and debris are kept out of the street and the storm system, and how

a property is cut and maintained to hold soil and water in place rather than send them downstream. Passing it is a state requirement for anyone who applies fertilizer commercially in Florida. We carry it because the standard it sets is the standard we

already work to.

Florida-Friendly Landscaping

We follow the principles of Florida-Friendly Landscaping. The certification for it takes longer to earn, because it involves field testing on top of the coursework. We are working on this one. In the meantime, we have learned the coursework and are on track to have it by the end of the year.

Florida-Friendly Landscaping is built on nine

principles:

Right plant, right place. Water efficiently. Fertilize appropriately. Mulch. Attract wildlife. Manage yard pests responsibly. Recycle yard waste. Reduce stormwater runoff. Protect the waterfront.

None of that is intended to be decoration, but in principle is a decision that gets made about a property on every visit we make. A plant that belongs in its spot needs less water and less attention to live a healthy life. Clippings that are mulched back into the turf fundamentally return nutrients to the soil, instead of washing into a drain or being bagged up for disposal.

This is why having the best mulching system you can is important, and why we run Walker mowers. They annihilate the grass and disperse it back into the lawn in a way that shortens compost time, which returns those nutrients to the soil faster, so the lawn needs less fertilization and less care over time. It also promotes the growth of the existing turf. Gaps in a lawn fill in faster when you mulch. Those same gaps tend to expand when you side discharge, and the larger clippings that side discharging leaves behind pile up into thatch.

Why it matters for our little pocket of

Florida

This one is close to home. Our whole area drains to the Indian River Lagoon, which is one of the most biodiverse estuaries in North America and one that has been carrying a heavy nutrient load for years. The nitrogen and phosphorus that leave a lawn do not just disappear. They feed algae, and algae is what turns clear water dark and pulls the oxygen out of it. One property on its own does not move the lagoon one way or the other. A whole route of them does. We maintain a dense set of properties across our area, and how we handle each one adds up in the long run.

What the certification means for you and your property

It means the work we do is done to a known standard, nothing else. Not industry ideas or fads, but real historical science about the ecology of our area, our little space in the world.

That kind of care looks different from the care that has been around for a long time. One place you see it is scheduling. Your lawn still gets cut on a regular rhythm, every week through the summer and every other week through the winter, which is what is generally recommended. But the exact day or time is not locked in stone. If there is heavy rain, or the grass is still soaked with dew, a cut may get pushed. If it rains the morning we would normally come, we may come back that afternoon once things have dried out. We prefer to cut when the lawn can take it and recover, not just when a calendar says so. A good way to understand it is that your lawn does not know that it is one o'clock on a Wednesday. It does know what the barometric pressure is, and whether it is wet or

dry, hot or cold.

The land and the water here were doing fine long before any of us showed up to mow. The best work we can do is work with how they already function, not against it. That is what the training is for, and what the certification stands for. We hold ourselves to that

standard because it is the right way to do the work, and because this is where we live too.