Central Texas Gardener

- Howdy!

I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," let's create new autumn memories.

Jay White of "Texas Gardener Magazine" reflects on where he's been as gardeners and where we're headed.

Young ecologists at Austin Youth River Watch plant for bats, pollinators, and birds.

Daphne reflects on garden perceptions and Heather Kendall picks citrus plants for cold hardiness.

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

- [Presenter] "Central Texas Gardener's" 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden, supporting a love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Announcer] Want to know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, HEB has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking and Field & Future by HEB trash bags.

You can learn more at OurTexasOurFuture.com.

(bright music) (bright music fades) - Young environmentalists, including high school and college students, dig in at Austin Youth River Watch to plant for bats and other beneficial wildlife.

- What we do at River Watch when we're planting is you're gonna want to dig kind of as far down as you can go.

- Y'all are going to just want to dig your hole deep enough so that the roots are not too deep so that the soil doesn't come up on the plant.

- I am a big fan of bats.

As an environmental studies major, I really love how they are a natural form of pesticide.

- We've been doing a lot of bat education since the summer up until now and kind of culminating with this bat pollinator garden here.

- My name is Erin Cord, I am the community engagement manager for Bat Conservation International.

We knew we wanted to do a bat garden program and we were looking for partners within Austin that were already doing really wonderful work that we could kind of support.

And Austin Youth River Watch came up as just a fantastic partner.

- I'm Melinda Chow and I'm the executive director at Austin Youth River Watch.

We run programs for high school students and young adults in environmental education and youth development in out-of-school time settings.

And I think that enhances science and nature education that happens in the schools and in the classrooms and exposes a wider variety of young people to potential environmental careers.

- Hello, my name's Jose Rodriguez and I'm here interning at Austin Youth River Watch.

And the reason why I'm here and why I got here in the first place was it was kind of an accident.

We were at an event and I just signed up for everything really.

And I got a call from them and I was just like, okay, it sounds fun.

- My name is Krista Kelly and I am an intern at the Austin Youth River Watch.

I originally found out about the program through one of my professors at my college and I really just love how many connections that the River Watch program has with so many different environmental organizations in Austin.

- My name is Chanel Davis and I am a program manager at Austin Youth River Watch.

We work predominantly with Black and brown students who historically haven't had access and opportunity to the outdoors in the same ways as other groups.

And our goal is to create a space and to create community for them to be able to have positive experiences in nature, for them to share those positive experiences with other Black and brown young people that look like them, and for them to have some ownership as well as hoping that that extends to stewardship later in life.

Currently in life as they're high school students, but also later in life and throughout their life.

- Ever since I've gotten here, I've really just loved being outside and that's really changed my mindset about a lot of things.

Like I wanted to be a police officer and now I'm not sure what I want to do now.

It's like I wanna be out here now.

- In our backyard, we've got lots of things going on.

Two of which were a vegetable garden bed, as well as a xeriscape garden bed, which were already existing here over the past couple of years.

And our xeriscape garden bed needed some work as well as our vegetable garden bed.

- Hi guys.

My name is Alondra Fleming-Parra.

I am an intern here at Austin Youth River Watch and I really wanted to join this program because I know that they make a really big difference in the lives of the kids they work with, and I wanted to really contribute to that while also contributing to the environment around me.

- I love bats 'cause as an environmental studies major, I love learning about how they're a natural form of pesticide, really into plants and learning about sustainable planting.

And honestly, bats just kind of get a really bad rep.

- About one in three bats in the United States are considered at risk and this means they have a declining population.

They're either listed as endangered or threatened by the Fish and Wildlife Service.

And there's a lot of different reasons for this, but one of the issues is definitely habitat loss.

And so the average person can actually make a huge difference by providing habitat for bats in their backyard.

And by doing this, they can plant native plants and most of the bats in the United States and all of the bats we have in Central Texas actually eat insects.

By providing native plants, you're providing a food source for the insects that bats are actually eating.

So that's really, really important.

- [Chanel] Partnering with Erin at Bat Conservation International, we've been working with them, teaching our students about bats, going to Bracken Cave, seeing the bats at South Congress Bridge, so many different things.

Building a bat pollinator garden essentially that would incorporate the two garden beds that we already have while adding a third at the back with the tires.

We got tires donated from a local discount tire that otherwise would've gone off to be trash in a landfill somewhere.

So we decided we could take them, paint them, make them look nice and make them into planters as opposed to them ending up in a landfill.

- [Jose] Basically we had to get the dirt and fill up all these tires with the dirt.

It was a process.

It didn't take us too long.

We got the granite, the stuff here, we had to tamp it down so it can look good and stay in place.

- So we had help from a fantastic landscape architect named Rachel Raise.

She's at Raise Landscape Design and she was able to help us kind of draw out this bat garden that we were looking for and figure out how to really do it in a cost-effective way, but where it would also be very aesthetically pleasing and also include a lot of the plants that we wanted to think about.

'Cause with gardening for bats, you're really thinking about attracting more nighttime pollinators and kind of nighttime insects 'cause that's what the bats are eating.

- So we can fill in right here.

That's gonna look really good.

- Oh, no, you go for it.

You're fine.

- There.

Beautiful.

- I moved to the Austin area about seven years ago and watched the Mexican free-tailed bats go under the bridge and I really became fascinated with them.

- We've also even gone on like little hikes at night with bat monitors that Erin gave us that track the bat sound and stuff.

So the detector hears the sound and then it'll tell you approximately what bat it is, what species of bat it is, which is so cool.

- We have our Mexican free-tailed bats and a lot of those will kind of migrate south to Mexico in the winter, but there's actually some we think that come from farther north and will actually stay in Austin for the winter in the bridge.

We also have certain species that will hibernate in caves, the tricolored bat, the cave myotis, they'll be there for the winter.

And then we've got some that kind of hang out here just because it doesn't get super, super cold usually.

One of the things we want to think about with a bat garden is this idea of bloom time succession where you have something blooming as much as possible throughout the year.

I's just thinking about kind of like capitalizing on that as much as possible to provide the most diversity and also number of insect species for the bats to eat.

- They're everywhere, whether you see them or not, right?

They're a part of our ecosystem, they're a part of our lives.

And I think that that was the thing, at least for me and I think for students as well, that they really picked up on is how important they are and how prevalent they are.

- I think what we're really good at and what we hear from students most has to do with new experience outdoors and also just being a lot more comfortable with science and being in the outdoors than they would have before.

And I think one thing we hear a whole lot is a sense of community.

Making new friends, new friends that they would not have had if they were not part of a program like Austin Youth River Watch.

- This is what I like to do.

I like to get down and dig and put plants on the ground.

I like to get dirty, try to make a better environment for animals or anybody really.

It's always good to be planting stuff.

It can only help, so why not?

- Producer Linda Lehmusvirta and director Ed Fuentes first met Jay and Sally White in 2012 at their gorgeous garden in Brenham.

Chris Corby, founder of "Texas Gardener Magazine" and a friend of CTG, recommended them to Linda.

And then in 2018, he tossed the magazine ball to Jay and Sally as new owners.

Today, Jay returns to "Central Texas Gardener" where we're going to swap a few tales about where we've been and where we're headed.

- I was always around gardening, farming, agriculture, but my Aunt Sarah and my Uncle Tom, they lived out East Texas, a little place called Wortham, Texas.

Had a dairy and he had been a POW in World War II.

He was a Japanese prisoner of war the entire time.

When he came back, he weighed less than 80 pounds.

- [John] Wow.

- And he swore, you know, like Scarlett O'Hara, that he would never go hungry again.

- Yes.

- And so he always kept a one acre garden and I loved helping him.

Then my aunt would can everything that he would make.

My joyous memories of summertime always involved meatless summer meals fresh out of the garden, you know, shelling purple hull peas, making homemade ice cream.

And so I'm not sure if that's why I garden, because I was very young when all that happened though, but I do think it put me on the path.

- I think a lot of people have that similar experience.

Certainly with me.

Same thing, both my grandmothers.

I have vivid memories of going there and picking okra and tomatoes and just feeling like that was the most magical thing in the world, that you could stick this plant in the ground and then lo and behold, a month or so later you've just got all this stuff you get to play with.

- We have friends that come visit us and you'll understand this, we have more urban friends that come visit us in the country in Brenham, and they'll walk around in the garden, you know, and they'll just be picking and they'll fill up sacks of food.

And when peach tree season comes and they're walking around with five and 10 gallon buckets of peaches, they're just amazed at at how much food homeowners really can grow.

- Of course, Texas is a little tough to grow depending upon where you are and it definitely has its curve balls.

- And that toughness to grow, I mean, that's really where "Texas Gardener" came from.

The man that started "Texas Gardener" and that Sally and I bought it from was Chris Corby, started in Waco in 1981.

- Okay.

- And at that time, he actually worked in the publishing industry, which Waco was big in at that time.

And he was an avid gardener from South Texas, which I'll say it's as equally as challenging as here.

And he was frustrated because there were no gardening manuals or magazines available at that time.

Not just for Texas but for the whole South.

So he and his wife Deborah started it in November of 1981.

We love social media.

If you want to follow us, @TexasGardenerMagazine on Instagram and Facebook.

We put out constant garden tips and everything.

- [John] Well, let's talk a little bit about how this has resonated with gardeners.

- When the magazine started in 1981, I think it was a complete different landscape for the home gardeners.

At that time, lawns were big, bedding plants were big, and I think the average home gardener was what synthetic fertilizer do I put on my green lawn?

- Right.

- And then they wanted to know what chemicals I could spray to kill my bugs and my weeds.

- Right.

- Both of the big changes that we're seeing happen in the gardening industry are related to, I think people are realizing that we need to take some special care of our environment.

So one of 'em that's changing is just a general desire to be more earth friendly gardening.

So homeowners now, instead of looking for what fertilizer do I put out and what do I spray, one thing that's really big is gardeners are embracing soil health.

Who would've ever thought that soil was cool?

But right now soil is one of the hottest topics in the home gardening industry.

Our home gardeners now are very interested in things like, how do they improve the amount of organic material in their soil?

Because they know, this is a saying that we have at "Texas Gardener" is that good gardeners grow plants, but great gardeners grow soil microbes.

And I think that is resonating.

So that's really been a huge change.

People want to build a healthy ecosystem.

They want to use native and adaptive plants because they know they're gonna require less inputs of any type.

Even organic pesticides and herbicides kill things.

And so they want to avoid as many inputs as possible and they're doing that with soil health, native and adaptive plants, low water plants and all.

So that's been a major change.

But I think the other change, and you'll be very aware of this, is whether we want to or not, if you're a gardener in Texas, over the next 10 or 20 years, we're all gonna have to learn to be a low water gardener.

- Yes sir.

- And the reason is I tell people, you know, all these people are moving to Texas.

- Yep.

- My advice to you, if you're moving to Texas and you want to garden, you need to call the AgriLife extension office in your area or the water board in your area and find out what, if any, water regulations are in place, watering restrictions.

'Cause as you know, that if your dream house in Texas has a big green front lawn in front of it, then you don't need to move to Austin or the San Antonio metro area because y'all have got severe watering restrictions that have been in place for years and are probably not gonna go away anytime soon.

- Yeah, and I think that's a big note is that in the past when it was so lawn oriented, we didn't have the population numbers, we weren't having quite frequent drought.

Now some municipalities are using up to 70% of their potable drinking water on watering lawns, which is just something you can't abide, right?

- That's right.

- That's just not something that's gonna work.

And to your point about the soils, I think it's really key too because in the prairie restoration work that we do, those communities are directly taught what it grows above ground is reflecting what's growing below ground.

And we know that that can take up to 40 years before you get what would be considered sort of a mature soil ecosystem in there.

So that's really wonderful to hear.

And I think some of that it's not just a trend though, it's being driven by these pressures, right?

If it's gonna be drought, no matter if you want to do that, you can't do it.

How do you think that gardeners are making a difference in ecosystems and how people perceive our landscape?

- So Sally and I believe very passionately that gardening matters.

You know, a lot of people think it's just a little hobby, we grow a few plants or whatever.

But I'm telling you, gardening matters.

So statistically, gardening is the most practiced hobby in the world.

And I love that.

And if that's true, and based on the numbers that I've seen with 30 million people living in Texas now, that means literally millions of Texans practice some form of gardening, some activity in the green industry, whether that's potted plants on your apartment balcony or a large food bank that's feeding food insecure areas.

So gardening does matter and it matters for your mental health, it matters for your physical health.

But where I think gardening really matters is that if there are millions of us doing this, if we can all find each other, get together, share a little, learn a little, talk a little, if we could all get together and agree on some things that we were all gonna do.

So let's just say water collection.

Sally and I are big, big proponents of water collection.

If we all put in a rain barrel or put in a little cistern on our property, just think of the rainwater that we would capture, stop from running away.

Or if we were to all plant native milkweeds in our yards to help the butterflies as they migrate.

With millions of people doing it, if we could all work together, we could make meaningful impact on our communities, our state, our country and even our world.

- Absolutely.

To your point, I think Mrs.

Johnson always said the environment is where we all come together.

And in a time where there's a lot of division right now, gardening offers that opportunity for us to come together and build that sense of community.

So thank you so much for coming and sharing a little bit about "Texas Gardener."

I wish we could talk forever, but we really appreciate you being here today.

- Well, thank you John.

It was a pleasure.

- Well now folks, let's check in with Daphne Richards.

(bright music) - As we celebrate CTG's 30th season, we want to celebrate you, our viewers.

You've helped guide our content and we've learned so much from you and your gardens.

It's wonderful when you've given us a thumbs up.

From Richardson, Jason Lewallen wrote, "I really love your show!

And it's true that the episode featuring John Hart Asher's amazing backyard is what got me inspired.

I re-watched it at least 10 times!

Then I bought Benjamin Vogt's book, "Prairie Up," and it helped me figure out how to design something that will be suitable for a front yard and avoid getting a weed citation from the city.

These pocket prairies are in their fifth year and I'm so happy to be in touch with you and to share their progress."

Valerie Stein wrote, "I'm a visual learner, so the examples of the wonderful gardens always sparks my imagination.

And to me, imagination's everything.

The sections on tips and tricks have always been very helpful.

I now recycle my cardboard in new raised bed bottoms and plant complimentary plants together along with many other improvements.

The entire show is a joy to watch."

And from Suzy Key: "I've always enjoyed your show on PBS.

Thank you for the variety of plants, yards, gardens, interviews of owners, and common and technical names of plants.

I continue to learn new and fun information.

My yard style was more natural before that was acceptable, thanks to your show and technical knowledge.

Through interviews with owners of a variety of yards and gardens, I have learned many new ideas, not only from the information talked about, but also from the lovely photography.

Thank you for the individuality of the photographers to capture what's being discussed.

I've done the rewind of special items, plant names, and spellings every show and I've been inspired by some simple ideas to add my own touch using what I have on hand.

Today's episode of 'Central Texas Gardener' was watched, needed, and enjoyed!"

We'd love to hear from you.

Visit CentralTexasGardener.org to send us your questions, pictures, and videos.

- With cool weather on the way, Heather Kendall shows how to protect our citrus trees.

(bright music) - [Heather] This is a good example of one where this is where the grafting point is and unfortunately we've got a lot of damage above that, but we've still got one good shoot coming up.

And so we're gonna let this one grow up and hopefully we'll have a productive tree again.

Hi, this is Heather Kendall.

I'm gonna talk to you today about growing citrus trees here in Central Texas, and just a few of the things that you need to be aware of to get the best experience out of it.

Citrus trees are subtropical, so they have a certain amount of cold sensitivity.

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

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

And Meyer lemon, we grow so many of those here.

They'll be cold tolerant to the mid to upper twenties.

But lime trees, they're really sensitive and they really can't tolerate below freezing.

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

So this is where it was cut back quite hard after the freeze and all this lovely young growth is coming out now.

So it's absolutely fine.

If you grow it in ground, there are certain things you have to be aware of.

The most important thing is that it's in a sunny, sheltered location, gets about six hours of sunlight.

You need to make sure that it is sheltered away from those cold northwesterly winds.

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

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

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

Always water your tree before a freeze.

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

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

You can wrap it around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of people come into me and particularly after the freeze last year and say, "Well, my tree died right down to the ground and it's coming back.

Is it okay now?"

Well, the thing you have to remember with citrus grown here in Central Texas is that most of it is grafted root stock.

And grafted rootstock means that the trunk and the roots of the tree are one kind of citrus material that have been grown specifically because they're very vigorous and they can cope with our soils.

And the point above the grafted material is the fruit, the delicious fruit that you want, whether it's a lemon or an orange.

And there's a grafting point where the two join, which you can see quite clearly on these two trees here.

Now if it freezes all the way down to below those grafting points, then you've lost all that lovely productive material above.

And all you're getting are the chutes coming up from the base here, that's rootstock material.

It's often very thorny and the fruit that it does produce is really usually pretty sour.

This is a good example of what happens when you get freeze damage.

You see how it's frozen all the way down?

Here's the grafting point and it's gone well below that.

All that's dead.

And so what it's doing is shooting up from below the grafting point and this is just the rootstock material which we don't want to keep.

And unfortunately, there's no point in keeping this tree anymore.

You can see very distinct here where the grafting point is and the rootstock below and it's quite different, the material above.

So you can see the very clear line between the two.

And this is all healthy productive material that's coming back.

It's had some freeze damage, we've cut it back a bit, it's now leafing out more.

We'll just have to do a little bit of trimming off just to take some of that dead material away.

But it doesn't really need much more than that.

So how do you know when your fruit is ripe and ready to harvest?

It takes about six months from when the tree flowers to when it sets fruit.

Color is the one thing you can't rely on to judge whether fruit is actually ripe or not.

You can test it, just take one off the tree and taste it and see if it's nice or not.

If it's not, the fruit can stay on the tree for two months before harvesting.

People often ask me how you should fertilize your citrus tree.

Well, the important point to remember is that they are very heavy feeders of nitrogen, but they don't need a lot of phosphorus.

So don't assume that you can use the same fertilizer for your roses, for example, that you would use on your citrus.

Anything with a high first number is important.

Cottonseed meal is good, feather meal also very good for a good source of nitrogen.

And I also sometimes like to change it up a bit and use a bit of fish emulsion and sometimes liquid seaweed with iron just to make sure that they're getting all the micronutrients they need as well.

Growing citrus can be fun and the result's delicious.

Just follow these simple tips and you will have a wonderful crop to enjoy.

- Hey, check out CentralTexasGardener.org for tips, resources, and to watch online.

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

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) - [Presenter] "Central Texas Gardener's" 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden, supporting a love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Announcer] Want to know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, HEB has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking and Field & Future by HEB trash bags.

You can learn more at OurTexasOurFuture.com.

(bright chime)