- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," explore how our nature connection impacts our interaction with the garden.

Natalie McAnarney's backyard lacked personality and engagement until she dug into gardening.

Then, we cross pollinate with Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke from KUT's podcast, "Two Guys on Your Head," produced by Rebecca McInroy.

Wizzie Brown answers your insect questions and soil scientist Andie Marsh breaks down composting.

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

Central Texas Gardener is made possible by generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden.

and by Diane Land and Steve Adler.

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music continues) Natalie McAnarney's new backyard lacked personality and family engagement until she dug into gardening.

- Initially, I wanted just things to be pretty and then I wanted it to be pretty and sustainable.

And then eventually, I got to the place where I wanted to support the wildlife.

My name is Natalie McAnarney and I have been in central Texas for a while.

Left and came back.

We bought this house in 2019 and it was kind of a builder grade yard and so we didn't have a whole lot of money to fix it up right away.

So it was, we kind of took it in phases, and I really wanted to create a space where it was appealing and kind of drew you outside, but also something that was practical.

A place where I could grow my own fruits and vegetables.

And eventually, I would really love to reduce my lawn size, 'cause right now there's a ton of lawn.

So I've still got, I think, a long way to go.

The first thing I did was extend the patio because we really enjoy being outside and somewhere along the way somebody told me, start with your hardscape first, 'cause it really changes how water moves and it might change really what options you have for plants.

The next thing I did was we added the vegetable garden.

And so I did kill all the grass and then we put in a few raised beds, just like two small raised beds.

They looked like two coffins for a little while (laughs).

And then, you're like, "Well this is great for the growing season but now it's cold and I still wanna do things."

So then we added a greenhouse and then the greenhouse fell apart in three years.

(laughs) And so then I have fixed that.

And then the more you're out here, the more you wanna enjoy it.

Then I started to just create an enclosure.

I think that was my goal.

I wanted it to feel like a big hug.

And so I started along the fence line and then I kind of have been slowly working my way around the patio trying to create layers of interest, but also just sort of that enclosure.

I also have a desert willow, which has been a superstar.

I mean everything loves it.

Bees love it, wasps love it.

Hummingbirds love it.

I love it.

It did not skip a beat in this heat.

Initially, I laid a bunch of weed barrier down and then every time I try to put a new plant in there, I'm kicking myself 'cause I've gotta dig through all that weed barrier, and guess what?

The weeds still grow.

So now I've taken to using solarization.

It is a slow process and it's not always super effective, but that's how I kill my grass now.

And then I think there's even sheet mulching that you can do.

There's other techniques.

I have St. Augustine, which if you rake it away, it's okay, but some of that Bermuda, I mean you gotta get after it to really, to really keep it from coming up in your garden bed, which would make me crazy.

I kind of created the landscaping around along the edge of the fence and it kind of is wavy.

I like that curvilinear pattern.

I just feel like it's just soothing to the eye.

I've edged it with a Victorian trench and so that's an edging technique where you create an invisible border but you do slope.

It's about, you know, about six inches deep, but you do slope the ground a bit.

One of the benefits I think of that Victorian trench is that you can direct water away.

You can actually grade it to where it's maybe a little bit deeper on one side of the garden bed.

And so the water will tend to flow that way, so you can kind of manage your water a little bit better, especially after a heavy rain.

I really like that natural border between the grass and the mulch.

I have border, like stone border and steel border and other places where I really struggle to keep the different media from mixing, like with granite and rock.

I have a really hard time keeping granite in place, or rock in place.

And so I've used stone border for that.

I have two rain barrels and one of the rain barrels is off my covered patio and the excess will drain off onto a small rocky area and then gets dumped into that Victorian trench and then down to sort of a dry creek bed with a bunch of rocks and it sort of sets in a low spot in my garden.

But then the water seems to absorb just fine.

I think the first thing, when I started to put plants in, I wanted something that would be nice all year or that gave me interest all year.

So I really let the evergreens kind of be the bones and then I sort of worked around that.

And I will have to say, I kind of used to just go to the big box store, and I don't mind a big box store.

They're great for a lot of things.

But they really didn't have a lot that was well suited for the area and I learned that the hard way.

So I had a lot of things just not make it through summer or through winter.

And so then I, as I began to just look at gardens that were doing really well, I realized that they did well because they had a lot of native and well adapted plants.

And so then I slowly started working those into the garden and sometimes it looks a bit like a hodgepodge, but I don't mind.

And so I've been filling those empty spots where I don't have evergreens with perennial, native perennials, primarily.

That's a challenging spot right there because it gets a lot of shade but it gets enough sun that they did struggle a little bit with the heat.

But the crossvine, I mean, even though it's in a planter, it's totally fine.

It just, even in the winter, it doesn't die back or anything.

I also have a little gem magnolia and I love that tree so much because it does offer all year interest and then the beautiful blooms in the spring and I had no idea that magnolia's flowers had a smell, but they smell really nice.

They're so pretty.

Recently I was introduced to Doug Tallamy and he has this homegrown national park.

So I put myself on that map and you can do that.

And I set a goal for myself.

But he talks a lot about creating, putting plants in that create, you know, food and a habitat for the food web and how important that is.

And I think when you're in the garden, you start to see all the little critters come out and you're like, "Well I want to do that too."

So I've done away with my pest guy now and I'm working on trying to do some other things.

It's that kind of a journey and I think a lot of people go take that.

I just want something pretty all the way to now I'm trying to support the food web.

(laughs) I do feel, as a gardener, that I have some degree of responsibility of doing this well because it impacts the food web beyond my yard.

I do know that.

And so I definitely want to learn more about, you know, how to just steward what I have here in a way that doesn't harm that food web at all.

And I will say that I knew I had become a gardener when the sound of bees no longer scared me, but made me happy.

And so then I just wanted to make life easy for them.

You know, the bees, the butterflies, the birds, because just sitting out here is such an oasis away from just the, you know, busy life and it's a way to be off of all the screens and it's very grounding to watch them.

So I guess I'm being selfish 'cause I just wanna watch them do their thing.

And so gardening provides a great opportunity for people to really just stop and slow down, which is what we need if you're an, I'm an anxious person myself and I get it.

So it's an opportunity to stop and slow down.

There may be some added benefits in the soil.

And then it's time away from that screen, which I'm sure will, as we go along with tech, we're probably only scratching the surface as to how that really affects us.

I don't think it's all bad by any means, but I think you gotta put some limits on it.

If you can find the thing that pulls you away from kind of living that ever productive, gotta be productive, productive, productive, it's good for you.

So I think gardening is really just good for a lot of us, and especially if you're an anxious person, because I think it creates this sort of optimism in you because you don't just see what's there.

You see things for how they could be.

And watching that come to fruition is just, it's magical and it's just encouraging.

So I think gardening for me has really brought that, has made me sort of this optimist, and so in a world where I feel like we get a lot of bad news, you see beyond that and it just gives you hope for seeing how things could be.

- Today we are thrilled to cross pollinate with Dr. Bob Duke and Dr. Art Markman from KUT's popular podcast, "Two Guys on Your Head," produced by Rebecca McInroy.

Every week they explore everyday things to help us understand our behavior.

Today we're gonna examine how our connection to nature impacts our interaction with the garden and the natural world.

Welcome.

- Thanks.

Thanks so much for having us.

- Gosh, do I call you doctors?

Doctors?

- Bob, Art.

- Bob, Art.

All right.

Well, I love it.

I think the first pressing question that we've had is, why is my plant talking to me and does that make me crazy?

No, I'm just kidding.

No, we wanted to step back and really talk about the concept of aesthetics and beauty here.

Why do gardeners perhaps need a design or boundaries to find beauty in nature?

- So much of what we think is beautiful is based in part on things we've seen before.

- Okay.

- And so we bring a set of expectations to almost anything that we encounter.

As a result of that, those expectations then shape what we want to do next.

And so when we encounter a garden, if we have a belief about what a garden should be, then we're going to be evaluating this garden on the basis of the reaction to that set of expectations.

- Yeah, and I think anybody who's identified as a creative person, whether it's gardening or creating art or whatever, you know, often what that means is, you have things in your memory that do create expectations about what's likely to be, and then you vary that in some optimal way.

You know, when you see things that people say, "I should pay attention to that," it's often not because it epitomizes what people think something should be like, but there's a little bit of a surprise in that, right?

There's a little bit of something that's not expected that makes me think, "Wow, that's really interesting."

- Is there a danger of that setting up a dichotomy, though, of good or bad, though?

- Well, I think that any aesthetic is gonna have its lovers and its haters, right?

And so it, you know, I think that there are these implicit value judgements that go into that.

And I think that part of the interesting thing about being, you know, willing to examine a variety of aesthetics is that willingness to kind of tamp down the initial reaction you have to something and then go, "Oh, actually I see what they were doing there."

- It's a pretty common human tendency that we make judgments really fast based on a little bit of information.

And if you're thinking about something that you're experiencing for the first time, you think, "Well, how long can I hold my judgment in advance?

And not just right out of the gate say, 'That's good.

I like it.

That's not good.

I don't like it.'"

You know, when I take little kids to an art museum and there is contemporary art in there.

So we walk up to something like in the Blanton, we see a pink octagon fabric pinned to the wall, and a kid would go, "What's that?

It's not even art."

I say, "Well just wait."

And one of the things that I do with kids is I give them an alternative thing to say when they see something that's odd to them.

So what I invite them to say is, when you see something, I don't understand that at all, say, "Hmm, that's interesting.

I'll need to think about that some more."

Now, when you hear an eight-year-old say that, standing in front of modern art, you think, "What a sophisticated young child," but actually, all I've done is just delayed the judgment making, right?

- Right.

- I just said, "Well, let's have an alternative to having to decide right away."

- Mm.

- And let's just experience this a little bit and see what happens 'cause we might not think the same thing five minutes from now- - Right.

- If I don't already get closure and say that's a good thing or a bad thing.

- There's a lot of push and pull, especially with the creation of habitat and landscapes.

Doug Tallamy has written "Nature's Best Hope," which is a "New York Times" bestseller that talks about the only way we're really gonna help save the environment and the world is if within our gardens, we include about a third of habitat.

Right, that has a collective impact.

And there's a lot of push and pull because people see habitat creation as disorder or messy.

And I'm wondering how we can start to approach that in a way where we evoke a new perception.

And I like to call it sort of a creative unpredictability.

I mean, 'cause part of that's letting go.

So how does one do that?

- Well, so here's an interesting thing.

Psychologists have talked about five basic personality characteristics that go by the acronym OCEAN, and the C in OCEAN is conscientiousness, which reflects how much do you need to complete the things you start?

Are you obliged to follow the rules from a personality standpoint?

And the thing about being a gardener is it requires a fair amount of conscientiousness because gardens don't remind you of what they need.

I've always said, "I can't keep anything alive unless it begs to be fed."

And so, you need that level of conscientiousness, which means you have an appreciation for the rules, you have an appreciation for things that have a particular order to them.

And so many of the people who gravitate towards tending a garden as something that brings them a certain amount of peace have that characteristic.

And now, you're putting that at odds with an aesthetic that says, "I want you to be very conscientious in keeping this thing up, but make it look kind of a mess."

- Yeah.

- And that's hard to do because it casts against type.

And so one of the things you have to do is to recognize I can be very planful and very engaged with creating something that is itself not going to look regimented.

- I think one of the challenges of changing your aesthetic about seeing something that you normally would think of as a mess as interesting is understanding more about what relationship it has to the rest of the environment.

I think the whole thing that you mentioned about habitat, you know, it's interesting, 'cause when you first said that to me earlier before we started taping, I thought, "Well, why would habitat necessarily be messy?"

You know what I mean?

- Right.

- Because I look at some places where, I'll look at a marshland somewhere, and I think, "Well, yeah, I mean, it's a little unkempt," but I mean, basically it seems orderly in a different kind of way.

And I think human beings, we have become masterful at controlling our environment, and the idea of a sense of personal agency is a sense that I can actually act on the world and make it do my bidding, you know?

But if you think about it, well, what's the function of a habitat?

What's the function of arranging whatever plants are growing here or whatever water features or whatever are here that are actually relating to insects and birds and other animals that might exist in this environment?

Well, now you're looking through that at a somewhat different lens.

I mean, you're not just looking at it, "Does that please me visually?"

as the first and only criterion, but are there things about this that I can appreciate because of how they interact with the bigger environment?

- How can we look to foster and create a stronger relationship and acknowledge that these gardens are actually doing something that actually addresses other species?

- Well, I think in part, we have to come to recognize the value of wild things.

So cities are very ordered.

- Right.

- They're planned, at least to some degree.

And really, I think there's a certain peace that sometimes comes with being in a more open space with a little bit less noise, or at least a little bit less manufactured noise.

And so I think that we have to learn to re-appreciate that again.

And as we learn to re-appreciate that then to remember that it's not just the plants, but it's actually the entire ecosystem.

- A piece to add to that is the importance of thinking about being a better noticer.

When you see anybody who's really expert at anything, I mean, one of the things that distinguishes them is that they notice features of what they interact with that other people just wouldn't notice.

And I think a lot of times, you know, you see somebody and you say, "How could anybody be interested in that?"

'Cause I'm not interested in it.

And what you come to realize, if you spend some time with somebody who actually is interested in that thing that you're thinking about, whether it's a garden or a book or whatever, is that they point out things that escaped your notice at first blush.

And I think one of the things about habitat creation, you know, when most people think about a garden, they only think about the plants.

They don't think about insects necessarily or about birds or butterflies or those kind of things.

And once you start to notice things like that, well, now a plant takes on a different kind of dimension, right?

Because it's not just what color is the flower and what do the leaves look like and that kind of thing, but now it's actually attractive to this particular pollinator who wouldn't be in my garden unless that plant was there, right?

- Right.

- And so now there's something more to notice about this than just the visual effect of having blue stuff over there and red stuff over there and green stuff over there.

- Bob and Art, I'd like to thank you so much.

I wish we could talk for like eight more hours about this.

Now we're gonna check back in with Wizzie Brown.

(soft upbeat music) - With cooler temperatures, our minds turn to preparing our yards for upcoming frost or freezes.

If you wanna help conserve pollinators, you need to think about how they spend the winter.

Many of our native bees spend the winter as dormant mature larvae, either in the ground below the frost line or in hollow stemmed or pithy plants.

If you want to help native bees, leave foliage that falls from trees in the autumn in your yard to create an insulating layer over the soil.

You can also help cavity nesting native bees by allowing hollow stemmed plants, like blackberry, thistle, or sunflower, to remain in your yard until the weather warms up the following spring.

I typically leave any hollow stemmed plants until new growth begins pushing out the following year.

Both of these can not only help native bees, but other animals to have a cozy place to spend the winter.

The other insects that people enjoy in their yard are butterflies.

Some butterflies will migrate south to get away from cold temperatures.

The monarch butterfly is well known for this, but others, such as gulf fritillaries, painted ladies, common buckeyes, and more also migrate.

Most butterflies overwinter in our area.

They may overwinter in the egg stage, typically found near their host plant, or spend the winter as caterpillars finding sheltered areas such as leaf litter or crevices of trees.

Other butterflies overwinter as pupae in sheltered locations.

Pupae enter diapause, which halts their development.

And pupae also have the ability to use an antifreeze-like chemical that's in their blood to survive freezing temperatures.

Adding native clumping grasses, like inland sea oats or little bluestem, to the landscape cannot only add winter interest with various textures, but are also great overwintering locations for insects.

From our viewers, Chris Ostertag submitted a photo of a salt marsh moth found on their kitchen door.

This moth is what the now infamous fuzzy caterpillars that were found in fall of 2023 and spring of 2024 turn into.

Malory Smith in Elgin submitted a photo of the largest moth she's ever seen, which had a wingspan of almost five inches across.

This moth is a Polyphemus moth, which was named after the Cyclops from Greek mythology, giving a nod to the prominent eye spots.

We'd love to hear from you.

Head to CentralTexasGardner.org to send us your questions, pictures, and video.

- Next, soil health scientist, Andie Marsh, breaks down homestyle composting.

(soft upbeat music) - Howdy, I'm Andie Marsh, and I'm here to ponder the question with you today, what is compost?

To help us get started, let's start with an exercise.

When I say the word compost, what do you think of?

You might be thinking of the food scraps you collect in your kitchen, or maybe you think of a compost bin that you wheel out to the curb.

You could be thinking about an actively composting pile, or you could be thinking about the finished product.

A rich soil amendment.

I think of compost as a curated heap of decomposition, or facilitated rotting, an incubator of soil life.

I also regard it as a verb.

It's a practice and decomposition happens even if we're not facilitating it, right?

But have you ever been on a hike and you see a discarded piece of fruit off the trail?

You know, a sad looking banana peel or a dehydrated apple core?

It might take a long time for those things to weather and break down and turn into soil in that context.

But if you were to put them in the belly of an active compost, they decompose in a matter of days.

And that's the magic of composting.

Why is it that a compost pile is more efficient at decomposition than top soil?

It's in large part because of our participation.

Isn't that cool?

When we participate in the rotting process, we are curating a habitat to allow decomposers to do their job well.

And you've probably heard of the concept of a gut microbiome.

You know, the microbiome in your gut that transforms food into nutrients for your own body.

A compost is a lot like that, and it's in this way that I view composting as being distinctly different from waste management.

In a composting practice, we're not only managing waste, but we're fostering a community of vibrant soil life.

Here are my top tips for improving the soil life at home in your compost pile.

Number one, convenience.

That might seem like a funny one, but in order to steward a microbial community, you need to visit the pile often.

And to do that, your composting practice needs to be very convenient for you to access.

So if you're overthinking what system is right for your context, just go ahead and start with a heap on the ground.

It's great.

The next step I have for you is to diversify your inputs or feed stocks that go into the pile.

This one's pretty self-explanatory.

If you're trying to raise a diverse set of soil life, they're going to need a diverse set of food options available.

One tip I have for doing this at home is taking your food scraps bin, this is mine.

So when this bowl fills up with food scraps, I go to my pile, open up a hole, dump the food scraps in, and then I take that same bowl and fill it with wood chips and add that to the pile.

This allows me to maintain a variety and balance of different foods to make available to the life in the pile.

Lastly, it's important to maintain good moisture in your pile.

Here in Central Texas, the quickest way to lose your diversity inside that pile is to allow it to go dry.

To know if you have good moisture in a compost that's looking pretty broken down, like this one, you can do what's called a squeeze test.

So you hold it in your hand, squeeze, and when you unfurl your fist, it should hold its shape pretty well.

If you have a bulkier compost that's younger with a lot of twigs and food scraps, you'll squeeze it and see water pooling between your fingers.

But if it's running down your arm, that's too much water.

You can learn more about soil health and compost at my newsletter, soilissexy.substack.com.

Happy composting.

- Want more from "Central Texas Gardener"?

Follow our producer, Linda, on Instagram for behind the scenes content and go to CentralTexasGardner.org to sign up for our weekly newsletter.

As always, remember, adopt the pace of nature.

Her secret is patience.

(soft upbeat music) Central Texas Gardener is made possible by generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden.

and by Diane Land and Steve Adler.

(bright music)