- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher!

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," changing goals impacted designs.

Laura and Eric Wills transitioned gardens as focus changed from homesteading projects.

Meredith Thomas responded to an autoimmune disorder with holistic wellness.

Weather is changing, too, so Heather Kendall protects citrus plants in winter.

Plus, Leah Churner and Colleen Dieter show how to plant bluebonnets and lettuce.

So, let's get growing, right here, right now.

(cheerful music) (birds singing) Priorities changed for Laura and Eric Wills as their daughter grew up and focus shifted away from homesteading projects balanced with technology careers.

Laura's many gardens also evolved in response to water resources and weather calamities.

She knows that a garden should always bring us joy, and when it doesn't, it's okay to switch things around.

- We have several different gardens within the same property.

One thing I've found with the garden is it should always bring you joy.

So when something isn't, then you switch and do something else.

I'm Laura Wills.

And this is our property, we live on two acres in Oak Hill.

We've been here since 2011.

When we moved in, there was one rosebush, a couple of pomegranate trees and some irises.

A lot of St. Augustine, some Bermuda and, you know, not much else to speak of.

We came in and actually I saw the property and that's what sold us on this place.

We had the fenced area.

I could see like, okay, this is a deer-proof area.

We had a nice fenced area and then there was a sunny spot in the back.

Why we moved here we used to live elsewhere in in South Austin and I had a really small yard.

The vegetable garden was in the front and we actually outgrew it.

So we came out here and just slowly built on to where I was up to 16, four-by-eight beds.

We'd get, you know, so many vegetables, I was canning, you know, pickling, making salsas.

And it was a lot of fun for a while.

And then it got to be overwhelming, and I'm coming home from work, and thinking I have to spend 2 hours tonight making pickles.

So I've switched it.

I just put annuals out there.

There's different reseeding wildflowers.

Whatever the pollinators love, I just kind of let it go crazy out there.

This is it's mostly shade.

I mean, well, it's kind of dappled.

It's a mix, you know, back here.

To show kind of level of shade, when we moved in, we had Saint Augustine in the shade parts, Bermuda and Asiatic jasmine, you know, in the in the sun parts.

But the the St. Augustine, I didn't even water it in 2011 that whole summer.

So, you know, it was surviving without much care.

So that's why I've left it.

I solarized some of the areas with Bermuda that were full sun.

We have a pool, so I wanted to have kind of a pond feel so that's why I have the bicolor iris, why I have the ruby crystal grass.

Then the back bed it was, we had a Livin Easy when we moved in and it was really happy.

So I just went with it.

I loved it for a while, but then it was right behind the pool.

And as we were swimming and enjoying the weather in the summer, the roses were at their worst.

I ended up leaving a few.

The Livin Easy got to stay because it's a survivor.

I've a Peggy Martin as well.

And then one Belinda's Dream, but other than that, you know, I replaced it with fountain grass, firecracker fern, yellow hesperaloe, you know, things that are going to look good in the summer and can take a beating.

And then in the back, it's kind of dappled shade.

You come out in the heat of the summer and I wanted something soothing and cooling.

So everything in the back is it's purple.

and silvers with little pops of yellow and red.

And I find that I come back and it just, you know, it feels like the temperature drops 10 degrees.

I've always been a fan of hostas.

And when I first moved here, you know, I was told from other gardeners, you can't grow those here, they don't do well.

So this is kind of my attempt of like, what would a hosta garden look like in a climate that will not take hostas?

So that's kind of if I think of the structure of the lamb's ear and the purple heart, it's that same kind of feel.

This bed right here, it used to be full shade and when we had the trees pruned ended up, you know, taking one branch that converted this bed to a little bit more sun than we were hoping.

But you know the Zexmenia, that's one that here it's on the edge, and it can take a blast of sun in the afternoon.

So, I've got the betony, Peter's Purple, and the zexmenia.

I've got some ajuga here and that one I ended up usually end of the summer, some of it's gotten a little blasted, and so I just transplant, and then it does pretty well all through winter.

The other beds are mostly dappled, so you can see the long skinny bed.

Since we've got a little more sun now, the coneflowers are now doing better.

When we had the chickens before, so we had a chicken coop behind me, this was kind of a dirt path because this was where we would walk, you know, we'd go feed the chickens every day, take care of them.

And once we got rid of the chickens, I still had this dirt path.

This was just something I did last year, was to add the river rock into all of our path areas.

And then the back bed where you can see the, you know, the two gates and with the chicken coop behind.

So that bed... We used to have guineas along with the chickens and ducks and the guineas are not that smart.

And they would run back and forth, back and forth on that bed trying to get over to the other side, but couldn't figure out how to do it even though they can fly.

So that bed was constantly trampled, and once we got rid of the the guineas and chickens, I was able to actually create that bed, which is one of my favorites as well.

It's mostly shade gets a little bit, you know, a little bit of sun kind of in the afternoon, a little bit midday.

The Salvia madrensis is there, I've got bronze fennel.

The lamb's ear, that's the big lamb's ear.

Lemon Balm.

Very happy.

So that bed is finally coming together once it's not trampled on a daily basis.

My large bed back there, it was anchored by pomegranate when we moved in, beautiful pomegranate that we mostly lost in snowpocalypse.

It's coming back a little bit.

So that changed that bed as well.

There was a lot of shade back there that's now changed.

So what happens is different plants like the changes and so I let those plants thrive.

This is what works in this in this garden.

So, you know, it's a lot of plants duplicated because I see what works.

I find that all seasons I do like this garden because whether it's flowering or flowering or not, I have all of the the different structure.

I think I've put compost on it twice in the 11 years we've been here.

And other than that, I really don't mess with it.

I don't water too much really anywhere.

When we moved in, you know, we have this really sunny hillside and there was a sprinkling of verbena and, you know, a few different wildflowers.

When I had the vegetable garden, I wanted to bring in pollinators to help with the vegetables, so I had brought in bees.

And then I also wanted to give them some wildflowers.

You know, they needed more than just the vegetables.

So we slowly, you know, over ten years have just been adding more and more seeds to the meadow.

And so the the front garden when we moved in was just native grass.

And I mean, we do love that, you know, it's no maintenance.

I still wanted some a little bit more and some garden beds.

But there's been a transition there as well.

Like, we had fruit trees at one point, there was a sun spot in the middle, wso I had a lot of fruit trees.

I found that they were requiring a lot of water and squirrels eat most of the fruit.

So we ended up, you know, taking that sun bed and turning it into, you know, wildflower meadow.

And then slowly we've expanded the beds in the front, mostly natives, right?

I water very little with the watering can, probably once a week, twice a week or once or twice a month, you know, in the summer.

And we've got a lot of dappled up front as well.

Dry shade and deer proof.

Mealy blue sage that I didn't plant that are just there.

I've got antelope horn, I've got the different verbenas I've got cute little delicate wildflowers.

Also, when when we moved in all along the house, you know, house was built in the sixties.

So you have your standard hedges that are, you know, all along the front.

And I wanted more of an organic feel.

I've got the dwarf palmetto, you know, so some different things that give you a little bit of texture without having the harshness of a hedge.

My husband, Eric Wills, you know, he was in technology industry with me for, you know, 20-plus years and recently wanted to switch careers and try something new.

So he is now going to ACC for blacksmithing and metal arts.

So the pieces just recently finished is an ocotillo.

Growing up in Phoenix, I always loved ocotillos.

They are just my favorite.

Mostly they're just not really meant for here.

So I asked him, okay, can you build me in ocotillo so I can have that in my garden, you know, a permanent flower.

So that's one thing he's actually focused on is, you know, permanent nature.

So, flowers and plants, that's really his passion when it comes to metal art.

What I find is it's a constant process with the art.

Everything should have, you know, a purpose.

It should add, it shouldn't detract.

So the front garden is all rust color, it's more natural.

And then I come back here and because I have all the silvers with the artemisia and with the lamb's ear, I wanted to play with the silver, with the art.

I know a lot of gardeners within Austin, and we will have different plants that we can't grow for no good reason.

You know, be it columbine or plumbago or lamb's ear.

Our gardens are all microclimates in Austin, different soils, different areas, so you might have something that just doesn't work for you, and it doesn't say anything about your ability as a gardener.

It just means try something else.

- Meredith Thomas started growing organic food for her family's health.

When she was diagnosed with autoimmune disorders, she expanded her vision to embrace holistic wellness with both wild and cultivated plants.

- I just take regular white vinegar and I run around the garden and pick out all the fragrant herbs that I can.

In this one, it's juniper, lantana, rosemary, sage, and probably some other things I'm forgetting, and just let it steep in the sun for about a couple of weeks.

And then I had this... Then I just decant it into these jars, or excuse me, spray bottles.

And I use it in cleaning.

And I'm just going do this because you all can't smell it, but it smells just divine.

And then another thing I love to do is make tinctures.

This is artichoke leaf.

This is for liver support.

Great for digestion.

And I just take a little bit before a meal.

I, myself, was diagnosed with two autoimmune disorders a few years ago, and I was told that they were progressive and incurable.

And that I needed to take certain pills, et cetera.

And somewhere in there... And it was a scary time for me.

And it was also, I lost my energy.

I lost my vitality.

I couldn't hardly get up off the couch.

So then I started looking for healers and healing things.

And that included plants.

I was already fermenting, but I went more deeply into the healing qualities of various plants.

And I'm just happy to report that now, those incurable progressive diseases, I longer have them in my system.

- [Narrator] Front yard and back, Meredith Thomas grows tasty meals and good health in a typical Allendale homestead.

She and husband Walter Stroup Jr. wake up every morning to peace and cheer that reflect the calendar of discovery.

- At age 45, something sprouted.

And I realized that I have a calling with these plants.

- [Narrator] A few years ago, she dumped lawn for pea gravel and raised beds to grow organic food.

- The bottom line is I wanted to serve healthy food to my children.

Everything has been scavenged or the soil all built from sheet composting.

Every board, every rock, every everything, I hauled.

- [Narrator] In mid-October, summer's burgundy amaranth and sunny cowpen daisies shade newly sprouted winter tastes and upcoming vegetables.

Her special joy is heading outside to pick her plants and then eat them.

- I try to take a moment before I pick to ask permission and then also to think after I eat.

And also doing that before I sit down to a beautiful meal that's come from mostly just around the yard.

This morning, I had rice and I had cooked the rice.

I took fig leaves.

And while the rice was cooking in the rice cooker, I had fig leaves that were on the surface.

And it perfumes this with the most amazing, complex smell.

You can't even imagine the taste of it.

It's like vanilla and spicy.

I also make tea from fig leaves.

- [Narrator] Along with their beauty, Meredith finds multiple uses for every plant.

Although she likes to pluck ripe Meyer lemons in fall, she harvests leaves all year for delicious tea.

Even her fence-screening plants multi-task.

- When I first planted loquat, I planted it because I love the look of it.

It's beautiful.

I wanted a screen, I wanted something that would be reliable.

It's a reliable plant.

And then I love the fruit.

But now I found out about the loquat leaf and its medicinal qualities.

- [Narrator] Originally, she planted passion vine for its bold leaves that quickly ornament a blank fence and feed Gulf Fritillary caterpillars.

- I didn't even know that it had sedative qualities.

I mean, we all suffer from anxiety from one another.

I made tinctures of the passion flower plant and found that its action was really strong.

But just somewhere out of the blue, I just decided that I would just take some of the fresh vine and decoct it for a nighttime tea.

If you look at almost any sleepy time tea, you'll see passion vine listed as one or passion flower, listed as one of the ingredients.

- And now I have mullein and I think a lot of people know that the mullein flowers steeped in olive oil are the remedy for earache.

And then the leaves are also for asthma and other things.

So you can use the leaves and the flowers.

- [Narrator] She's learned to forage wisely with respect for the wild foods that some consider weeds.

When they show up on their own in her garden, she doesn't banish them from orchestrated beds.

- I started being more interested in what grew outside of the box than in the box.

Then I started wanting to encourage those plants that grow naturally here.

So I would encourage bring them here.

And I have a wild area where I spread wild mustard seeds.

So now I have wild mustard, which I know most people want to get rid of.

But I eat it and love it.

I've tried dock, cleavers, henbit, chickweed.

Those all just showed up on their own.

The direction I'm going is more wild, more perennial, less work per se.

It was just amazing, just even to go out there this morning.

And in the dark, I fumbled around and I picked passion vine leaves, the new shoots of passion vine leaves.

And then I went to the arugula that's sprouting and pick the little baby arugulas and picked the little baby radishes.

And then I went out to the moringa tree and picked some moringa, which is the vitamin tree for my vitamin boost.

And I just feel gratitude, every meal, just great gratitude.

- [Narrator] Meredith harvests from the front yard, too, where she invites neighbors to share.

Pollinators and birds also welcome her neighborly food forest since she changed the curb side appeal.

- Initially, I just wanted to actually have a screen between our house and the street.

The bedroom windows look out onto the street and I didn't like my children looking out onto a street.

I wanted them to see green.

And so that's why I planted that row of loquats.

It was a buffer, visually.

Also we have some light pollution from Burnet Road.

It actually helped with that.

And also noise.

I wanted a little living room that's what I essentially hoped to create, a little living room in there.

I think it was two years ago, I just decided that that was the sunniest part of the house.

And I really would love to have an orchard.

And I planted two persimmon, a quince, two Anna apples, a peach, a fig, a pomegranate, a cherry Barbados.

Tree trimming places will come and do great big loads of mulch.

And then I'd also, over the years, accumulated a bunch of chop limestone.

I planted a sunchokes this year, the Jerusalem artichokes.

Beautiful sunflowers, but then it's got the tuber to eat and it spreads, which I actually consider that a plus.

- [Narrator] She frames the front door with papalo.

- Papalo, it's not that well known, it's a Mexican herb.

They're very fragrant, very strong flavor.

That's my that's my summer green, my summer salad, it's very hardy.

It grows in any kind of condition.

- [Narrator] Self-seeding lambsquarters is durable, lovely, and delicious.

- Meredith Lambsquarters, aka Chenopodium giganteum, and this is a particular cultivar called Magenta Spreen.

It's the most delicious green, the most delicious green.

And I think all of us know in Texas that it's very hard to have any green in the summer.

It grows in shade, it grows in part shade, it grows in full sun, no water, a lot of water, any kind of soil.

Another term for it is wild spinach.

So if you like spinach, you will love this plant.

- [Narrator] Then she got into fermenting and making bitters.

- I finally built this.

I bought two stainless steel tanks.

Each one can fit 300 pounds of substrate or plant matter.

So fermenting is what you do when you put a vegetable matter under brine.

Essentially, it's an anaerobic process.

And every single vegetable on planet earth has lactobacilli growing on it, every single one occurring naturally.

And the magic that happens is that, when you put these vegetables in contact with salt and under brine, the lactobacilli magically proliferate.

And so they actually turn the cabbage or carrot or whatever it is that you're fermenting into having more vitamins, more of a health benefit than it did in its raw state.

These are bitters.

Here's some fig, give it a taste.

Delicious, strong, delicious.

- [Narrator] So, what are bitters?

- I get a plant, either dried or fresh.

And roots and bark, and then get Everclear or vodka or in some cases, brandy.

And then you steep the plant in the jar with the alcohol.

And so after two, three, four weeks, you then strain it and that's what you have, that should be the base of the bitters.

It's very similar to making tinctures.

So tinctures would be the same thing.

There's kind of a crossover.

The difference I would say with bitters is that there's a very strong bitter taste.

It's that energy of the plant, and it's the engagement with the plant that for me has been a great healer.

Not just from what I've ingested, but being in contact with them.

- Winter's on the way, and it's time to protect our citrus plants.

Heather Kendall from The Natural Gardener shows how to bundle them up for cold weather.

(soft music) (birds chirping) - Citrus trees are subtropical so they have a certain amount of cold sensitivity.

And you need to know that some of them are more cold sensitive than others.

For example, you can grow satsumas and kumquats in the ground and they'll be cold tolerant down to the mid-teens.

And Meyer lemon, we grow so many of those here, they'll be cold tolerant to the mid to upper 20s, but lime trees they're really sensitive, and they really can't tolerate below freezing.

And when I say cold tolerant, what I'm talking about is the tree itself will be okay, but there may be some superficial damage to the leaves and the branches, but the main part of the tree stays intact.

What should you do to protect your tree in the ground?

Well, you should make sure that it's mulched anyway.

You mulch it with some shredded bark or some pine straw just to protect that root area.

Always water your tree before a freeze.

You don't think about this, but evergreen trees particularly benefit from having a good watering just before a freeze.

You can make a little tent for your tree using row cover or blankets.

You can wrap it around.

What you're trying to do is trap the ground source heat up around the tree.

You can add a heat source by using incandescent tree lights rather than LEDs.

If you can't protect your tree because it's got too big and obviously after a while, they do get too tall to cover completely as a tent, the best thing for it is to protect the trunk of the tree.

And you what you want to do is protect it by wrapping the trunk from the ground all the way up to above the grafting point.

If you have them in a container outside, they're going to be more sensitive to freezing than if their roots were in the ground.

So bear that in mind if you have a container grown plant.

Those roots are up above and are exposed to that cold air.

Now if you grow in a container, there are things you also have to remember.

The first thing and most important thing I remember is that not to have a container that gets too heavy.

If you have a heavy ceramic pot that's full of soil, and then you have a mature tree inside , that's a really heavy thing to move when you have to get it in quickly for a freeze.

So try and choose a container that's not too heavy.

The plastic resin ones, they're pretty good these days.

The dwarfing varieties can stay in containers pretty much their whole lives.

The larger trees like the grapefruit and the oranges eventually you want to grow them out in the ground just because they have a big framework and big root network.

- What's the secret to success with bluebonnet and lettuce seeds?

From CTG's archives, let's check in with landscape designer Leah Churner and Colleen Dieter, co-founder of the Central Texas Seed Bank.

(soft music) - I'm Leah Churner.

- And I'm Colleen Dieter.

We're celebrating the kickoff of the Central Texas Seed Library by showing you how to plant seeds.

- I guess you can't just throw them on the ground, huh?

- No.

No, that's how it works in nature, but certain seeds like Blue Bonnets have protective coats that prevent them from sprouting all in the same year.

So that way, if it's too wet or too dry this year, the plant will still be able to reproduce in following years.

- Okay, well that's smart for the plants, but a lot of gardeners, they want these plants to germinate this season, which is where seed preparation comes in.

So I'll show you how I prepare Blue Bonnet seeds for planting.

All you do is just take some boiling water and pour it over the seeds through a strainer and then let them dry.

This will break that seed coat.

- Okay, do you like to do that instead of scarifying?

- Yeah, some gardeners like to scarify their seeds with sandpaper to break the seed coat, but I just find that this is pretty easy to do it this way.

- Okay, so that's just boiling water.

And you should always read the seed packets if you're buying seeds 'cause they'll have a special instructions for each kind of seed.

So for example, I have sweet peas right here and on the seed packet, they recommend soaking the seeds overnight because the sweet peas have a really hard seed coat too.

- Okay and so I'm just gonna let these seeds dry and once they're dry, they're ready for planting in a full sun area.

So I like to lightly scrape or rake the soil first in the area and then scatter the seeds by hand.

The best time to plant is October or November for wildflower seeds in Texas.

What other seeds did you bring, Colleen?

- I brought some lettuce seeds.

This is a variety called Flashy Troutback, and it will say on the seed packet to plant a quarter inch or an eighth of an inch deep.

But the thing about lettuce seeds is that they actually need light to sprout.

So what I like to do instead is I'll just sprinkle them over the top of the soil and I don't even bury them, like this.

And then I'll just gently kind of squish them down so that they have good soil contact like that.

Okay.

- And how do you water them?

- Okay, and then it's really important because they're so small and light, it's really important to water them with a really gentle shower of water like that.

So a watering can with like a shower head type action on it so they don't wash away.

- [Leah] I think lettuce seeds are a good crop to do successive sowing, right?

- Yeah, so successive sowing is where you would plant a few seeds this week and then a few seeds next week and that way, you can have a continuous harvest.

- Well cool, let's get out and plant some seeds.

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

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

(soft music) (birds chirping)