11/21/2024 - By Dr. Raymond Snyder

Maintaining healthy, resilient plants in the landscape can be challenging, especially in urban landscape settings. Urban growing environment size, shape, and soil conditions are often not conducive to establishing and maintaining landscape plants and turfgrass. All that to say, assessing and understanding the anomalies inherent to urban landscape environments is critical for achieving high-quality plants and turfgrass. This article will help you recognize issues and offer solutions via products and practices.

Irrigation for Urban Plants

The necessity for narrow, confined root zones is inherent to space-limited urban landscape settings, especially shopping centers and planned communities. These “island” landscape settings can be difficult plant-growing environments due to irrigation, soil, and traffic/wear challenges.

Properly designed irrigation systems can be impacted in urban environments with complex underground piping and subsurface drip emitters. Pop-up irrigation heads are often found malfunctioning in urban settings resulting in either grossly over or underirrigated landscape beds. Irrigation audits should be conducted monthly to confirm that both the system hardware, operational frequencies, and times are properly set based on meteorological conditions. Taking visual observation of every irrigation head operating properly should be confirmed monthly as well so you know you are not wasting resources.

Maintaining Healthy Soil for Urban Plants

It is not surprising that plants with micronutrient deficiencies are often found in urban landscapes. These soils are found to be high in limestone rocks or shells whose constituents impart undesirably high pH conditions in the soil that reduce the availability of critical micronutrients, such as Iron (Fe) and Manganese (Mn).

Utilizing acidifying forms of fertilizer, chelated micronutrients, and potentially incorporating elemental sulfur are all techniques one can implement to overcome high pH soil conditions. Consider replacing the entire root zone with soil that is a combination of preblended sand and organic matter free of limestone particles in settings where overcoming high-pH soil conditions is not a viable strategy.

One option is Harrell’s Landscape/Media mix, which is a premix of medium to coarse sand blended with organic matter, resulting in a limestone-free soil that has a pH of approximately 5.5 and is 7% organic matter on a weight basis. The Harrell’s Landscape/Media mix also contains plant essential elements necessary for establishment.

Turfgrass in Urban Environments

Finally, turfgrass growing in urban landscapes faces unique challenges relative to conventional turfgrass growing environments such as home lawns. Urban landscape turf is often maintained in narrow, high-traffic areas. Turfgrass maintained on steep slopes associated with elevated properties or drainage can get damaged by mowing stress due to the scalping of uneven surfaces and ride-on, center pivot mowing units.

Urban turf is also likely subjected to the same poor, high pH soil conditions and irrigation limitations as the adjacent landscape plants. Turf growing in such conditions should receive inputs of chelated micronutrients and acidifying forms of nitrogen. As noted above, if the conditions are extreme, consider amending the soil with organic matter or Harrell’s Landscape/Media mix.

Your Harrell’s Rep Knows Urban Plants

If you have any other questions regarding urban plants or any other growing areas, your local Harrell's Rep is your best resource. They are ready and equipped to help you find the best products, practices, and programs for you and all your efforts. Reach out today to get started and conquer the challenges of the season.