Lawn Care in Monticello, FL

Monticello is the seat of Jefferson County, which the territorial legislature split off from Leon County on January 6, 1827 and named for Thomas Jefferson. The town was laid out that December and took the name of Jefferson’s house in Virginia, and it is still the only incorporated city in the entire county. Through the 1830s and 1840s it became the place where the county did its governing, its business and its socializing, and most of what stands downtown went up in the last quarter of the 1800s. That downtown is a National Register historic district now, over forty nineteenth century buildings and the third oldest district of its kind in Florida. The courthouse at the center of it was dedicated in 1910, and the architect built it to echo the real Monticello, so the name of the town and its landmark end up pointing at the same house.

Settlers came for two reasons. Tallahassee was close, and the ground would grow cotton. After that the county earned its living off a run of different crops. William Cirardeau shipped the first load of watermelon seed out of here in 1882, and forty years later Jefferson County was turning out eighty percent of the world’s supply. Pecans made better money than the Le Conte pears did. Tung trees entered the country through this area in 1906 and covered better than twelve thousand acres of the county by the late 1950s. And Fred Mahan, who has a stretch of highway carrying his name, gave away somewhere between thirty five and forty thousand plants to green the twenty five miles of road between here and the capital.

For a lawn, the two things that matter are the dirt and the heat. This is Red Hills ground, and the soil under most properties is Orangeburg sandy loam sitting on red clay, the iron in that clay being exactly why the hills got called red in the first place. It drains better than the color suggests. Water works down through it steadily instead of standing on top, so yards out here rarely stay soggy the way flatter ground closer to town does. The trade is grade. This soil runs on slopes of up to twenty five percent, and on a real pitch the runoff takes fertilizer and topsoil downhill with it while a mower deck shaves the crowns off the high spots. Then there is the heat. The hottest temperature ever officially recorded anywhere in Florida, 109 degrees, was logged right here on June 29, 1931, which is fair warning about what a bad stretch of July does to turf that has been cut too short. Properties run to real acreage out this way and the roads are shaded by live oak, so lawn mowing in Monticello is usually a matter of covering open ground efficiently and then working carefully around the shade and the slopes. Good lawn care in Monticello means setting the cutting height for the heat rather than for looks, and staying off a wet grade that will tear.