- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on Central Texas Gardener, let's go Waterwise in style.

New Gardner Alexa Volpe went for a drought tough cottage design with native plants, Karen Guz from the San Antonio Water System explains how we can adapt to weather extremes and ongoing drought, Angel Schatz and Hannah Beall smashed mushroom blocks at the Central Texas Food Bank, and Daphne Richards answers your questions, so let's get growing right here, right now.

- [Announcer] Central Texas Gardener is made possible by generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden, Diane Land and Steve Adler, and by the Travis County Master Gardeners Association.

(upbeat music) - Alexa Volpe never knew that gardening could be so hard until moving to rocky soil in San Antonio.

- I would describe my garden as a zero-scape cottage design, and I wanted something that was really lush and green and had interest all year, but I also wanted it to be drought tolerant.

Hi, my name is Alexa Volpe, and I'm a gardener here in San Antonio, Texas.

I have been, you know, piddling and putzing out in the garden since I was a little kid in South Florida, and I remember watching, you know, my family growin' herbs and veggies and all kinds of things out in the yard.

My parents are Italian and Italian folks love to, you know, get their hands out there in the earth, and so I grew up watching a lot of friends and family have their little plots.

Down there, you put something in the ground and it grows, but here in San Antonio, we have to be able to garden between these extremes.

You know, the drought and the heat and then these cold snaps that we get that can be very taxing on our plants.

Not only did I wanna have a space where we could have a destination and something to do, but I also wanted something that would attract wildlife and pollinators and sort of give a little bit back to some of the habitats that, you know, are missing around in our suburban communities.

When we moved here about five years ago to San Antonio, the yard was just pretty much grass and some of our evergreen shrubs and trees in the back, and there was really no purpose to go outside.

You know, it was hot, and maybe the kids played in the yard, but I knew that I wanted to create a destination back there.

Was that a patio or a walkway or something?

And there was so many ideas that I had going on, but you know, in those first years, it was kind of discouraging gardening because all the fancy plants that I bought at the big box stores were dying, and I was like, gardening in central Texas is a whole 'nother thing.

We live on top of the Edwards Aquifer, so our soil is pretty shallow and we have a lot of rock underneath.

We have a mix of builders clay, so I'll dig in certain spots and it'll be that sort of red clay that looks like it's been added to the area.

Other parts of the yard, I'll dig and you'll hit limestone, and so I started by using, you know, plant lists that I had found on Central Texas Gardener, plant lists that I had seen from Garden Style San Antonio and the Grow Green Initiative in Austin, and so those were excellent resources, I think, for building that vocabulary of what works out in our landscapes, and so I picked based on color, I picked based on what's a host plant, I chose plants that would reseed so that I knew I'd have volunteers in the coming seasons.

I chose plants that would add texture or structure like different ukas and cacti, and in the end what I have is this, you know, this smorgasbord of color out there.

And as an artist on hiatus, I would say these new plants that I have are my palette, and so when I go out there and I see all of these colors, it gives me a lot of joy.

And maybe not half, but 30% of the plants out there, I propagated from parking lots and construction sites.

You know, I would drive along the road and I'd be parked in a parking lot somewhere and I'd say, well, that little thing is growing in between the cracks.

That must be a really successful Texas plant.

And so I started by, I would say, well you know what?

This little Indian blanket flower, I'm just gonna see if I can grab the roots, you know, and put it out in the yard and see if it catches, and so I started to have a lot of luck, and I found that if you soak, you know, a specimen in water for the day before and then plant it, I had really great success with the roots catching, and that luck translated to getting a lot more excited about the plants that are in my area.

I like to think that so much of my garden really is a souvenir of my traipsin' around San Antonio because a lot of the plants that I have out there are maybe little pieces I've cut off from a walk along one of the trails here or something from somebody else's garden.

That was actually a little like a cutting that I took from a plant on the outside and I left it in water, I let it form some roots, and it was a tiny little shoot when I had it, and it's grown into this monumental plant.

It's taken two springs for it to look like that, and it attracts bees.

I have seen, I know in the show sometimes people talk about how certain plants are good for their seeds because a lot of birds will eat them, and I just never catch the birds out there eating any seeds, and then the other day I walk by and I see these two beautiful little finches just perch on the stems of the salvia out there, and they're just quick, quick, quick, nibbled the seeds right out, and so it felt incredibly gratifying, like what I planned to set out to do is to create a space that I could enjoy, that wildlife could enjoy.

It just was a beautiful culmination of all that work, and so this year I said, you know, why don't I add my produce in the middle of all of that that I've got going on?

And I've always, I guess, put in, you know, kales or the Swiss chard.

There's lots of parsley, cilantro, all the dill, you know, those service host plants, but we also get to eat them.

This year I've had this crop of the swallowtail butterfly caterpillars on all my dill, and I'll tell you, for years I tried to go, for example, zucchinis and zucchinis have to be fertilized.

You know, they have to be pollinated and I could never get a single flower to set, and then I said, well, I probably, I don't have a lot of bees, it's just grass out here.

There's nothing for anybody to come out, and now the yard is just, I mean, I'm taking pictures of every butterfly that's out there and it's not just butterflies, there's little moths and you know, there's all kinds of different bees and different sizes and there's, you know, little flies that pollinate, so everybody's out there, and I noticed that even my veggies that I have in my little garden containers are setting as well.

When I was planting the garden, what we originally had back there was a lot of sod.

Because we live in a lot of hilly area in this part of San Antonio, we already had the terracing, you know, with the increase in the rock there.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to add flagstone or do some sort of rock path, but I said, you know what?

I'm just gonna keep it super simple.

I'm gonna leave a space to walk with just the mulch.

And then as I have cut back tree limbs and stuff has died in the frost, I kind of wanted this sort of woodland aesthetic, and so I've lined the mulch bed with different tree limbs, you know, put in little succulents sort of along the way.

And so the bed is very organic and natural and when you go out there, you almost feel like you're walking, you know, on a nature trail.

You know, you just lift up the limb and there's all like, you know, little critters underneath it and rolly pollies and all kinds of stuff.

I try to create little spaces within the walking path and just within the garden that have a little bit of whimsy, that get my kids excited about going out there.

I have a little area in which, you know, my daughter and I, we go thrift shopping and she picks out little knickknacks and she puts, she calls it her little center, you know, where she puts her favorite little items and she goes out there and she gardens in that space, moving things around and putting things to her liking, and then, you know, my son also has a little section where he likes to sort of put flowers and arrange rocks and then I have bowling balls out there and little plates and things that are just, I pick up along the way.

The first bed that I made, I made to honor my grandfather who passed away a few years ago, and so I said, you know what?

I'd love to really make a garden and that I have a plaque out there with his name on it.

We walk by and we think about him.

I volunteer on the PTA board at our local school, and so I've been active in turning one of the gardens for the kids into one that is a pollinator friendly garden that uses and showcases the resiliency of our native plants.

I worked on that project and then I decided that I would love to help out even just in our own community, so I've volunteered on our HOA to be able to help them design in some of the more, I guess, complicated spaces of our community properties.

I'd like to be able to go out there and feel like in a world where it feels so hard to make a difference, you're actually changing the planet just a little bit, even in your own yard.

- Weather extremes and ongoing drought aren't going away.

Instead, let's learn how to work with them.

Karen Guz, Vice President of Conservation for the San Antonio Water System explains how we can adopt garden style wherever we live.

How are you doing Karen?

- I'm good, thanks for having me here.

- Thanks so much for being here.

Weather extremes, some people are really worried about sort of the droughts, the freezes, the intense rains.

Should they be worried about it and what sort of approaches can we do to sort of deal with these curve balls that we're getting?

- Well the good news is that we live in a place that has a pretty broad and deep plant palette to choose from.

But what's been hard for folks, I think, in the last couple years, as you said, it is that juxtaposition of really hard freezes stressing some plants, followed by many days over a hundred degrees without rain.

So we have seen some plants not thrive that previously did very well and I think that just opens up the conversation for gardeners to talk to each other about what's still thriving and has our plant palette maybe shifted a bit?

There may be plants that 10, 15 years ago everybody said were a great idea, and maybe now we're gonna add a little flag of caution.

If you put this in and we get a hard freeze, may not do so well anymore.

- I think one of the big challenges too is that people tend to think, "Well what's a plant I should use?"

when maybe the question should be, and to your point, "What plant communities should we look at?"

- And we try to talk to people about a couple key concepts, recognizing that for San Antonio Water System, we've surveyed our customers and most of them want a more diverse landscape, but they have no knowledge.

Most people are not master gardeners, so they want advice and so we try to give them advice that's gonna help them have something exciting to look at every season, and as you said, a somewhat diverse palette of plants in that landscape.

These are living plant communities, and if what you want is something, I have had a customer once say to me, "Well I want something that's gonna be evergreen and blooming all year."

That would be plastic and we don't recommend that.

So you know, we have to temper the advice we give people with the reality of this is what to expect.

- A big component of your work also is with water conservation.

What are some of the bigger changes and patterns that you've noticed with this increasing importance on water conservation within our landscapes?

- Most of our plants are making it.

They're always gonna be, when we have an extreme weather event, whether it be a freeze or a drought or even too much rain, we're gonna have a few specimens tank and die in our home landscapes and commercial landscapes and in the native areas that are not irrigated, and you look around and you see, you know, what happened?

Why is that live oak not making it and 20 others around it are?

I don't have an explanation.

We don't know.

We'd have to do a postmortem, that's unrealistic.

So the good news is I think most things are making it.

What we did also see though is some things just didn't look their best.

Some of the plants that normally, blooming perennials that bloom in the summer, they were looking kind of peaked when it was a hundred degrees so many days in a row with no rain.

Most of 'em didn't die, but I'm sorry, they didn't look their best.

- Embracing a water conservation approach is dormancy.

- Thank you for bringing that up, because we try to talk about this concept of summer dormancy, that a lot of our plants that are adapted to our region have strategies for getting through these long dry periods that south central Texas is just gonna be prone to.

They may, you know, do leaf firing and not have active photosynthesis going.

They may just slow down growth.

If they don't, then they may have extensive roots, so if you put 'em in an area where they're root bound, that's not gonna go well.

So that's a key thing to keep in mind that it is not natural, for example, for grass to be green in the summer, - If you drive around the hill country, our native grasses are generally not green in the summer months.

They go into a form of dormancy.

That's how they survive.

- To be fair though, they might be green if it's a mild year though, I've definitely been around, I'm sure you too, when we've had water and it not be as hot.

I don't think that's happening as often.

But it can be.

But that also comes from a different expectation.

The native plants aren't just great with drought because they happen to be, they actually evolved from that, so they have that capacity.

So I think that's something that understanding and as we like to say, get down with a brown because it's actually a strength.

That's something that's really important.

What are some examples of plants that you're seeing make it through some of these challenging conditions?

- You know, I've been talking to my friends at work who are a bunch of garden geeks about, you know, so you guys are driving around, what are you seeing?

What are you see in your yards?

And we've done an exercise at our events called Survived, Thrived, or Died, about the last couple years, and one of the things that is a takeaway is the answer is different depending on who you talk to.

I use Blackfoot daisy as an example.

I'm underwhelmed.

I haven't had good luck with that plant.

Other people gushed about it and said it was fantastic during the drought.

So there are plants that it depends on where they are.

Are your soils just right for it?

Is the amount of sun it's getting just right for it?

And then maybe it might've thrived in the drought.

There's a short list of things like mountain laurel, just shrugged off the freezes and the drought.

Yopon holly, no problems.

You know, we've all seen Esperanza blooming on the roadside where nobody's watering it and it's hot as Hades there.

So there is a short list of heat loving plants that thrived.

Then we also kind of have a list of ones where we'd put the caveat probably won't look its best in these harsh conditions.

- I think something that people too in trying to solve this problem is that they also aren't necessarily understanding that it's not necessarily one of these curve balls, so to speak, that's causing the issue.

Sometimes it's multiple, so we have super heat and then a crazy freeze and a lot of water.

Well not one of those events really cause the problem, but all three does and that sort of adds that complexity too.

So, but that's gardening, right?

It's experimentation, right?

There doesn't have to be a singular answer, and I think, to your point, that's a really interesting exercise with Survive, Thrive, or Die, I think it was, that people will observe plant performances differently from site to site.

What about planting after drought?

So if people are looking to refresh their landscape, what would be some go-to elements that you would say would be something to look for?

- So there's a lot of debates in what should be a drought resilient landscape.

One I wanna take off the table is that we are not promoting rock-scape.

- Okay?

- What I call rock-scape.

Rock-scape means I'm just giving up on having a living landscape and I'm gonna lay down rock.

You know, I don't wanna be the taste police, I don't think it's pretty, but it's also not so easy to take care of.

You're gonna get leaves and things growing in that and it's gonna drive you crazy.

It's also a heat sink.

So we are suggesting to people that they think about, if they're gonna have grass, think about where it's functional, make sure you've got a drought tolerant one, make sure you've got soil there, and then think through your landscape and look at some free designs that are available to understand you.

We have seasons and if you plant all heat loving perennials, you're gonna be kind of bored in the winter when those freeze back.

So we try to talk to people about balanced landscape.

Think about you may have an outdoor living area, you may have some functional grass somewhere, and then you're gonna have a lot of native, pretty resilient plant material that hopefully every season gives you something to look forward to.

- [John] Okay, so a dynamic landscape.

- Very much so.

That's kind of the advice we're giving.

We have free designs on our gardenstylesanantonio.com website.

We call it Plant by Numbers.

And so we find people who aren't expert want like 200 square feet, that's like two parking lots sizes, you know, together, and we say, so take this 200 square foot problem area, maybe your grass isn't thriving in the corner bed, the strip close to the pavement, the deep shade where the grass can't grow anyway, and we have free designs for people to kind of pick the style they want and then choose the plants that pop into the suggested design.

One of the nice things about this region is we welcome people from all over the country and all over the world really, and they come here, and they're like, yeah, I don't know what these plants are.

So this is supposed to be a place for one stop shopping.

Of course you can find all the San Antonio Water System incentives there, but there's also videos, there are free resources to download, there's a weekly e-newsletter you can sign up for to find out what's happening in the landscape right now because we know people are seeking that resource that's very specific to here and maybe very different from where they came from.

- Well Karen, I wanna thank you so much for coming to share all your information about Garden Style San Antonio and I think that is a wonderful resource, I think, not just for San Antonio but for all of central Texas.

So I appreciate you reviewing all of these challenges we have and look forward to the amount of solutions that y'all offer.

Well now let's check in with Daphne Richards.

(soft music) - If you've had blue bonnets in your home landscape for a few years, you likely now have them in a few places that aren't so convenient.

They do like to get around.

If you catch them small enough, you could try to transplant them or put them in pots to give away to friends.

But if they're pretty mature and have flower blooms showing, it would be best to wait until after they flower to make a move.

You could even harvest the seed once flowering is done.

Jennifer Vince-Recksiek in Van Alstyne spotted this small patch of pink blue bonnets in a field last April.

Pink is a recessive color so the seed from these pink plants won't necessarily produce pink plants if harvested.

All the surrounding blue plants will cross pollinate them, most likely leading to blue offspring next season.

You can purchase pink, white, maroon, and other blue bonnet seeds directly from growers who separate them from blue plants in order to keep the flower colors distinct prior to harvesting the seed.

Blue bonnets along with fall blooming asters are among the plants suitable to grow in the 30 feet around your house.

Consider the defensible zone in fire wise landscaping.

These plants are low growing, staying close to the ground so they don't easily spread embers to a home's roof.

In the 10 foot perimeter around your home, use plants that are low to the ground, green, and healthy.

Avoid putting highly flammable plants like rosemary or yopon holly within 30 feet of any structure, especially in front of your windows.

Keep plants and organic mulch well irrigated, and fire wise maintenance includes keeping shrubs small along with proper pruning and prompt removal of any dead or dry vegetation.

Use materials like rock, stone, or pavers to create a buffer around the home and plants.

Inorganic mulches such as decomposed granite, gravel, or rocks are best for areas that abut the house or decks.

The Texas Forest Service has some great information on preparing your landscape if you live in fire prone areas.

We'd love to hear from you.

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

- Next, see why Hannah Baell and Angel Schatz are smashing mushroom blocks at the Central Texas Food Bank.

(soft upbeat music) - There's about 5,000 of these that could go into the dumpster each week creating that like methane emissions that we don't want, so that's why we like to rescue them.

- Hi, I'm Hannah.

I am the garden manager at Central Texas Food Bank.

Here, our mission is to nourish hungry people and lead the fight against hunger, and we do that by growing as much produce here on this one third acre as we can.

- My name is Angel, and I am with the Central Texas Mycological Society and we have a wonderful program.

We've partnered with Central Texas Food Bank and a lot of other community gardens and school gardens and we rescue mushroom grow blocks that could go into the waste, and we take these sterilized blocks and we teach people in different ways how to put them back into the soil.

- So here in this spot that you can see, it's about a third of an acre of growing space and the last two years we produced just under 23,000 pounds, and that goes out to our community who is experiencing hunger through our programs.

We have an onsite pantry.

Most of our food goes directly there first.

That's the first stop.

If we have too much for that, it goes out on mobile distributions to one of our 21 counties that we serve in Central Texas.

- Central Texas Food Bank and Hannah reached out to us and signed up to be part of the program, and so we've been delivering about once a month and using them in the soil here.

- We have pretty hard clay here.

It really seems to help add some tilt to that and help aerate the soil.

So we wanna feed our garlic some extra nutrients, so we are going to mix this straw with the mushroom substrate to try and help feed those microbes.

- And so we're gonna mix in this spent mushroom block, which is simply to sawdust and I just like to step on them and smash them up.

You can also just open up the bag and smash it with your hands.

It's nice to get your hands on the mycelium to feel how strong it is.

It's got a really nice strong bond and you can just mix it in with your straw and that mycelium and the mushroom, the decomposer fungi is gonna continue to break down, accelerate the decomposition process of the straw.

So this is the food that fungi loves to eat.

They like a lot of carbon matter.

I like to tell people that fungi is the reason why we have a surface to walk on.

There our chemist of our planet just breaking things down.

So you wanna make sure that you've got a lot of moisture as well 'cause that's gonna help both your plants and it helps jumpstart this continued decomposition.

- I like to use this mulch method for long season crops like this garlic that's gonna be in the ground for six months.

It'll just really help mitigate the weeds and help feed the plants.

- But this is gonna help break down some of this remaining woody matter of the plant and cycle that back.

You could put some cardboard on top to help retain the moisture, help it break down further.

But this last fall we introduced a program where we can deliver.

We got some grant funding, we're able to deliver to schools, community gardens, churches, any community based project that sees the value of adding organic matter to the soil.

- We have two full-time staff, myself and my coordinator Ollie, and besides that, we run volunteer shifts about three days a week.

Typically Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday mornings.

So you can go to our website, CentralTexasFoodBank.org and click volunteer and see what kind of shifts we have coming up.

'Cause we love to have help out here.

- Go beyond the show with us.

Follow our producer Linda on Instagram where she shares even more CTG content, including glimpses into her own gardening projects.

Be sure to check out CentralTexasGardener.org where you can get tips, show highlights, and sign up for our newsletter.

Until next time, adopt the pace of nature.

Her secret is patience.

(soft music) - [Announcer] Central Texas Gardener is made possible by generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden, Diane Land and Steve Adler, and by the Travis County Master Gardeners Association.

(upbeat whistling jingle)