- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on Central Texas Gardener, cut flower gardener, Laura Brennand, shows how to plant seeds for spring flowers, including those tricky poppies.

At the Carver Museum, garden specialist Harve Franks builds community through raised beds and seasonal fresh food.

Get a pro trick for weed control at urban farm Este Garden, and see why to plant wintertime cover crops.

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

(cheerful music) When Laura Brennand was expecting her first child, she threw some flower seeds and bulbs into a few raised beds.

Their success prompted a newfound plant passion, and cut flower garden consulting business La Otra Flora.

Since fall is the time to plant seeds for spring flowers, get her pro tips to grow for garden wildlife and indoor arrangements.

Get her trick for growing poppies, how she plans for success of blooming, and watch her start seeds for transplanting.

- Hi, I'm Laura Brennand, I am La Otra Flora, I'm a seasonal cut flower gardener, I grow flowers all year, I got into growing cut flowers when actually I was pregnant with my son.

I didn't have a lot of time to be planting and harvesting, so I decided to put some spring bulbs into the ground, and when they came up in February, March, they were just so amazing, and I was so stunned how easy it was to grow these flowers, and I just was hooked and ever since then, all I wanted to do is grow cutting flowers in my garden.

So one of the most important things that I tell my clients is to keep an observation journal.

I think it's definitely beneficial for you to write down dates of when you planted certain seeds, just to document, and also to plan out your garden.

You can make any kind of notes, maybe when something's first started blooming you can write down when it blooms, it gives you a good range of how long that plant took to grow from seed to flowering.

I also keep a calendar that keeps me on track of when I need to put things in the ground or when I need to take things out.

So I like to organize and store my seeds in a box, and I like to organize them by season, so these are my fall planted seeds, so I have some sweet peas, I have some pansies that I'm gonna put out very soon, and on this side I have my warm season.

So I have some sunflowers, some cosmos, and in the front here, I have my wildflower seeds, that I'm gonna plant out very soon, and also some seeds that I've planted out and saved, seeds that I've saved from past seasons.

So now that it's October, it's time to get ready for spring planting.

In this bed, I had some hot peppers, I have some leftover strawberries that I left, and actually behind me is one of my favorite flowering vines, the hyacinth bean vine.

It's such a prolific vine, and it comes back every year.

The flowers are so fragrant and beautiful and actually edible, that I use them in some edible things, salads.

So in this bed, I just cut the peppers down to the surface line, and I didn't wanna disturb the soil too much, but I did add some compost, I sifted it with my hands, I just got it nice and fluffy again, and now I'm gonna plant some Nigella seeds, this is one of my favorite spring flowering flowers.

You wanna look at the back of the packet.

It tells you information on how deep and how far you can plant them, so then Nigella say that you barely cover.

I'm just going to plant a few.

I just use, you can use like a pencil or a chopstick, but you just make it little holes, and I plant them maybe six inches apart, and I plant two or three seeds in each hole here, and then I lightly cover, and pat down, and then I usually water right after.

So October is the best time to plant flowering spring bulbs.

So I have here some Narcissus that I'm gonna plant, this is the Erlicheer variety, extremely fragrant, and just so beautiful.

I also have some Anemone corms, that I'm soaking to rehydrate.

You wanna plant these anytime in October.

I like to pre-sprout them in a plastic tray just to kind of get them a little bit of a head time to grow, and they're super easy, they come up nice and beautiful in the spring.

I also like to start some seeds in trays.

The reason why I like to start in trays is because I like to get a head start on some seeds that I can't grow in the garden yet.

So, and also sometimes when I direct sow some seeds, some of them don't come up, or squirrels dig them up, so I always like to have some backup.

And it's also fun to share some transplants with friends and neighbors.

So what I have here is a seed tray and I have some seeds, I have some sweet peas, and some delphiniums, that I'm gonna start in the trays, I like to use cocoa core as my medium, I feel like it's a little bit more sustainable than peat moss blends, and it actually retains moisture really well.

And what you do is you just, it comes in like a big block and you just kinda soak it with water and loosen it up, and it makes this nice medium, and then you would just fill your trays, and you take your seeds and you'd put one or two in each cell, and you would keep it nice and moist, and, you know, water it every day, every other day, make sure it gets plenty of Sun.

I have a greenhouse, but you can also just put it outside.

Whenever you wanna put them in the ground, they need to be at least a few inches tall, they definitely need to have their second set of true leaves out and set, that's when you can put them in the ground, or if you want to, you can put them in a little bit a larger vessel, so that way they can have more room to grow roots.

So one of my favorite flowers to grow are poppies, and they can be a little tricky to grow.

However, they're really not.

You just need to have a couple of key things ready.

The most important thing you need is your soil preparation, poppies need this super soft, fertile fluffy soil, so you're gonna wanna work your soil to make it nice and fluffy, and the second thing is when to plant it, I usually plant somewhere in November, there's an old gardens tale, that in order to get successful poppies, you need to find the dreariest, rainiest ugliest day in November, and that's when you plant your poppies.

The soil needs to be nice and moist, and the reason is because the poppy seed are so so tiny, and they can get easily washed away or dried out.

So this nice moist soil is gonna be the key to germination.

So whenever you plant, you wanna have your soil ready, and they are super super tiny, I mean, like they look like dust.

So you're gonna wanna just scatter them very lightly on the surface of your site.

And so I like to actually plant on the line of my drip irrigation, so I know that it's gonna be moist, and I can control that moisture.

So I'm not even gonna make a hole, I'm just gonna scatter one or two seeds here, and then get a couple more, and then one, two here and then a couple, and then some more.

And that's all you really need to do.

If it's raining, you definitely wanna keep the soil as moist as you can, every day, it needs to be consistently moist, they're extremely cold hardy, so they can definitely take light frost.

If you want something really beautiful and showy, I recommend the, you know, Lauren's Grape, The Black Swan, these are your opium poppies, your somniferum.

California poppies is also just something really bright and showy, you can put in a garden, very prolific, and one of my favorites is the Amazing Gray, The Mother of Pearl, these are your Shirley poppies, the rhoeas.

These are beautiful, not the best for cutting, if you wanna grow cutting poppies, I definitely recommend your champagne bubbles, your Iceland variety, that's the nudicaule variety.

And they grow really thick, strong stems, and they last a long time in a vase.

One of my favorite reasons why I like growing cutting flowers is because they bring so much beauty to the outdoors, but you can also cut them, and bring them inside and enjoy them.

I really love sharing them with my friends, my neighbors, and I actually sell them on occasion when I have enough in the garden.

If you'd like to follow me on my journey, you can follow me on Instagram at La Otra Flora, I also have a website, laotraflora.com, and it's been really fun, and I love it so much.

- Fall is also the best time to plant native wildflower seeds like Mexican hat.

But what's going on with this wild looking character that bloom for Barbara and Ernie Mansion in Dripping Springs last July?

We checked with extension horticulturist, Daphne Richards, who confirmed that this phenomenon is called fasciation.

Basically it's an abnormal activity of a plant's growing tip that can lead to multiple extra flowers and flattened, misshapen stems or flowers.

Since it may never happen again, it's one for the family photo album.

Late spring is when Laura plants sunflowers to feed pollinators and birds.

With successive plantings, she gets blooms all summer and then plants again in August for October flowers.

From Wills Point in East Texas Stephanie Ellis shared her great looking sunflower that she started off from seed last year.

Along with providing food for pollinators, sunflowers are great summertime cover crops, their deep taproot mines beneficial bacteria, fungi and microbes to bring it to the surface.

And this year, our soil really took a beating once again.

So in fall, we want to plant cover crops to nourish that worn out soil.

That can even be springtime's photo op blue bonnets since they're legumes that fixate nitrogen in the soil.

We can also grow edible cover crops like Daikon radish.

To show us how, let's check in with Lea Scott at urban farm Este Garden.

- I think we all kind of form a relationship with the plants and recognize that they're incredibly generous, but when I think about growing, I ultimately think about growing soil as our main priority.

And so to kind of give back to the soil, we like to plant cover crops.

And so that's a crop that has a specific yield for the soil that we're not actually gonna harvest from.

And so for our purposes, cover crop, it serves a lot of different purposes.

One it helps compete with the weeds, additionally, it helps prevent erosion, it keeps soil in place, which helps with the absorption capacity for water for your raised beds, and for us, we've chosen a couple different cover crops for this season.

One is a crimson clover, and so crimson clover is great for a couple of reasons.

One it's a legume, and so legumes have a symbiotic relationship with Rhizobium, its a bacteria that forms on their nodules, on their roots.

So it does this kind of magical thing through this relationship with this bacteria, that it makes nitrogen that's atmospheric nitrogen available for plants to take up.

So that process is called fixing nitrogen.

And so that's really helpful for our plants, because plants are heavy feeders, they require nitrogen.

Another crop that we're gonna be growing here as a cover crop are Daikon radish, Daikon radish are, one, delicious, so they could be harvested if you chose, but they also are referred to as a tillage radish, they have a really deep taproot, that goes beyond what you would actually harvest.

And so it's mining for nutrients deep in the subsoil, and bringing that up and making it accessible to other plants around it.

And now I rake it in.

It's just a light raking.

(calm music) - Master Gardner and long-term garden educator Harve Franks wants to pass along lessons she learned as a child at her grandparents' farm in the historic St. John Freedman's Colony.

In summer 2021, she joined the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center as a garden specialist.

She and Greg Farrar are framing a former swimming pool with raised bed gardens.

Their goal to teach children and adults how to grow food while bringing together a community to learn the cultural history of African Americans in Austin and beyond.

Museum Curator Carre Adams wanted to restore its engagement as an amphitheater to enjoy music, poetry and exercise classes enriched by flowers, fragrance, and the cycles of growing fresh food.

- Ah.

- Wow.

(laughing in unison) - My name is Harve Franks, and I'm a gardening specialist here at the beautiful Carver Museum.

The Carver Museum is dedicated to teaching the beautiful history of African American culture in Austin, Texas.

We have a genealogy center here, and people can come and study their family history.

One of the programs that we've started here at Carver is we have taken our decommissioned swimming pool that has been vacant for the past 15 years, and we built beautiful garden beds, and it's going to be amphitheater, and a place to enjoy music, poetry, exercise classes, and a gardening environment.

And we want it to be a place where we can bring the people in our community, they can walk around the museum, but also be able to experience horticulture, show kids where food comes from, and that, you know, they can grow things that the parents would've been buying at the grocery store, and it's gonna taste even better than the grocery store, I think.

And I want to show kids that if you can take a tiny seed, and turn it into a giant sunflower, that is truly magic.

I used to garden with my grandparents who were farmers back in the 50s and 60s in Caldwell county, and my grandfather and my grandmother were doing farm to table from the 70s into the 80s.

My grandmother had a cafe on Airport Boulevard called Ruby's Kitchen, and my grandfather and her had a farm, which they still do, they're deceased now, but they had a farm in Dale, Texas, Saint John Colony, which is an original colony, an African American Freedman's colony that was established in 1872.

And that's where I grew up in that community, and I didn't realize that as a child, it would have such an impact on me, and that as an adult I became a master gardener, because I wanted to continue to teach gardening, and that's what I do here at Carver.

I want to teach kids how to take seeds, plant them, and be able to feed themselves and their community.

I remember when I was six or seven-years-old, and I was going to kindergarten here, and we took a walk to our genealogy center, which was the original Carver Museum back in the 60s, and I've never forgot that.

And so now to be back in my community gardening, and I think I can make a difference, and hopefully I'll get some kids that will be the next future gardeners of America, you know, pass it on.

Our curator of this museum is Mr. Carre Adams.

And this has been one of his visions to bring this pool back to life.

And that is how I got to the Carver.

I would not have been able to do this alone, I have a partner, his name is Greg Farrar, he is an excellent master builder, and he came in and he built all the beautiful garden beds, our beautiful arbor, the railings.

I started garden late August, 2021, so it's been about eight months, and I'm about to go from the fall collards and lettuce, and things like that, and plant some corn and squash and different things.

It's a test garden.

It's a garden to give people examples.

Whenever people visit the garden, I encourage them to touch, taste, take vegetables home, when we have kids, we might have 20, 30 kids come for a workshop or to help volunteer, when they help in the garden, I give them bags, we go, we cut vegetables, we wash them, we get them to take it home, so they can go make a salad with what they were able to help grow.

When we have an event, I can make salads, or a beautiful lemonade, that's what I love to do.

I can take a beautiful sunflower arrangement for art exhibit, I wanna have things on site that we can use, that we don't have to purchase.

What I'm very excited about, Greg Farrar, our builder just built about six or seven new beds, and we're going to start a cultural heritage garden, where I'm going to be planting things from Africa, yams, orca, I'm going to do Native American glass corn, and then a tribute to George Washington Carver.

I'm going to be growing peanuts.

My grandfather, the farm that I have now, was a peanut farm.

And I remember picking peanuts, digging them up when I was a kid, but I have not seen a peanut in like 50 years, you know, growing from the ground.

So I cannot wait to do that.

And I want to be able to take my gardening class is gonna teach summer youth gardening here at Carver, and take them out on field trips, and show them what a historic African American farm community is like, show them how to take, you know, seeds, plant a garden, but then also bring it back to the city.

I love container gardening, I love raised bed gardening, if people are not into starting from scratch, and having to do a lot of deep digging, I suggest using some untreated wood, because you don't want any wood that has any chemicals as a border, and I suggest also to get familiarized with the rock yards and dirt yards, you can do it a lot cheaper than bags, and so that's what we did, and I like to use a nice organic soil, and then we came in with compost, I am big on collecting seeds, so as my lettuce starts to bolt, I'm gonna harvest the seeds, my onion seeds, my chives, yesterday, I'm gonna harvest seeds for my oregano.

Anytime we have leftover vegetables, and things from an event, I do try to propagate seeds, and I love to experiment, and see what I can get away with.

I forgot to make mention one of my favorite organizations, Central Texas Mycology, Angel Schatz, she has mushroom spores that they donate to our community in East Austin, and we have started a mushroom installation here, as well as a worm composting installation.

And so in the fall, we're inoculating the mushrooms now, hopefully we're gonna be able to have about five different varieties of culinary mushrooms.

We have Lion's mane, Portobello.

I'm trying to get some morels, if anybody wants to donate some morel spores.

We have a wonderful groups of different volunteers that come and help us, some of the volunteers have been the Carver ambassadors come and help us sometimes, we've had Westlake High School, next month we're going to have AmeriCorps Vistas come visit the garden.

People are interested in taking horticultural classes, just feel free to call the Carver Museum.

One of the most exciting moments was we had a group of teenagers that were coming to volunteer, and not many of them always asked, you know, "What's your experience in gardening?"

and a lot of them had zero experience, but after they came, I put 'em in like some were composting, some were harvesting, some were planting seeds, some were watering.

We had about 20 different kids, I broke 'em into groups of five, and what brought me so much joy is like, I got scissors and we were able to, they were able to go and pick and harvest vegetables, and the herbs and taste the lemon balm and taste the mint, and this one, young teenager had her little bag, and she's like, "It's just so much I can do with this."

And it made me so happy to know that she was gonna take this bag that she was excited about about home to her kitchen, that made my whole summer, that if I made an impact on that one child, that she wants to be that excited about food, that's why I'm here.

- Now, here's a question I get a lot.

Why do we sow spring wildflowers in the fall?

It's all about seed germination.

It depends upon the type of seed, soil temperature, and moisture levels.

Light requirements also differ, some seeds want light and others need darkness.

That's why depth to plant comes in.

So once again, you wanna check the seed package for details.

Sometimes it will also show you what a seedling looks like, so that you don't mistake it for a plant or weed you don't want.

The Wildflower Center and Texas A&M AgriLife also have a resource guide and we'll have that info on Central Texas Gardener's website.

Then in response to the right conditions, seeds will germinate, form a rosette, and flower in the spring.

But those darn weeds take advantage of the right conditions too.

And they will germinate right alongside everybody else, since they don't know that we don't love them.

They've got a job to do, and they go after it with gusto.

It's a hot debate, since one gardener's weed is another one's salad, herbal tea or a bee's flower feast.

But to control them in vegetable beds, let's head back to Este Garden for a simple pro tip.

- One of the perennial challenges for gardening is controlling weeds.

And here at Este, we have several tools in our toolkit for that.

One of our favorites is the scuffle hoe or stirrup hoe, it goes by many names, but essentially the tool has a blade on the base.

They actually run underneath the soil, and cut weeds at their roots.

So it's a really effective tool for getting weeds out specifically at their thread stage, but beyond as well, we've found, particularly when soil conditions are right.

So another great tool that we love for weed control is our hand tiller.

So this one is helpful for weeds that are further established, or maybe a little more aggressive, and so the way we use it is you kind of stand over it, and then use your core to turn, and you actually are loosening up the roots at the base.

So for us, we really struggle with grasses that work their way into our beds, and so things that have really aggressive roots need a little bit more of a aggressive tool.

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

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