- Howdy.

I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," let's work with weather challenges.

Lori Najvar and Glen Chapell restored an eroding slope guided by designer Leah Churner.

Fall's primetime for planning, so Kirk Austin from the Natural Gardener picks resilient options to establish now.

Daphne answers your questions and Sonia Koschoreck from the Monarch Sanctuary Project preps milkweed seeds.

So let's get growing right here, right now - [Narrator] "Central Texas Gardener" is made possible by the generous support from Lisa & Desi Rhoden, thank you.

(upbeat instrumental music) (birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) (birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) (birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) - When Lori Najvar and Glen Chapell watched their slope erode and gully washers, designer Leah Churner stepped in.

(upbeat instrumental music) - There is something to say about Central Texas with the less formal approach gardens.

I think is a lot more interesting 'cause you really do experience how they adapt to whether when I married Glen, he wanted a place with the view, and so we got the view, we got the dramatic weather 'cause we live in Central Texas, and Glen got to build his house that he wanted to build.

- [Glen] This is challenging because there's a cliff right there and there's two live oaks right there.

We have a very small building area.

So this house is sort of shoehorned in.

- [Lori] The pandemic hit, and he created the structure to the yard.

- [Glen] I built the boardwalk and I put the pond in.

- [Lori] The digging of the pond became a free gym membership because all the neighbors would come and dig.

It was a big hole to dig.

What's the diameter of the pond?

- Oh, it's seven feet by a little over two feet deep.

- So we made it deeper so that the raccoons hopefully would not, you know, have a feast, but we had no idea the ecosystem that would just appear outta nowhere.

Where we've had frog choruses doing their mating calls and we've had leopard frogs.

- And I even did some design work for planting beds and areas for sculpture, and a place for some grass for the dog to sleep.

But I realized that what I was doing was architectural, and rectangular, and geometric rather.

I started worrying it wasn't gonna be Lori's yard, and I wanted it to be a Lori and Glen yard, not just a Glen's yard.

Barton Creek's our backyard, and so I think we both love nature and love the creek so much that we wanted it to feel more like that instead of like a sculptured formal yard.

So that's where we found Leah, who works really organically.

- [Lori] When Leah came on board, she noticed that we have water that's diverted from the back of the house that goes beneath the house, and it pours out into the yard.

And she was the first person that thought about a dry creek.

The dry creek adds this other element, when those storms come through, it's awesome.

- In addition to, you know, building the dry creek we also added some terracing with eastern cedar logs.

They really helped to stabilize the slope because they're very, very slow to disintegrate.

Those are down below the pond and kind of all over the place to prevent more runoff.

There was erosion because this is built on a steep cliff.

The soil is pretty heavy clay, it's a mix of clay and rock, and it's something that I see a lot kind of near creekside properties in Austin where if you're up slope from a creek, that will often be a weird kind of soil that is a mix of really, really heavy gumbo and limestone all mixed together.

So it can be kind of tough to dig.

But the good news is we had an unlimited number of rocks to use to build a dry creek bed, and edging, and everything like that.

(upbeat instrumental music) - There's all these animals that show up and putting new plants in can be a struggle because you want them to establish.

The armadillos can come and just pull them up.

So we place some of those rocks strategically around the plant so that they won't come and dig them up.

But we do have a dog named Grover that puts an armadillo outfit on sometimes and we've discovered he or the neighbor's dogs will also pull 'em up.

So the rocks have been really helpful to get the plants established.

- [Leah] So what we did was we kind of mapped out visually where we wanted to have focal points.

But there was a beautiful view that we wanna emphasize.

In another spot, there was some houses down the hill that we kind of wanted to screen off.

So we were thinking of the vantage point viewed from inside the house.

His office looks out into the garden, and their living room looks out into the garden.

So, this yard is their backyard, but it's really their primary focal point from inside the house.

Glenn and Lori had the boardwalk in place.

They had the pond in place, but they really needed to soften the lines of the boardwalk 'cause it had some very hard edges.

And so we thought about, you know, how can we soften these hard lines and these right angles with some plants.

- I'd like for it to be more like a boardwalk in a natural environment that's there to preserve the planted areas around it.

- The light here is, it's dappled shade, for the most part, and on this side of the garden it's pretty heavy shade actually.

And so we just incorporated a bunch of plants that can handle some clay soil and also that can handle the dappled shade, which is so many native plants here.

You've got a lot of mist flowers.

We wanted to create a good balance of the warm season and the cool season.

So we wanted to have plenty of things that would be evergreen or at least summer dormant, and growing in the winter, like a good balance of those things.

There's a bunch of bulbs.

It was a fun idea to plant the Grecian pattern plant next to the Hoja santa because the Grecian pattern plant it goes dormant during the summer, and the Hoja santa goes dormant during the winter.

We brought in some native ground covers like heartleaf skullcap, different kinds of sedges, and yarrow, and those are all really great for year-round interest.

(rattling) We have some, some blooming perennials that bloom in the spring and the fall for, you know, to give some good food for the butterflies, and bees, and everybody.

(upbeat instrumental music) - [Lori] And I've noticed that in so many people's yards they're starting to have like more community spaces out in their yard.

And so this provides a really nice space to visit.

- Working with clay soil, you can amend it and you can do a lot if you keep adding compost, but there are some plants that are just never gonna do well in clay soil.

So you need to accept those limitations.

And so certain things like Blackfoot daisies, four-nerve daisies, rosemary, lavender are just not gonna do well in the ground here.

So if you want those, maybe put them in a pot.

But it's surprising how many of the native plants that we have really just do fine in the clay soil.

- I feel like mountain laurels, they are such a beautiful, you know, tree plant for this area.

And I always love watching the seeds, how they transform.

And so I started collecting mountain loyal seeds.

They sponge, you know, placing those seeds in something that's different, a different kind of vessel where that color shows up.

- The teapot was my idea.

The teapot drips into the bird bath.

It looks like it's dripping on its own, like a magic teapot.

It's sort of a fun personality profile 'cause people walk up here and they'll look at it.

Every now and then somebody will go, "Well, how do you get up there to refill it?"

It goes back to a hose spigot that's turned down really low.

This is at least the third house in a row I've had an outdoor shower.

They're really a pleasure to use.

I love being out there to watch the moon rise.

- [Lori] And we have little frogs that'll serenade at night.

- Cliff chirping frogs.

- Yeah.

The canyon wrens just love scaling that limestone that's behind the house.

And I've seen generations of wrens where they're just teaching their little babies to fly around.

- The staghorn ferns, you know I think they're a living sculpture, I think of myself as an art collector with them.

The first one I saw was in a, you know, public botanical gardens years and years ago, and I just thought it was the most beautiful thing.

Really you need a greenhouse.

They gotta be protected in the winter.

They need a fair amount of light.

A lot of the easier varieties you could grow outside but you gotta deal with it in the winter.

In my case, they had the retaining wall there, which was required to hold the cliff back.

And so originally it was a screen porch, and then I realized I could put up plastic panels, and I realized this really is a greenhouse.

- There's another thing about two artists coming from different perspectives in our homestead.

And so we kind of merged some of the collections that I do and his structure that he provides, it's kind of fun.

- This year has been one for the record books.

But you know what, a lot of our plants have been through this sort of disturbance before.

Today, Kirk Austin from the Natural Gardener picks resilient options to establish now.

Hey Kirk, great to see you.

- Thank you, John Hart.

- Congratulations, I believe it's somebody's birthday, the 30th anniversary of the Natural Gardener.

- It is our 30th year.

And in celebration of that what we've decided to do this year is to plant 30 trees, - Wow.

- on our property.

- Really.

- We've had so much damage during the last two big freeze events that we've had in the last three years.

And we had started to build some shade structures but we figured that the best shade structure is a tree.

(John Hart laughs) And so we're trying to replace a lot of those that we've lost over the years.

- We have a lot of viewers that ask, "What in the world can I grow here?"

Especially, you know, newcomers to the area.

And it's already a challenging environment to grow stuff, but now we're getting these freezes and the extreme heat.

So let's walk through a couple of these and sort of the conditions because you know, y'all are the experts.

What I love about the Natural Gardener is that you really understand cultivating a beautiful landscape.

So let's go through a few of these.

Why don't we start with the singular grass we've got up here.

- So that is maiden grass called, this particular one is called Adagio.

And it's known for the little plumes that it has - Mm-hmm.

- that start about midsummer, but then they last all through the fall.

We do recommend cutting it back every winter, but it has a really good seasonal interest.

And this particular one has a little white variation right up the spine of the long leaf there.

- [John Hart] What types of soil conditions would you say these work in?

- [Kirk] They are very forgiving.

- Forgiving, all right.

- If you're- (chuckles) We do always recommend a little bit of compost, some soil conditioner, things like that are always beneficial, you know, to give plants a little bit of a headstart.

But, they almost all of the native grasses and certainly the miscanthus will tolerate our lousy alkaline soil here in Central Texas.

- Okay, and then and light, will it tolerate some shade?

A little shade.

A lot of shade.

- As much sun as possible.

- As much sun as possible.

- Uh-huh.

- Okay.

We got a sun lover here.

- Yeah, uh-huh.

- Okay.

And then what about watering?

That's always a chief concern for people.

- You know, the first year you're gonna wanna take care of it a little bit.

You don't have to water it every day, but, you know a nice watering once a week, or so wouldn't be a bad thing.

What we always recommend is deeper watering with less frequency.

- Sure.

- Mm-hmm.

- Okay.

And then this is an adapted plant, correct?

- It is not native.

- Right.

- [Kirk] But there are some natives out there that we do recommend, like Gulf Coast muhly.

- Sure.

- [Kirk] Big muhly, Lindheimer muhly.

Those are all good.

- Well, let's move to some of the shrubs we've got here.

So we've got, this looks like yellow bells, but am I fooled here?

- [Kirk] (laughs) Well, it is a type of yellow bells.

That's in the Tacoma stans is the broad category for all of them.

This particular one is a variant called Lydia that has a little bit more bright bloom to it, but it's a slightly more compact plant.

- Okay.

- And, but it's kind of known for being early to start and late to finish on the flowering.

- And then again the soil's pretty, pretty carefree?

- Pretty forgiving, this will grow in the shade but it won't bloom as well.

- Okay.

- So it's another sun lover.

- And then what about butterflies or bees, a lot of pollinators.

- [Kirk] This is a good one for bumblebees.

- Ah-hah.

- Yeah - I like it.

- Yeah - [John Hart] I love it.

Well, let's move to the salvia here.

This looks like a really beautiful plant that you've brought.

- Most of our salvias were real winners.

This particular one is a Mexican bush sage, Salvia leucantha.

- Okay, yeah.

- But there were some other salvias that are certainly as good as that.

The Salvia farinaceas, the mealy blue sages.

The Mexican bush sage really needs to be in full sun, but the mealy blue sages will tolerate some shade.

And then there's the Salvia guaraniticas.

- Right.

- The majestic sages will tolerate a lot of shade.

Again, with most perennials, most blooming perennials you're gonna want to cut 'em back in the winter, but they bounce back and they'll be performing for you for this Mexican bush sage it blooms a little bit in the spring, but then it goes crazy in the fall.

- Do you?

- And you'll start seeing them all around town, - That's great.

- you know, from, you know, September through Thanksgiving.

- [John Hart] And I know the salvia has definitely hosts a lot of pollinators on those things.

- [Kirk] They do.

We have them thick in our butterfly garden.

- Okay.

- The butterflies like them.

Even the hummingbirds.

That's a really good plant.

- Okay, what about this hibiscus here?

- So this is in the Rose of Sharon Althea hibiscus syriacus family.

This one is relatively new to the industry.

It's called Purple Pillar, and as evidenced by the name it's more columnar.

- Mm-hmm.

- It grows about four feet wide by about eight to 10 feet tall.

- Okay.

- We do not cut it back.

We give it a little bit of a shape in the wintertime.

- Right.

- But we had zero damage with it in either of the freezes and then it's been a real workhorse in the summertime.

Very tolerant of most soils.

The hummingbirds really like it, and it starts blooming about Mother's Day, and never stops until, - Wow.

- [Kirk] until almost Christmas.

- You've got kidneywood, which is one of my favorites, and is wonderful on, you know, rocky dry soils where you might be having a challenge getting stuff to grow.

I know you need full sun, but I mean these flowers are some of the most fragrant to me.

- It has a wonderful honey scent to the flower, and the bees are totally enamored by it.

- Crazy.

(laughs) - [Kirk] This will be covered in bees.

- Yeah.

- And that you can hear the bees - Yes.

- from a few feet away.

It is very tolerant of rocky soil.

Once you plant it, you really don't have to do much to it.

If we get into this period, you know, we've got, you know, a 100 days of a 100-degree weather and no rain.

- Right.

- Give it a little help.

- Yeah.

- But it's still gonna survive.

- Yeah, that's - It's just not gonna thrive.

- definitely a survivor.

And then really quickly, these last two.

I know some people really love their cacti and their agaves.

You've got two species here, the reginae and the ovatifolia.

What about these?

- So what we like about both of these is that a lot of people lost many of their agaves in the various freezes that we had.

These were two real survivors.

The smaller, the Queen Victoria, has a wonderful variation to it.

It's great for smaller gardens.

It really never gets much bigger than you know about a beach ball.

And, you know, being an agave doesn't require a whole lot of water.

- [John Hart] Yeah.

(chuckles) - Our real winner though is this Whales Tongue agave, the Agave ovatifolia.

So many people had some problems with the agave Americana.

- Yes.

- We had about a 50/50, you know, some of them made it, some of them didn't.

All of the Whales Tongue agaves that we had on property had almost no damage at all.

There was some of them had a little bit of tissue damage and some of the, the leaves got a little bit wavy.

But the very next spring, all of the new growth was perfect and we're very, very happy with it.

- Kirk, I wanna thank you so much for coming by.

I love the Natural Gardener.

Happy birthday.

(Kirk chuckles) I'm excited about the trees, and I just wanna thank you again for coming on and speaking with our guests.

Now let's check in with Daphne Richards.

(uplifting instrumental music) - Thanks, John Hart.

Augie always loves CTG day.

Our question this week is, what's the difference between meteorological and astronomical winter?

Astronomical seasons are based on Earth's position relative to the Sun.

Think summer and winter solstice and spring and autumn equinox dates, and meteorological seasons are based on weather cycles.

We generally think of winter as a cold time of year, but we could get an early or late cold front well outside of astronomical winter.

Also confusing might be the use of the terms frost, freeze, and hard freeze.

Frost is a term generally used to convey that temperatures got cold enough for dew to briefly freeze.

While a freeze conveys a longer period of time around the freezing mark of 32 degrees.

And we use the term hard freeze to convey that temperatures were several degrees below freezing for a long enough period of time to inflict damage.

Nuances of just a few degrees can make a lot of difference in the landscape.

We also talk about a plant's hardiness, which is how we can convey information on how much cold a plant can take and still survive.

You'll often see a plant's hardiness zone listed on its label, and here in Central Texas we are listed as zone eight.

And container plants are more susceptible to freezing temperatures because their roots are more exposed to the cold air circulating around the container.

So if you can't move your citrus or other cold tinter plants outta the cold, you'll want to protect them with floating row cover.

Next, Jo Ann Printy has another great question.

She's got a wooden planter that the builder lined with metal many years ago, drilling in drainage holes.

The past few years, she's used it to store old garden tools and a bit of rust has formed.

Can she use it for herbs again?

Yes, to assist with drainage, I'd suggest lining the bottom with about an inch of pea gravel before adding potting soil.

We'd love to hear from you.

Click on centraltexasgardener.org to suggest your stories, pictures and videos.

- What's the secret to germinating milkweed seeds?

Sonia Koschoreck from the Monarch Sanctuary Project shows us how.

(upbeat instrumental music) (birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) - Hi, there we are here with the Monarch Sanctuary Project and our mascot Lexy, short for Danaus Plexippus, which is Latin for monarch caterpillar.

We are here today to teach you a little bit about germinating Texas native milkweeds.

Those monarchs, no matter which way you cut it, whether they're going north or south, they have to come through the Texas funnel is what we call it.

So I feel like as Texans it is our responsibility to offer those monarchs what they need to finish their migration.

Whether that be native milkweeds, nectars, sun shelter, no pesticides.

When we think about germinating milkweeds, we think about what happens naturally in nature, right, Lexi?

(Sonia laughs) So when the seed pods open up, the seeds fall to the ground, and they're exposed to rains, winds, colder temps, animals stomping on them.

And these natural processes are basically what we consider scarification and cold stratification.

In order to germinate our milkweed seedlings here are the materials you'll need to get started.

Today we're gonna use a green milkweed, common name, green milkweed, Latin name Asclepius viridis.

Now green milkweed specifically does require a scarification process, which as we mentioned is like when animals will stomp on the seeds to break down the outer casing of the seed.

So I'm gonna show you how to scarify your seeds.

So we're gonna go ahead and take a jar of a little bit of sand.

And I have already included the green milkweed seeds in this jar, and these have already been pre shaken, so I'm not gonna go for like a rockstar workout here.

But all the seeds are shaken up.

From here, you'll go ahead and pour your seeds into a strainer over a container to catch the seeds.

Shake it out, sift it out, and all you're left with is the seeds.

We're gonna wanna soak our milkweed seeds for six to eight hours all the way up to overnight.

The rest of the materials for the cold stratification are equal parts Perlite and Vermiculite.

Perlite will help with the aeration.

Vermiculite is gonna help a little bit with maintaining the moisture.

So we take a a Ziploc baggie, make sure it's got a nice little zip on it.

And also make sure you label the baggie with what species of milkweed you're using and what date you started your process.

We are going to cold stratify our seeds in the refrigerator for four to six weeks.

We're gonna go ahead and pour our equal parts in Perlite, voila.

Vermiculite.

(seed rustling) Voila, and then we will add our pre-soaked seeds into the mix.

We're gonna want the mixture to be moist but not soggy.

So what we'll do is we'll add a little bit of water in there.

We'll kind of smoosh it around in there.

And then we'll take a look at the corners and see if there's water pooling in the corners of our baggies.

And then you're gonna throw this mixture into the refrigerator for four to six weeks.

In order for these seeds to germinate, they're gonna need to be between 65 and 80 degrees under bright indirect light.

We use grow lights.

We also use a seedling heat mat.

This is a 10 by 20 seedling heat mat.

Pretty soon you'll start seeing germination from the seeds.

So the little roots will come out of one end of the seed.

I like to use a clear shallow container, so that I can see what's happening with the root development on the side.

And my germination container has ventilation holes.

You can just poke holes into a container, if you don't have one with fancy little knob here.

On the bottom I have placed a layer of well draining soil mixture.

And then we also put a handful of mycorrhizal powder in there.

Mycorrhizal powder is a type of fungi that helps develop a connection, like a wheeler and dealer of nutrients with the milkweed taproot systems.

Then we're going to (seeds rustling) spread out our four-to-six week refrigerated cold stratification scarified mixture.

(seeds rustling) We'll finish this off with a light dusting of the same, (container thudding) germination mixture, just enough to cover the seeds.

(upbeat instrumental music) ♪ Yeah ♪ (upbeat instrumental music) Once you start to see the first leaves pop out, those aren't actually your true leaves.

You're gonna wait for the second set of leaves to come out, and that's what we call our true leaves.

Once your true leaves have developed, get your four inch pot container ready to go.

I like to use a chopstick for my transplanting.

So what I do is I put a nice hole in my four-inch pot, and then once my seedling is ready, I will lift delicately the root systems out and gently transplant it into the four-inch pot.

Cover those little root babies up, and these plants will be ready to transplant in the spring or fall.

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

Until next time, remember, adopt the pace of nature.

Her secret is patience.

(birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) (birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) (birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) (birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) (birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) (birds chirping) (upbeat instrumental music) - [Narrator] Central Texas gardener is made possible by the generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden, thank you.

(uplifting instrumental music)