- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," explore artistic flair with three families.

Julie Nelson and Kay Angermann brought creative collaboration, muscle-wielding grit, and problem solving to the rocky, flooding ground.

Butterflies, bees and birds flock to a deer-protected plant and pond habitat, a haven for Ingrid and Doug Green.

In Leander, before their house was even built, Ana and Julio Lopez mapped their new dream garden.

So, let's growing right here right now!

(cheerful music) - [Narrator] Creative collaboration, muscle-wielding grit, and passion for plants and animals, that's what Travis County Master Gardeners Julie Nelson and Kay Angermann brought to their new homestead, dubbed Katie Bird Farm.

- We bought the property in 2013.

We had been eyeing it for a long time.

One of our best friends lives next door, and we had spent many times on her back patio.

We kept talking about this rough, rough, rough, rough, rough... - Dreaming about living next door and doing something fabulous.

When we first walked onto the property, well, we started designing it at that moment, but we had to back into it, literally our bodies, because you couldn't walk.

- Well, we had to chainsaw a path so we could actually pull the truck into the property.

- [Kay] First of all, we had to locate all of the oak trees on the property.

- [Both] We have twenty-six oaks.

- [Kay] So we cleaned it, cleared it all out, figured out where we were gonna build the house and all.

This was over the course of a year.

And then all of the sudden the blackfoot daisy started showing up, and some bluebonnets... - Native yucca.

We have the yuccas everywhere.

- The four-nerve daisies and some grasses.

And we were like, "Oh my gosh."

Once we lifted that canopy, it was like everything woke up.

- We love birds.

And we wanna make sure that we have a lot of habitat for them.

So some of it was native, some of it we've enhanced.

All of those cedars, that's protection for the chickens because it's less room for hawks or owls for predators to swoop in.

We are on very, very rocky property out here.

- [Narrator] From previous gardens, they knew how to deal with rocky land and shade.

Plus, they've got gardening roots.

- Our mothers, our grandmothers, my sister and brother-in-law own a big greenhouse in Des Moines.

It's in the family.

- My family, they're all farmers in South Texas.

- [Narrator] When they moved to Katie Bird Farm in 2013, Halloween floods washed out the driveway.

- [Kay] And so we ended up having to bring in a backhoe and all of these large berms around the property are literally from our washed out driveway.

- [Julie] Because they had to scoop it up and just dump it in a couple areas.

- So we rented a skid steer ourselves and we started forming all of these berms.

- [Julie] We filled it in with some of the cruddy dirt that we had and then good dirt and then mulch.

So you just layer this berm.

- [Kay] Everything was done in such an organic way.

Julie and I never wrote, drew a plan out or had a plant list that we wanted.

- I built all the raised bed gardens and we have to raised bed our vegetables because it's so rocky out here.

We tried hay bale the first season and that was okay.

But then we realized we actually needed a different solution.

(calm music) - [Kay] Julie is really good at building and I'm really good at holding things while she builds them.

(Kay laughs) - They did hire out for their sturdy and safe chicken coop.

- [Kay] And it's a mobile coop.

So technically it could be moved.

It's on wheels.

I actually brought it in on my little John Deere Gator UTV.

And then we've kind of just made it our own thing.

- [Julie] We attached an old, we have an old dog kennel and we attached that to it and then created more space, so they can free range some but we can have 'em in a protected area at times as well.

- [Kay] We completely close them up at night.

So they are completely protected from anything.

- [Narrator] The happy hens are watched over by Our Lady of Guadalupe, rendered by graffiti stencil and mural artist Federico Archuleta, known as El Federico to his many fans.

Then the chickens got company.

- The donkeys were clearly a midlife crisis for me.

Some people go out and get a sports car or do something crazy.

I got donkeys.

It was just something that I had always wanted and we wanted to have a little hobby farm.

- [Narrator] They charm up every spot with unique and personable vintage finds that Kay sources for her business, Hipbilly Kay.

- [Julie] Kay'll bring something home that's really cool and she'll place it somewhere and I'll be thinking, "I think it might work," and I won't ask her necessarily.

I'll move it and say, "Hey, what do you think?"

And more times than not, it works.

I'm like, "Oh, that does really work there."

So we're constantly just kinda moving things around and looking for the right angles.

So we have lots of collectible stuffs.

- [Kay] And we utilize a lot of them.

I mean a lot of them really have a purpose and most of them as planters.

We've got a hog feeder with succulents in it, over here is my dad's old cast iron crock.

- [Julie] And your grandfather kept his minnows in it.

- [Narrator] One of their favorite finds is an old windmill that inspired the barn's design.

This storage building and winter home to large container plants had to be substantial enough to support the windmill's weight and 10-foot girth.

- [Julie] We owned the windmill before we owned this property.

So we knew we needed to do something awesome.

- [Kay] And then we light it up and we keep the lights on it all year.

It illuminates the whole garden at night and it's fabulous.

- [Narrator] Then they added a greenhouse as a propagation station where they also overwinter cold tender plants.

- [Kay] We actually got the greenhouse from the same guy that that did the chicken coop.

- [Julie] We pack that greenhouse.

In the winter you can barely get in, you can get in just enough to do the requisite watering.

Otherwise you cannot maneuver in there.

- [Narrator] On super cold nights, a small heater in greenhouse and barn warms things up nicely.

- It's probably one of the biggest chores on this property is the winterizing it because we have a big investment in our potted plants and we don't wanna lose them.

I mean, most of these plants in the pots we've had for four and five years that have made it through the winter.

- [Narrator] To protect plants from deer, they installed a six-foot goat wire fence.

So, what's behind the homestead's name, Katie Bird Farm?

- My grandmother, from South Texas, from Violet, Texas, a little town outside of Corpus.

Her name was Katie Burkhart.

And she was an avid gardener.

She was a rose gardener and a farmer, a farmer's wife, I just loved my grandmother.

In the vegetable garden here we have a gate that was her garden gate in her rose garden.

And well, at first was the gate to the house, the old farmhouse, and then she moved it into her rose garden to be a feature.

Kinda like we have these features around.

- [Narrator] One feature honors a resident roadrunner who adopted them from day one.

- I've always kind of thought of my grandmother as my guardian angel and so I feel like that has manifested itself into this roadrunner.

She followed me around yesterday.

And sometimes I would come out and she would literally follow me all around the property.

It was crazy.

- [Julie] She is Katie Bird and we're Katie Bird Farm.

- Butterflies, bees and birds flock to a deer-protected plant and pond habitat, a haven for Ingrid and Doug Green.

- [Narrator] Serenity draws Ingrid and Doug Green to a garden that's always a flurry of activity.

Post oaks and live oaks host birds on their 28 acres west of Lago Vista.

- I've got 13 water stations out there, 150 bird houses.

I just like the wildlife.

We actually bought out here in 1997 and we bought a lake lot.

And then in 2002 they opened up another section, and me and my wife walked this property and just fell in love with it.

Because it's...

I've got hundreds of post oaks that you can't even reach around.

And it's just beautiful and quiet.

- [Narrator] Since deer populate the land too, Doug built an enclosed garden for pollinators, dedicated to his dad, Paul Green.

- So my dad, Paul Green, he loved plants, he was a member of the Austin Men's Garden Club for many, many years.

- [Narrator] When Paul opened Paul's Beauty Salon on Red River Street in 1951, he styled up generations of customers and no doubt answered garden questions.

- And when we moved out here, he kept trying to give me plants and I go, "Dad, I'm not ready, 'cause the deer are gonna eat em."

And so after my dad passed away, and I do have some plants up top, but the deer would eat them, and I'm a plant nut also.

So I built this.

I've learned to draw about 12 years ago in a program called CorelDRAW so I could lay this thing out.

But I was gonna start with 40 foot walls and make it a square.

Well, 40 feet by 40 feet is 1600 square feet.

If you add one more wall and make it a pentagon, it goes from 1600 to 2,700 square feet.

So just buy three more posts and two more pieces of wire almost doubled the size of the garden.

And then I just kinda took it from there and made the water fountain in the shape of a pentagon.

There's some planter boxes that are in shape of a pentagon.

There's a game to find Doug's pentagons 'cause there's 17 pentagons out here.

- [Narrator] To thin mountain cedars for sun-loving plants, Doug worked with off duty firefighter Ryan Stark.

- [Doug] He would cut the tree down and I would haul it off to my burn pit and then we would come back and dig the roots out.

And I spent many hours disking the soil to get every root out.

- [Narrator] Ryan drove posts four feet into the ground with an air hammer, securing them without concrete.

- [Doug] The post or drill stem, like drill stem pipe that they would drill oil wills with, you can buy it anywhere.

This happened to be new drill stem that's never been used, and that way you know there's no chemicals inside or anything.

The wire is actually a concrete wire that they put into concrete to form like the rebar mesh.

I've used it before in a roll, but it's really hard to unroll and it can hurt you.

This actually came in 20-foot by 8-foot panels.

So I put the post every 10 feet so it would span the 20 feet, so every section is just a single piece of wire.

- [Narrator] It double duties as vertical support for perennial and annual vines that flower across the seasons.

Annual, self-seeding purple hyacinth bean blooms in late summer and fall.

- [Doug] But I started off with crossvine and evergreen wisteria, and then I got a passion vine.

Actually, this year I started planting grapes.

I'm gonna plant and grow grapes just for the birds.

If you're gonna do something for the butterflies, do something for the birds also.

- [Narrator] Since butterflies need water too, he places shallow dishes of sand moistened with drip tubes.

Males puddle for salt and amino acids.

- One of 'em has pure sand, one of 'em has salt and sand, and one of 'em has a little bit of horse manure in it, 'cause I found that...

I think it's a yellow sulfur butterfly.

I would go over there and there'd be 15 of 'em on my horse manure pile.

- [Narrator] An original member of the Austin Pond Society in the 90s, Doug applied his experience to design a dimensional pond.

Bees and wasps perch on its edges while butterflies puddle in the gravel.

- [Doug] I wanted places for the birds to have a bird bath and for the bees and butterfly to get a little drink where I call it skim water.

I dug a one cubic yard hole.

I have a Bobcat with a digger on it.

So I dug a square hole, and being a ponder, I put a liner in it, a pond liner.

And on this particular case I used upside down pickle buckets with holes in it to give me more volume of water and less pea gravel I had to haul to put in there.

So then I just filled it all in with pea gravel.

I poured the concrete main structure and I made a mold that would have rivers going through it.

- [Narrator] He designed one fountain with an upside-down container topped with a sphere.

- I actually poured that out of concrete.

One of my grandchildren had a volleyball or soccer ball out here that had gotten old, and I just cut a hole in it and poured concrete in it and then cut the ball off of it, and I put a pipe through the middle to start with.

- [Narrator] Doug lucked into such good soil that young plants quickly filled in.

- That's why we kinda picked it.

When you're out at the lake, you get a lot of rock.

I call it a chocolate loam everywhere, but I've got some washes that you could bag up and sell as play sand, it's so sandy.

And this property is a weird piece of property.

If I'm looking to the backyard, there are no live oaks in front of me and there's no post oaks behind me.

I've talked to a wildlife biologist about the different stratuses of the soil.

The post oaks went down where it was sandy and lived, and then the live oaks live up top.

- [Narrator] He nurtures his growing plants with aged compost from his horse manure and sawdust from his woodworking projects and sawmills.

- [Doug] But the biggest thing I did for the garden, I bought a load of granite sand.

A lot of people don't realize granite gravel, decomposed granite gravel, is a mulch.

It has nutrients in it.

It's porous.

- [Narrator] In just two years, the garden's a habitat smorgasbord and visual sensation.

- [Doug] I was reading about gardens, and the first year is gonna be pretty good.

The second year is gonna be a little better, and then the third year will be your best.

So I'm waiting for the third year, 'cause I can't imagine it being any better than this.

I told myself I wasn't gonna go nuts.

Maybe I wasn't gonna plant the whole thing the first year, but then I couldn't stop.

You know, every time I'd go to a nursery.

I went to nurseries in San Antonio, I went to every nursery in Austin, and I asked the owner or pretty knowledgeable person, "What's your favorite butterfly plant?"

Almost everyone would mention Gregg's Mist Flower.

When I said, "Okay, what's number two?"

And so I would just build on that.

And it's amazing, the butterflies this year were on plants I've never seen 'em on before.

I love the butterflies, I love the hummingbirds, and birds and bees.

This is my Zen time out here.

- [Narrator] Paul passed down his gardening love to Ingrid and Doug's son Ryan who painted a tribute for future generations.

He accents with containers, purchased or scavenged and modified.

- But most of them I made out of two by six cedar, and one thing I've learned by doing this is you wanna leave a little place where the dirt can settle.

You don't want the dirt right up to the top of the board, 'cause when you're watering, you want that water to stay in and soak in.

But the other containers that are like metal troughs, some of them are fire rings that just don't have a bottom.

And there's some places that sell planters that don't have bottoms and then they sell goat troughs or horse trough that have bottoms, the ones without a bottom cost more 'cause they're a planter.

So I would buy the ones with the bottom and just cut the bottom out.

I've found anything that could make a container.

There's a culvert over there that just was left over from the job and I took it and it's perfect.

And so with everything not having a bottom, then your roots... You can't overwater and your roots get down in the real dirt and just keep going for years and years.

- [Narrator] In his shop, he designs and welds mild steel containers to measure.

- [Doug] I'm a hobbyist metal worker and woodworker, mainly woodworker.

I started doing metal work in Junior High, I started doing metal work when we moved out here.

Taught myself to weld, and then I bought a CNC plasma cutter, which uses a computer to draw.

You draw it and then send it to the machine, it cuts it out.

And so I could cut out things like the leaf planters and the butterfly chairs.

I basically built a website just to show off.

I do get business off my website, but a lot of it's word of mouth.

Since we're outside of Austin, I have a drop off point in North Austin, that a store that allows me to come and go and drop off items and pick up items to engrave or build.

And I have a few people come out here, most of what I'm making are gifts.

I just enjoy making stuff for other people.

- Before their house was even built, Ana and Julio Lopez mapped their new dream garden in Leander.

- It's not where we wanted them to grow, it's where they like to grow.

So I just play with them and and make them happy.

I think this this is the secret of the success on the garden to make the plants' garden.

After all, they make us happy.

Hi, I'm Ana Lopez and my husband, Julio Lopez, moved here back in 2018.

We were thinking to downsize after living in a nice house surrounded by preserve area privacy place.

We love it.

But we decided to downsize and it was hard for us to find a place with a little bit of privacy, especially because we like the garden and we wanted to have a land where we can enjoy and plant what we want with fruit trees or roses.

I love roses.

And one day we crossed by this location and Julio say, look at that lot.

This is our place.

And I started on my mind and a piece of paper drawing my design, let's say a design.

I say I wanted to plant this here and that over there.

So we started a project and then we was just playing around.

Julio say, no, I don't want this here.

I want this there.

We started like even a year before they started building.

After all we move and then Julio got to work and then I start digging.

We noticed the soil was not good for the garden.

And we asked for a mix of garden beds soil in which is they and they deliver some and then we just mix it.

And that's that's basically it.

I think I have a green thumb 'cause my mom did.

We just like to mix plants where they like to grow.

We don't have a plan, we just like to plant the plants that we like.

And then if they do good in one spot, good, if they don't, we just move it around.

The garden bed in the middle is because one day a neighbor passed and say, "Can I look at your garden?"

I say "Yes."

And she just walk inside and then after she looks everything and it was beautiful, she ask, "Where's the vegetable garden?"

I was like, "Oh oh, we don't have a vegetable garden because I'm a flower person, not the vegetable person."

But I was like, "Okay, let's plant a vegetable garden here."

Julio, "Can you help?"

After we did the rose garden, we moved to another area and I decided to have a herb garden because I love to cook.

That's my other hobby.

I love to cook.

And I like to have mint in my garden.

So this special mint reminds me of my mom because she always cook with that kind of mint.

And then I add some thyme because I love thyme.

So we have plants that live with us so many years.

I have one plant that I think is the first plant that I got because I read in magazines, and I noticed the flowers.

And not knowing that they don't live in Texas, it's only up north.

But I like them.

It's like, is that peony?

So I decided to buy one and keep it in a pot for so many years and the first house that we own.

And then we moved to the second one, so we took the plant to another one.

After I noticed the blooms then I decided to buy another one and then another one, we have three.

And they bloom once in a while, not all the time, not every year.

And then there are the river rocks around.

It's because we like to mix things for instance, agave.

So my succulents and I notice it looks clean.

My husband always wanted to have a pond.

And I mean, I know it's hard and we think about in other houses that we live in, I mean, we did it at one point.

But then there are raccoons and other types of animals come in and take about at night and destroy everything.

So we just give up.

But I wanted to have a water lily anyway.

And I found this big water pot that we can fill and put water plants in there.

And we have this water lily that I love and it's with us for so many years as well.

I like to plant rose bushes and trellises and I say, "Julio, can you make me an arbor here?"

So he did the first one and I have a Peggy Martin rose in there and another one growing on the other side.

And then he say, "I wish to have a grapevine."

So and I said, "Well, you need to do another arbor because there's no place for your grapevine here."

So he end up doing another one on the back side and now we have the grapevine and we really enjoy looking every morning.

And then it was kinda empty in there.

So our son knows that we have so much love for Our Lady of Guadalupe.

So he contact this artist, Austin artist.

His name is Federico.

And he painted that beautiful image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

I like to recycle, but I also like to have some color because we like to see bright colors.

So that's why we chose the purple and the green together.

And I like blues.

So I always dream to have a gate, a different gate for the entrance.

We always know about the secret garden and I was dreaming about the gate.

So one day we were heading to the mall and we noticed this antique store and I said, "Look, Julio, stop."

We saw the door, it was all damaged.

And we ask if they have that for sale.

They don't even know the price but we end up having the gate door.

So we came and we sanded and we just think that, you know, the color we like.

The neighbors love it and they just pass and they say, "Oh, I love your gate.

It looks like a secret garden.

Can I go in?"

And I say of course, everybody is welcome.

We have shade in this area and then in the afternoon, sun hits all in here.

But then we can move around and there we have another patio in the back and it's shady in the afternoon.

So we just move from one place to another.

In the morning, we drink coffee in here and in the afternoon we go and chat on the other side.

We like the sound of the water because, you know, relax us.

I mean, the sound of the water is just amazing.

And we like to sit and have this peaceful retreat.

So we decided to have it closer to the patio because it's a shaded area at some point.

And then the birds come in to take a bath.

I think it's important to take care of the environment.

Even if we don't like some plants, we just leave it for the birds because we provide food for every insect, for every bird, for every butterfly, as well for our friends to let them come and our neighbors, to let them come and walk 'cause we wanted to share, the peaceful garden that we have.

This is our place where we enjoy and we relax and it's a stress-free zone for us.

When people say, oh, I'm going to the gym and I say, oh, I'm going to mine because this is my gym.

I dig out and I work hard every day because having a garden, it's a hard work.

It's nothing like you plant and forget about it.

It's something that you have to put love and all your energy, but it pays off.

We always enjoy watching the birds and the butterflies.

It's just amazing to be able to create a place where we can relax and enjoy every single day.

- Find out more and watch online at centraltexasgardener.org.

Until next time, remember, adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.