Sunshine mimosa and frog fruit

[jean_ji]

Sunshine mimosa is a native Florida plant. I liked the pink puffs in the spring. I planted five in a bed four years ago and they escaped and made their way to the street. Now it’s heading to the corner. I planted a few in the back yard and they went under the fence and are heading into the side yard. Native plants can’t be classified as invasive, they are called aggressive. Boy howdy with some of them!

On the other side of the house in a narrow strip I planted a different ground cover called frog fruit. It spreads, not quite as aggressively but it too has gone under the fence. I’ve been removing the grass ahead of it as it advances. I wasn’t planning on replacing our grass with ground cover at first, but it’s morphing into that.

Neither require fertilizer nor irrigation, are hosts to native pollinators and can be mowed. I’ll see how they do as time goes on. The frog fruit is a nice ground cover, but I may be slightly afraid of the sunshine mimosa.

Sunshine mimosa


Frog fruit

[twinkletwinkle22]

I planted sunshine mimosa as a lawn cover when we lived in SW Florida but it never spread like your because we couldn't use irrigation (groundwater from well was too salty and killed plants). Had some frog fruit growing but it also never spread like yours. We were on the coast south of Sarasota and it almost never rained.

Our yard was a mix of native weeds, native groundcover and what was left of St Augustine grass. Florida is a tough place to grow a lawn unless you have lots of decent water.

[jean_ji]

I’m south of Sarasota on the coast. It does get extremely dry here. Last year during the drought (we had no rainy season) the sunshine mimosa was the only green in the yard because of its 3 foot roots.

The frog fruit are in a slightly shadier area and are doing fine so far, we’ll see how they fare this summer. Both go dormant in winter and lose color but don’t go totally brown.

I hand water using well water on all of the plants until they are established, which takes a good 6 weeks. No salt intrusion in our well at this point. People hear native plants don’t need water, but they do until their roots are established and they need water in really dry periods for a good year.

Grass in FL not only takes a lot of water, but a lot of fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides and a lawn service to maintain it.

The pic below is our back side yard. It’s patches of sand, Bahai and Bermuda grass and invasive grasses. Unless grass is fertilized/watered it diminishes and lets weeds take over. I had planted a few sunshine mimosa behind the house and it’s now coming out from under the fence and going into the side yard.