Central Texas Gardener

- Howdy.

I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," meet a few creative problem solvers.

On tour, when stormwater runoff plagued a family's home, they plunged into a whimsical, colorful makeover.

And since every good design starts underground, soil health practitioner Andie Marsh explores basic principles that apply to any garden.

Wizzie Brown answers your insect questions, and Amber de la Rosa connects the community through plant swaps.

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

- [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardener" is made possible by the generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - When stormwater runoff plagued a family's home, they plunged into a whimsical, colorful makeover.

- One of the sayings here in Bouldin Creek that I don't hear a lot anymore was you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a local artist.

And that's becoming less and less true all the time as people are being driven out of Austin who are artistic and creative.

So I wanted to make an amazing house, but I also wanted to promote all these people so that they could stay here.

Hi, my name is Joey Trevino.

I bought this house a couple of years ago.

I moved in the day before Snowpocalypse, and it was quite an adventure.

I only had a mattress and nothing else in the house.

I thought I had escaped the snow snowpocalypse, but no, when I walked into my bedroom on midnight on Friday, I walked into a pool of water.

I spent the next eight months of my life fighting against irrigation problems in this house.

And at the same time, I was starting to remodel it because it was kind of a boring, square, beige house, and that's not my style at all.

And then little by little, I started coming up with ideas for what I wanted for the house, and luckily I had some amazing people to really help me with it.

I had multiple goals with it, but first of all, it was to keep Austin weird and to promote the local artists.

The other reason I created the house is I got four grandkids, little ones.

They're like babies.

I want them to wake up every morning and go, "Why aren't we at Papa Joey's house?"

(laughs) I wanted it to be whimsical for them.

My overall brain was Nelson Rockwood.

He's my general contractor that did the house.

I don't know many general contractors that would have been okay with turning my house into a very large octopus.

I've always been entranced with mermaids, you know?

They're just very whimsical creatures.

I thought it would be wonderful to have one.

Rain Lily Design came in, and they did all of the landscaping.

I worked with Heidi Choate extensively to kind of figure it all out.

- Some of the main challenges that we had working on this project was just really the shape of the lot, just being really narrow.

And especially since his house is down slope, it had taken on a lot of water, so just working with the grade and also coming up with a smart drainage plan while not compromising the design.

His vision was he just really wanted this beautiful water feature.

We worked with Dan Johanson with Focal Point Water Features, and they created this beautiful, natural-looking water feature in the front yard, sort of a metaphor for all of the issues that Joey was experiencing with all of the water runoff.

That was sort of our inspiration for creating a natural landscape just around that space.

- There's something calming about the water.

I can just sit here and listen to my water feature all day long, and I have people that come over and do the same.

(laughs) It's almost like looking at a fireplace, you know?

You just kind of get drawn into it.

I enjoy their water feature so much that I was like, "Well, I gotta do more of that."

(laughs) So we reached back out to them and said, "I need another one in the back."

And I was very careful, too, about the use of water.

So one of the things we did is we decided to capture the water that falls on my house.

So all the rain gutters in the house feed into a water tank that I'm sitting on top of right now.

There's a water tank that holds 3,750 gallons of water.

So anytime it rains, water goes into the tank, and then the tank feeds all the water features and the landscape as well.

- So in terms of picking the plants for this landscaping, I really didn't wanna pick anything that would compete with all of the other elements that are going on.

I mean, you have this beautiful mermaid sculpture and a octopus mural that demands your attention, so I didn't want anything that would take away your focus from those elements.

My focus was picking a lot of different textures, soothing different shades of green and pops of color.

Joey really wanted a weeping willow.

He loves that look.

And as magical as they are, they don't really love our climate.

So anytime I can promote our native plants, even something as humble as our honey mesquite, we just felt like that was a good choice.

And now it's really starting to mature and give that look that we want, just kind of cascading over the water feature.

It looks really whimsical and exactly like what we wanted.

This plant palette had a lot of leafy textures with the different varieties of sedges and different ferns, but we also wanted to attract pollinators, so for that, we used Gregg's mistflower, dwarf Katie Ruellia.

We have different varieties of salvias, maybe three different varieties of salvias, or four, wisteria, a Texas variety.

My favorite ground cover is frogfruit, which it just spreads really profusely, and it also blooms like crazy, so you'll get lots of bees for that one.

We wanted to give him something that will continue to thrive with very little maintenance.

Really, you can just ignore them, and they're gonna look great because they're suited for our climate and native, they're used to our difficult summers and our increasingly difficult winters.

- We did such a wonderful job with, like, the landscaping and the water feature out front, we really wanted to do something for the entrance.

We covered it over the top, and over time, there'll be plants growing down, and then you'll have kind of plants flowing, and then we put a bunch of nautical baubles in there at different kind of heights to kind of highlight it.

And so the idea over time is that the vines kind of grow in over the baubles that you'll be kind of walking almost into a garden as you kind of come into the house, because part of what I'm trying to do is, you know, get rid of those boundaries.

- From the beginning, Joey just expressed wanting a design starting from the inside of his house, transitioning out into the yard, blurring the borders and everything, making it just everything just kind of crosses over into another space seamlessly.

In terms of the plant palette, it is a little bit different here in the backyard.

We do get some more dappled light.

Our approach to landscaping is just trying to invite nature back into the space, creating a sustainable landscaping and environment that not only you can enjoy, but also all of the other native animals that live in the area as well.

We were trying to kind of create these vignettes throughout the yard, focal points for different areas where you're seated, so everything has something, some interesting feature that you can enjoy in that space.

- The Mother Nature sculpture over there, it's an amazing piece of sculpture.

That was created by Stuart Simpson.

He's with Austin Carving up north of town.

That started out as two tons of Austin limestone, Central Texas limestone brought just from here in three different segments.

He spent eight months of his life carving it.

- [Heidi] In this area, we have some soft leaf yucca, and that's one of my favorite evergreens to use as it will add structure to the garden.

And we also have crystals like Brazilian quartz and Moroccan geodes.

- I went with Heidi out to Nature's Treasures off of 35.

I went around there like a kid in a candy store, just picking out crystals everywhere.

And one of the things I wanted was one big, giant crystal, which is prominently featured in the lower water feature.

I really took guidance from Rain Lily on the actual placement for all the crystals.

When we bought the house, my wife recognized that one of the trees in our backyard was dead.

We had a company come out and take the tree down.

Well, what we were left with was a ball root that weighed about a ton.

And finally, one day, Nelson Rockwood, my general contractor, turned to me and is like, "What if we get one of those guys that takes a chainsaw and turns stuff into, like, a chair or a bench?"

And I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's what we should do."

And he went off and found this guy named Wade, and then he put a gorgeous aqua resin on top of it, turned it basically into a loveseat for my wife and I.

So in the evenings, my wife and I will come out here and sit on that gorgeous cutout of a ball root nobody knew what to do with and have a nice glass of wine and enjoy our creek.

So it was a wonderful collaboration.

For me, my favorite part is working with all these artists.

These people are amazing.

There are so many artists in this town, craftspeople, landscapers.

It's astonishing, and we should be celebrating those people.

- Every good garden design starts with the soil.

So today, let's go underground with soil health practitioner Andie Marsh to explore basic principles that apply to any garden.

Andie, welcome to the "Central Texas Gardener."

- Hi.

Thank you so much for having me.

- Well, it's wonderful to have you here because we're gonna be talking about something that I know you really love.

It's something that's so important to garden health, the soil.

So what's your background, and what is a soil health practitioner?

- (laughs) Great question.

I've been obsessed with soil microbes in particular since taking a course in 2012 in my undergrad, and I've been trying to figure out a way to be a soil health practitioner professionally since then, and what that means to me today is that I have a microscope practice.

So through my business, Rhizos, I evaluate soils and biological amendments like compost with a microscope to see what is or is not living in there, and that insight informs land stewards on how to restore their soil health.

- When we talk about soil, what really are we talking about?

- When I talk about soil, I'm talking about the life in it.

So, you know, just like you and I have a microbiome, all those microbes that live on our skin and in our guts, plants evolved with microbial partners that provide them nutrients and resistance to pests and pathogens.

So that is where soil health comes into the mix is restoring those ancient partnerships between microorganisms and plants so that the plants have what they need in terms of nutrients and pest resistance and improved soil structure.

- So you're a certified lab technician, let me get this right, through Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Food Web.

What is that program?

- Yeah, so Dr. Elaine Ingham is one of the world's foremost soil biologists.

And in her over four decades of research, we've come to learn a lot about the soil food web and how it serves plants and how it improves the health of our landscapes.

And she stepped outside of academia to create an online program to train people like me who have a huge interest in this field but aren't necessarily motivated by research but more so motivated by applying the science in the field.

- It's such a universe in the soil.

- [Andie] Mm-hmm.

- We know a lot, but we don't even know nearly all of what's growing down there and what those relationships are.

Is that correct?

- Right, there's a quote saying that we know more about the cosmos than we do about the soil underfoot.

And while that's true, we also are living in a time where we do know enough to be farming and gardening differently.

- Right.

- So that's really important is the discoveries that Dr. Elaine Ingham and others have made, we can start applying to our soils, whether that's a home garden or at scale in farming.

- Well, let's go into a little bit more detail about some of these critters that are down in the soil.

So, you know, we talk about fungi, we talk about bacteria or even protozoa.

What are these things, and what are they doing?

- Mm-hmm, such a good question.

Bacteria are basically the first what we call a trophic level of the microbiome.

And so, to give you an example, bacteria will adhere themselves to those silt, sand, and clay particles so as not to wash away in a rainstorm, so they'll exude a little bit of a glue and stick themselves to one of those minerals.

And then you have fungi... That there, the bacteria with a silt molecule, is considered a microaggregate.

And then a fungi will come in with its long filaments and bundle a bunch of those microaggregates together to make a macroaggregate, and this is what soil structure is.

So even though I'm using some technical terms like aggregates, that's really how we get pore space in the root zone, which is really important to the health of our plants and also the resilience of our landscapes.

That's how water will infiltrate into our soils and become cleaner as it does so.

- Something that I see a lot out in the field, though, is the soil compaction is such a big deal, and you're talking about these pore spaces where, you know, a lot of people think that they just need to keep adding water or something like that.

But is it true that if you really look at the healthy soil, almost 45, 50% of it should be void space, correct?

- Right.

Right, right.

So, you know, with clay platelets that tend to stack one on top of the other, the moment you start getting biology in there, these microbes, it starts creating that pore space which creates habitat for other organisms like earthworms and other beneficial soil life.

And so that's ultimately what we're trying to do when we're taking a biological approach to soil health.

- Let's talk about a scenario where, you know, a lot of people, they buy their home, they're gonna start gardening, but they're having issues.

And soil is the foundation of the garden, so what are some of the common issues that create really poor soil health?

- Well, in the case of building a home, or even a home that was built a long time ago but never really remediated in a way, what's happening there is the disturbance of excavation, we lose a lot of our top soil, so we lose that structure, and we're essentially trying to grow now on subsoil, which lacks a lot of soil life and lacks the kind of structure that you'd find in a more spongy topsoil layer.

So it kind of becomes our job, as the steward of that land, even if it's just this small garden plot, to introduce these practices that will reestablish that topsoil layer.

- But that isn't as simple as just going out and buying a bag of, you know, Miracle-Gro or what's labeled as topsoil, right?

I mean, what is a healthy soil?

What do we need to do to really address some of those issues?

- Right, so I always turn to the soil health principles, so if it's all right, I'll list them for you.

- What are those?

Please, please.

- Yeah.

So the first being minimize disturbance.

- [John] Okay.

- The second, we want to keep soil covered, right?

And the third being having a living root or maximizing photosynthesis.

- [John] Okay.

- We also want to increase biodiversity on the land, livestock integration, which we can get more into, and then the last one being context.

And so context is really important because how a golf, you know, turf manager might accomplish all of those five principles is going to be really different than a home gardener or a farmer, right?

- Sure.

Let's talk about one of those principles.

So you talked about coverage and all that, but biodiversity, what is that, and why would that be important?

- Right, so similar to above-ground ecosystems, we want to have a mix of predator and prey species because that's what allows an ecosystem to be really resilient and dynamic.

So the same thing is occurring below ground.

We actually have predator and prey species.

They just happen to be on a microscopic level.

- [John] Right.

- And so this is what I study with the microscope are those kinds of relationships that are happening below ground, and encouraging more biodiversity below ground through things like compost application, or even just adding more biodiversity in your plantings can have an effect on the biodiversity below ground.

It's kind of that so above, so below.

- So what's growing above could be an indicator of what's going on down below.

- Sure, yes.

- Or even vice versa.

- Right.

If you could do one thing to really help soils, seems like compost is a really good thing, but there's some stipulations to that.

Let's discuss compost a little bit.

- Yeah, my take on compost is that because this information about soil biology is relatively a new understanding, we don't yet have the language to really discuss compost and all of the different biological qualities.

- [John] Mm-hmm.

- So what I will say is that compost does vary quite a bit in its biological quality, like, what is living in it.

- [John] Right.

- And I always encourage people to start a composting practice at home because the more I look at these composts under the microscope, the more I'm realizing backyard composts tend to be a lot more biodiverse than something you can purchase from a store.

- But that's usually because now it's become an industry practice, and there's different ways, and I wish we could talk for 30 more minutes about this.

But really, you know, it sounds like just the old-fashioned way of making compost is really gonna get you your best product.

Is that correct?

- That's right.

And, you know, the more biodiverse, or, I'm sorry, the more diverse inputs you have into a compost pile, the more biodiversity that will result in.

- Before we go, I wanted to reference, so you've got a wonderful Substack.

Can you tell us a little bit about that as well?

- Yeah.

Yeah, thanks.

So my Substack is called Soil is Sexy.

It's this fun corner of the internet where I've been creating content for small farmers and gardeners as a way to support that community because a lot of these consulting services are really only being hired by large businesses.

And so I've created a newsletter, and we provide practical guides but also philosophical discussions about our connection with land.

So all of that's free to subscribe through a platform called Substack.

- Well, that's wonderful.

Andie, thank you so much for coming in.

Love talking about soil.

Thank you so much for all your work that you do.

And now we're gonna talk about some more critters with entomologist Wizzie Brown.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Wizzie Brown, entomologist with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, and today I'm going to talk about aphids and why they may not be so bad in your garden.

I know this is a tough sell, but there are many beneficial insects that rely on aphids as a food source, so if you have zero aphids in your landscape, then there will be no food available for these beneficials.

The beneficial insects are things such as ladybug larvae, green lacewing larvae, syrphid fly larvae, and also certain parasitoids.

Parasitoids are tiny wasps that lay their eggs in other insects, in this case, aphids.

And when eggs hatch, they consume the infested insect from the inside.

Parasitized aphids, also known as aphid mummies, look like aphids but are usually brownish in color and puffy looking.

Once the fully developed wasp emerges from its aphid host, you can still see the left-behind aphid exoskeleton with a tiny circular hole in it where the wasp emerged.

Ladybug larvae come in a variety of sizes depending on species and instar but max out at around a quarter of an inch in length.

Ladybug larvae look similar to tiny alligators in shape and are often blackish-gray in color with orangish-red markings.

There are some ladybug larvae that are white and fluffy looking, making them similar in appearance to mealybugs, which are a plant-feeding insect.

To definitively tell if you have a mealybug or a ladybug larvae, you'll look at the mouth parts.

Mealybugs have soda straw-type mouth parts while ladybug larvae have mandibles or chewing mouth parts.

Since not everyone is keen on inspecting bugs that much, you can use the rule of thumb that predators don't tend to hang out with other predators and typically move quickly.

So if you see a few sporadically placed mealybugs, they're most likely going to be ladybug larvae called mealybug destroyers.

Likewise, if you see clusters of white, oval, wingless insects, those are most likely going to be mealy bugs since they will often cluster in groups for protection.

Lacewing larvae are brown to tan in color, tapered at both ends, and have sickle-shaped mouth parts that they use to stab into prey.

They are quick moving and may also bite if handled.

Lacewing larvae feed on aphids and other small, soft-bodied insects along with insect eggs.

Syrphid fly larvae, also known as hover fly or flower fly larvae, have some larvae that are predaceous and feed on small, soft-bodied insects.

The common one that I see in Central Texas is a pale green maggot that is carrot shaped and has a pinkish-white stripe down its back.

So when should you manage aphids?

This is really a personal choice but can vary from person to person, yard to yard, or even plant to plant.

I have plants in my yard that I specifically have so they get aphids, ensuring that I have a population for the beneficial insects to feast upon.

If you feel the need to manage aphids, you can start with a high-pressure jet of water to knock them off the plant.

This won't get rid of all of them, but it can reduce the population while conserving beneficial insects.

We'd love to hear from you.

Click on centraltexasgardener.org to send us your questions, pictures, and videos.

- Next, Amber de la Rosa unites community through plant swaps.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Amber de la Rosa.

I'm with Central Texas Plant People.

We started the plant swaps back in 2018 with a group of friends back when plants were getting kind of expensive, and I had one plant, they had another plant.

This guy is a pink princess philodendron that I got on the freebie table actually at this last plant swap.

It looks like it's in kind of hydroponic medium, but really healthy guy.

You can see here it has a lot of aerial roots kind of throughout the plant.

These are all indicators of a healthy plant, but it's also a good place to propagate, so you can always kind of come under one of these aerial roots and kind of chop it up right over here.

I'm not gonna chop this guy up, but I will show you with another one.

This guy right here, just kind of a basic philodendron but also has a lot of aerial roots.

We're gonna cut right underneath these aerial roots right here.

And I did disinfect my scissors before I took off this morning.

So I'm gonna chop right under there.

So I'll typically kind of cut off these bottom leaves.

That way, the plant kind of pushes more energy to kind of grow these roots, and then we'll submerge this bottom part into water.

But these are kind of some of the easier plants to propagate.

We'll stick them in water, and within a few weeks, we'll start growing some roots.

It'll look something like this.

This is also something I got in our last plant swap.

You can see how it's rooting very nicely.

Once it has a little bit of a bigger root system, this is something that I will typically put in usually a mixture of perlite and coco noir.

This is probably a pretty good root system already, so I could probably put that in there.

And I'll leave it till I see those roots pop up, pop out.

Like, I'll leave them in a clear container, and once I see the roots around the container, that's when I know that it'll be time to move it to, like, a bigger medium.

This is another popular one amongst plant swaps.

With this guy right here, we can literally kind of take, I usually just pinch them off, but pinch a little piece off, and I let them dry at least a day or two before I kind of just...

I don't put them in water.

I kinda let them sit on top of the dirt and mist them regularly.

You can follow our page on Facebook.

It's called Central Texas Plant People.

It's a group.

Or follow us on Instagram @centraltexasplantpeople.

And you can also learn more about the plant swaps and any other events that we host there.

For Backyard Basics, I'm Amber de la Rosa.

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

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

Her secret is patience.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardener" is made possible by the generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden.

Thank you.

(whimsical music)