- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on Central Texas Gardener, let's go front yard forward.

For a Tudor-style home, landscape designer Kim Beal goes for casual style with formal lines in shady gardens.

After years in theater, Leigh'Ann and Jordan Andrews turned the spotlight on growing food for their community.

Since fall's the best time to plant roses, William Glenn at Barton Springs Nursery shows us how.

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

(cheerful instrumental music) (cheerful instrumental music continues) (birds chirping) To complement a 1938 Tudor-style home, landscape designer Kim Beal goes for casual style with formal lines in its shady gardens.

- My goal when I started designing and I started Rain Lily, was to create spaces that people would actually utilize and that they would actually enjoy being in, to get people outside more and forge more of a connection with nature.

My wife, Stephanie Scherzer, and I started Rain Lily Design and Landscaping about 20 years ago, and it's now being owned and run by one of my long-time wonderful employees, Meredith Gresham.

About 18 years ago, my client approached me to help with maintenance on this beautiful garden.

It's a 1938 Tudor home that's just gorgeous in and of itself.

And then there was some really beautiful hedges and shrubbery that existed in a great framework to work in.

But there were a lot of issues.

There was a lot of roses and things that were just getting shaded out, and not doing their best, and not the right plant for the right spot.

For instance, we had a very old cherry laurel hedge that was just planted too close to the pathway.

And after being pruned like crazy for many years, it had to be replaced.

We had better plant placement with that by moving it a little further away from the pathway.

And we chose a bay laurel hedge instead, which the bumblebees have just gone crazy for.

So over the last 18 years, we've just really cultivated what worked and taken out what wasn't working, experimented, and then dealt with everything Mother Nature gave us.

This garden has some formal bones, but I would call it casual formal, because it's still got a loose, laid back, maybe kind of Austin-style.

You know, this garden has such beautiful walkways and allees, and we used Will Fleming to increase the the drama of the entrance.

So pea gravel, I just think is a really versatile material.

It has a very old-world kind of European look, which I think really works well with the Tudor house.

And I also love it just from an environmental standpoint, because it's not completely impervious, so it's gonna allow some water to percolate through.

It's nice on bare feet, because it's round.

The homeowners here have had young children that they raised here.

So as this garden got shadier and shadier, we really had to think of, how do we keep the garden beautiful and interesting without a lot of big, colorful flowers?

And so we focused a lot on textures.

I really love the Ming fern for texture in the shade.

There's also another relative, another asparagus fern called plumosa, and that I've also used in the garden.

And both of them weathered the severe cold like champs.

And then for pops of color, we've used things like purple oxalis.

We've used a hardy red amaryllis, that I just love because the... Of course, the big red blooms are gorgeous, but then there's also some purple kind of veins on the leaves that really are beautiful.

And then we've also really added some seasonal pops of color with things like the American beautyberry, and those gorgeous purple berries in the fall.

And then our oakleaf hydrangeas, which give us two seasons of color.

They've got the beautiful white blooms in the spring, and then the the gorgeous crimson and orange fall color.

Then, of course, we've just got our wonderful structure with our Burford hollies, our boxwoods, our bay laurels.

This garden also has a lot of palms in it.

The Mediterranean fan palms did not do so well in the freeze.

We've had kind of mixed results with those coming back, but the sabal minor palms have just really done well, as have the windmill palms.

And then as far as the hardscaping, there was a lot of existing beautiful old stonework, stone walls, stone steps and patios, and we didn't want anything we did to stand out.

So we actually went to our stone yard and found stones that were cast off from other jobs that had weathered and mossed a little bit.

And then there's a beautiful area that the pathway leads towards that used to be a vegetable garden, and it got too shady over time, like most of this garden, as these trees have grown.

So we decided to make that into more of like a place for the owner to put a sculpture or a bench or something like that.

We were able to save some of the plants from it, though, and so we've got a beautiful, mature lemongrass that we were able to move around and keep.

That made it through the freeze without any problems.

And then we were able to just introduce some fun new plants and maybe experiment a little bit.

One of the plants that's just one of my favorites is the bush morning glory.

It's a native, actually.

It comes in both white and kind of a pinky purple, and it just blooms beautifully, and has made it through the freeze this year, as has a little bit more of an experimental plant for me, which was the brugmansia or Angel's trumpet, as it's also known.

It's just an elegant plant that has these pendulous blooms that hang down, and it came back like a champ from the freeze without any problems.

And then another plant that I've used in this area that I've used throughout the garden is the ligularia.

And again, this is just texture that you can't beat, because the leaves look like giant lily pads.

And then on top of it, in the fall, you get these yellow blooms.

And then another native kind of bullet proof plant that we've woven in is the fall aster, and it's going to seed right now.

But it gave such a show this year, this past fall, that the the homeowner actually sent me photos of it.

So as you're moving on towards the backyard, down the side yard, we encountered an area that had never really been landscaped before, and it was just a large, sloping kind of eroding area.

And so we really, we wanted to create good flow from the front to the back yard, because there was a beautiful firepit and stone patio that already existed.

We created these gentle stone stairs, again, mimicking the existing old stonework, continued our gravel paths around to create that continuity, and continued the the the feeling of these little openings, where our gravel kind of widened a bit and it gave you a chance to pause and kind of see where you're going.

Then we also introduced some other fun shade plants.

One that was very new to me, which was a type of red blooming ruellia called Cajun Fire, and I honestly didn't imagine it would do that well, but it has survived everything Texas has thrown at it.

And then we've got Toad Lily in that area that provides a really nice surprise bloom in the fall with its kind of white leopard spotted blooms.

And then persicaria is another little workhorse in that area.

The blooms are white and not super significant, but the foliage is just so interesting.

It's got all kinds of purple and green and silver.

And then, of course, firespike, one way to get lots of color in the shade.

Not always cold hardy, although ours made it through the recent cold snap.

So when the homeowners decided that they wanted to have a pool, there was a lot of thought put into, again, making that pool look like it had always been here.

And so they decided to surround it with a stone wall and use a beautiful archway, and a stone archway, and then, of course, iron detail for the gate and things like that.

They made their bathroom have a very kind of garden folly or a pergola type style to it.

It doesn't look like a bathroom.

We complimented all of that with our plantings using, you know, big, lush plants like the rice paper plant, the windmill palm.

We did a huge hedge of sweet olive, which will knock your socks off in the springtime, because it just perfumes the air like you can't believe.

And some really fun perennials, like the Everillo sedge, which has a great kind of chartreuse color in the shade, and then the Fruit Salad shrimp plant, which, again, just that chartreuse and red, just kind of a fun plant (laughs).

Very festive looking down there.

While the shade garden has its challenges, I'm a huge proponent of planting trees and making those those spaces comfortable for human, you know, humans to be in.

Our biggest weather foe is the heat.

And so if we can't create spaces that are are cool and inviting, then we're not gonna go outside.

And then from a design perspective, I'm always trying to create rooms when I go outside, because that's what makes you feel cozy and private and hidden away.

- After 12 years in theater management, Leigh'Ann and Jordan Andrews turned the spotlight on a dream cultivated since grad school: growing healthy food for their community.

(bright music) - Our friends come over and we love to like walk the farm, and take things out of the ground, and they eat it right there.

Not a lot of people get to do that.

I'm Leigh'Ann Andrews.

- I'm Jordan Andrews.

- And this is Billie and Jean's Farm.

We named it after our grandmothers.

So when we graduated from TCU for undergrad, we moved to Iowa for six years.

I was a grad student there studying theater stage management.

And then, well, we didn't have any money, 'cause I was a grad student.

- Yes.

- And so one of the ways that we found that we could buy food or foreign food was to volunteer at the farmers' market.

So if we volunteered for a farm there, they gave us a free CSA box every week, and that was our groceries for a week.

And then we moved to Washington for four years, just following our careers, and had grown food in all of those places.

After doing theater for almost twelve years, when the pandemic hit, we decided we wanted to farm full-time.

- We decided to move home to Austin, when the rest of the country decided it would also be a really good idea to move to Austin.

Kyle is just kind of where we found the house, where it was affordable, where it was, you know, close to 35 and- - No HOA.

- No HOA, so we can do whatever we want with our land.

The first nine months, I taught high school, so I would leave in the morning, and come home, and it was amazing the amount of work she would do every day that I got home.

So yeah, what were you doing those first couple of weeks of school?

- Yeah, so, literally the very first thing that I did was lay out how I wanted the beds to look, like how I could maximize the amount of space.

And so I just use string and laid everything out.

And then it was just bare Bermuda grass.

So I put cardboard down.

I went to every recycling center I could, and dumpster dived for good cardboard, and stripped it all, and then laid that down, and then ordered compost from the city of Kyle.

So they use all the yard waste and make compost, and you can have it delivered.

So I had all that compost delivered and put four inches of compost down on all the front beds.

And then laid the drip lines.

And then maybe a month after turning the drip on, we realized that the clay soil was so heavy underneath that- - The beds were not draining.

- Between the compost and the cardboard, they weren't draining.

So then we dug trenches in between, six-inch trenches in between every single bed, and filled it with river rock.

And that has completely fixed that.

We don't have rainwater collection yet, but we will in year three of the farm.

So right now, we don't have gutters.

And so for some reason, this corner is where all the water drains, like the whole house basically drains right here.

So there's like two or three inches of river rock, and then cardboard.

It really helps distribute that water and it doesn't just all pool right by the house.

- We knew we couldn't use it for food production, but we knew that we needed pollinators.

We really needed flowers and aesthetics and things like that.

And that's really not our thing.

I can grow you some kale, but I'm not a huge flower person.

- No.

- And my mother, Kelly Andrews, has a stunning house in Georgetown.

She does all of her own landscaping, does all her own design.

She maintains the flowers for us and teaches us how to do it, and we're really still learning- - So grateful.

We wanna be able to make our own compost, because, because of our heavy clay soil, we add compost at nearly every planting.

Most people only add compost once or twice a year, depending on where you live, but we add an inch of compost every planting.

And we have a lot of food waste.

One of the ways we get rid of that food waste is we got chickens recently.

So we have a backyard flock of six chickens.

They eat a lot of our greens, which is great.

- Yes.

- But we also use their wood shavings and their waste in the compost to try and add nitrogen.

We sell at the SFC Farmers' Market downtown.

And being a member of Sustainable Food Center, they help you so much.

- We did have really insane weather the first year that we lived here, which can happen in Texas.

So the benefits of that is we feel like we've kind of seen it all.

You have to have- - Row cover.

- Row cover.

You have to have shade cloth.

You have to have these things.

And coming from theater, we're just- - Adaptable.

- Theater is just problem solving.

That's all theater is.

The problem is we need the audience to think that it's 1920s and we're on a beach, but we're not, we're in a theater in, you know, in downtown Austin.

So the constant problem solving is what we've always done.

- So right now in the ground, we still have all of our cool season things and we have all of our salad, greens, brassicas, and root vegetables, and peas.

But we're transitioning slowly into all of our warmer season things.

We have eggplant and squash in right now.

Next will be tomatoes and then peppers.

We do follow basic crop rotation principles to try and keep pest pressure down and to keep the soil healthy.

So we try to plant things that will feed the soil before things that are heavy feeders.

Then we don't really do much inter-planting.

We would if this was more of a home garden, but because we're trying to get the most production possible out of a bed, then we really do try to keep things in neat rows and all the same thing.

However, we allow mistakes to flourish on the farm.

There are a lot of mixed beds right now.

One of the reasons why is because lettuce gets stuck in our seeder.

So even if it is in the middle of a beet bed or turnips, whatever, there's lettuce there now.

And then the other weird thing right now, that doesn't always happen, is in one of the freezes, we had just seeded everything.

This winter was just a battery of freezes, so every time we would seed things or transplant, there would be another freeze, and everything would die, and we'd have to replant.

And we did that- - Three times.

- Yeah, three times.

And then it got warm enough and both sets of things germinated.

Hakurei turnips are a small, sweet Japanese turnip.

We grow them because they're small, so they grow pretty quickly.

And then we fall in love with them.

We'd actually never tried a- - They're so good.

- Hakurei turnip before we planted them.

And then the first time that we harvested it, I ate one and was like, "This tastes like actual candy."

- [Jordan] Yeah, they're super sweet and crunchy.

- Yeah.

So we love them.

Root vegetables do really, really well here.

We have very heavy clay soil, but roots can just push through that.

- [Jordan] We grow tatsoi, which is similar to a bok choy.

It can grow and be more of a braising vegetable, but we cut it really small and put it in a salad mix and a lot of arugula.

- [Leigh'Ann] And then we grow microgreens, including pea shoots and sunflower shoots, 'cause those are just so like hearty and delicious, and you can add 'em into any salad mix.

- We also do broccoli and radish microgreens, and we add those in to our salad mix as well.

Microgreens are just plants that are seven to 14 days old, so I grow them in trays indoors under lights.

And the whole idea is that these little tiny plants have the same or similar nutrients that they will when they're a full-grown plant.

Leigh'Ann is also a excellent gluten-free baker.

She's always been an excellent gluten-free baker.

And then for several months, when the theater was shut down, when we still lived in Seattle, she did a lot of baking, as everybody did.

- Mm-hmm, like everybody else.

- And it's developed a couple of recipes that we now always have some sort of gluten-free baked good at the market.

And that really kind of started, I would say, last year with... We overgrew zucchini last year, and we had found a great gluten-free zucchini bread recipe.

Right now we're doing rosemary focaccia bread, 'cause our rosemary did well over winter.

And then we'll do zucchini bread in the spring, peach hand pies in the summer.

We've planted six peach trees this fall.

Two early varieties, two mid and two late, so that we could extend our season as much as possible.

And we know that six peach trees isn't that much production, but it's enough for us, and like I said, we bake with them.

We sell every Saturday morning at the SFC Farmers' Market in downtown Austin, and then every Sunday morning at the downtown Buda Farmer's Market at Buda City Park.

We have always been passionate about healthy eating, and local food, and eating close to home, and seasonal eating.

We always kind of knew that when we were done doing theater full time, we wanted to really invest our lives and our lifestyle in eating that way.

And we didn't know what that looked like or what it meant, but this is what it's turned into, and we're so grateful for that.

- Being outside and working here was so healing for me.

I taught high school remotely last year and it was extremely difficult.

One of the most difficult things I've ever done.

I was supposed to be teaching in a theater with 20 kids making things, and instead I was in a classroom, an empty bare-bones classroom alone, right, on a camera.

Then I would come home in the evening, and get to start helping on the farm.

And then when we started harvesting, she did a big Friday harvest, and about once a month, I would take off work, because there was just a lot to do.

And I found like those Fridays spent washing greens at our pack station was just extremely healing for me.

It was a time to be outside, to be quiet, to think my thoughts, and I feel like I processed the pandemic and a new job.

I processed all of that out here on this land.

So when I got to finally turn this into my full-time job, I was so ready for it, 'cause this is truly my happy place.

- Fall is absolutely the best time to plant, and that includes roses.

William Glenn at Barton Springs Nursery shows us how to do it.

(upbeat music) - Hi there, welcome to Backyard Basics.

I'm William Glenn with Barton Springs Nursery, and we're gonna learn about planting roses.

Before you start planting a rose, it's a really good idea to learn about the rose, because you wanna make sure you choose the right one for the right place.

Now, some of the things that you wanna look out for, most importantly, is that you wanna find a really sunny spot.

As you can tell, we're in a spot here that's awash with sun.

And roses really won't tolerate any fewer than, I would say, six hours of sun.

It's a good idea if you can give them even a little bit more than that.

Another element that we wanna consider is improving the soil.

It's really rare that the native soil is going to be in a state that's gonna be great for roses.

So what we do is advise that you always make sure that the soil gains some fertility with the application of compost, and porosity with the application of something like expanded shale, lava rock, or maybe decomposed granite.

I prefer expanded shale, because I feel like it gives a nice loft to the soil, makes it really porous, and accepts water readily, and also hangs onto water a little bit longer.

You'll hear the adage "Dig an ugly hole."

So you wanna dig an ugly hole that has plenty of cavities, crevices, fissures, places for the roots to effectively escape the hole that you've dug, so that they're not bound and get the tendency to get girdled in there.

Alternatively, what my preference is when I'm building a bed is I will actually use something called a broadfork, a garden fork.

You can even use a shovel.

But basically, the idea is to amend the adjacency, right?

The area that surrounds the hole, so that you're not only improving the hole itself where the rose is gonna live, but encouraging it to migrate outwards, and for those roots to also find some comfort and nutrients and water on the outside of that hole.

Short-term, you're gonna get it established quicker, and long term, you're gonna give it a more optimal environment in which to thrive.

So you'll notice when I dump this out of the pot that it doesn't have a real heavy rooting sort of net that has been created around the outside from being in the pot for a long time.

This one is relatively fresh, and so I don't usually try to mess with the roots too much.

I wanna be gentle with this root ball, and maybe coax those roots out a little bit to make sure that they're pointing outward.

If it were a more heavy sort of rooting situation, where I'm just seeing a white web of all kinds of roots, I might massage it a little bit more vigorously and try my best to get those roots separated, so that they are encouraged to move outwards.

But in this case, I'll probably just do a little bit of light sort of massage.

So what I'm doing here is placing it and watching to make sure that I'm not going too deep.

You'll see that a lot of rose growers, especially up north, will advise that you bury what's called the bud union.

That's where a stock and a scion are grafted together.

And up north, it's a little bit more important, because they get a lot colder temperatures, they get winds that can damage the the scion, the upper part of your rose, the rose that you want.

Here in the Sunbelt though, in the southern part of the United States where we are, I don't advise doing.

I like to keep this bud union above ground, whether it's grown on its own roots or it's grafted.

With its own roots, it's a little easier to see, but basically the easiest way to remember this is just try to keep the soil level level with what you got from the nursery.

The soil that I've excavated from the hole is partially native soil.

It's partially acidified cotton burr compost, which I really like, because it has low levels of nutrient, but it also has a little bit of sulfur in there to help buffer the pH.

We have really alkaline soils.

You'll see that I'm gonna just start back filling this hole little by little.

And as I go, I am going to water little by little to help the air pockets in there settle.

What I've got here is just water with a little bit of a root stimulant, an organic one that is a fulvic acid and a humic acid complex.

And this will help sort of get the roots off to a good start.

We don't necessarily fertilize when we're opening up the soil for the first time and planting something.

I like to use these stimulants, these natural things, molasses, fulvic acid, humic acid, seaweed, things that are stimulants, and that will get the soil life up and running, but not necessarily push growth of the plant.

You add nitrogen, especially if it's gonna get cold soon, you can actually get into a situation where you have tender growth that's affected.

I usually try to remind people that you don't really wanna shove this down.

You don't wanna step on that soil and really mash it in there.

You wanna retain whatever porosity you can, so we're careful not to walk on these gardens.

We're careful to make sure that we keep the airspace as open as we can and let the water do the firming for us.

And now we're getting just about to ground level.

You can see that the top of that root ball's now pretty much even with the soil that surrounds it.

I'll do one final watering, kind of get it firmed up one more time, see if any sort of openings happen with the water.

Maybe something sort of collapses in there, and then we just refill that.

I always advise too a healthy layer of mulch, but like with most woody species, you wanna be careful that you're not putting the mulch right up against the plant.

That can sort of encourage some rotting organisms, and you don't want that.

You do want a layer of mulch that's gonna mitigate some of the temperature fluctuations that could happen in the soil, especially in the summer and in the cold, you wanna sort of retain a good level soil temperature, and it'll also suppress weeds, and long-term, it's gonna break down just like any organic material, and provide low levels of nutrients as well.

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

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

(cheerful instrumental music) (cheerful instrumental music continues) (bright flute music)