This is a post about how I’ve been getting into gardening, plants, biodiversity, and conservation.

Some background

I mentioned in 2023, that I had been wanting to spend more time outside, and in particular, gardening. This is partially an intuitive thing: it feels nice, rewarding, and literally awesome to be outside observing, learning about, and beginning to understand natural processes and their interactions. It’s also a logical thing: I’ve listened to a lot of www.thegreatsimplification.com over the last few years, learning about biophysical limits to economic growth, climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, plastics, etc etc etc and a way that I can see to respond to the myriad challenges described in the podcast is to get outside, gain knowledge and skills outside, meet and help others who want to do the same.

I first started gardening with a community group in the Cherrywood neighborhood in east Austin when I lived near there. I got connected with the group through a friend who ran a composting business that delivered compost to the neighborhood community gardens. The gardening group found families in the neighborhood to donate a portion of their yard and their water so the gardening group could make and maintain a garden and possibly a compost system in their yard. The homeowners and the gardeners all shared the harvest. I loved this! It was a wonderful contrast to my day job inside at a desk working with computers and the people who managed the computer systems; it was satisfying to go outside in the morning and help to grow food for our group. Perhaps best of all was that I was told my job that morning by someone who was more experienced than I was, so I was learning.

But, I eventually bought my first home in 2014 - a condo on the opposite side of town. So, I stopped gardening with the Cherrywood group. I bought some pots, soil, and plants for my patio and they all died.

I met Mar in 2015 and soon thereafter moved into her house which had a yard. We worked for years. I took over mowing the lawn since I enjoyed the task and didn’t want to pay someone anymore. Leo was born in 2018, and Nico in 2021. And somewhere along working and raising young kids, I let the St Augustine grass die from underwatering and pouring our kid pool water on it. I figured if it couldn’t sustain itself on the rain, it didn’t deserve to be in our yard. But, eventually, we were sad enough at the dead yard and wanted the kids to have a place to play in the grass, so we re-sodded with St. Augustine. A little aware of Buffalograss, I attempted to find sod installers and vendors that worked with Buffalograss sod, but it didn’t work out. So we went with St. Augustine in 2023. Also in 2023, we bought a basil plant from Green N Growing in Pflugerville and it lived well in our backyard with daily hand watering.

At the beginning of 2024, I participated in a group reflection and envisioning process facilitated by YearCompass.com. The capstone of the process was choosing a word to symbolize the upcoming year as well as a wish for the upcoming year. Here’s mine:

So, I envisioned 2024 being “the year of the garden”.

At the start of the year, I was mainly just keeping our newly re-sodded lawn watered, cut, and “weed”-free. We weren’t growing food or increasing biodiversity - but now we are! Read on to learn more :D

Establishing our food garden - Spring 2024

On the heels of the wild success of keeping one plant alive in 2023, I wanted to go bigger. But how big? We wanted to conserve part of the yard for games like soccer, frisbee, tag. I didn’t want to build a garden that was massive and not be able to maintain it. So I opted for an 8x4 raised bed for edible plants. This would be approximately 32 times bigger than the 1-plant garden we had in 2023! Here we go!

Hugelkulture in the raised bed

Nico helping make the raised bed

Local organic soil being added to the raised bed

I opted to spend money on a bed from https://www.vegogarden.com and an irrigation watering grid from https://gardeninminutes.com/ rather than build the bed and irrigation myself. I’m very pleased with these purchases since they let me focus on plants in the early days. Initially I planted potatoes, spinach, onions, carrots, chard, and garlic chives and also homed about 250 red wigglers in an in-bed worm compost bin.

The watering grid working

A photo of the garden in spring 2024

A drawing of the garden layout in spring 2024

Inviting beneficial insects to the garden - Spring 2024

Pretty quickly into growing vegetables, I saw evidence of something eating my spinach and chard leaves. After doing a little research, and looking around in the soil and mulch in the garden, I found armyworms.

Armyworm in the garden

I learned that armyworms do eat these plant leaves! How dare they! Trying to garden organically, I started learning about natural pest management approaches and found beneficial insects to be an interesting option. The book I referred to the most was “Attracting Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden” by Jessica Walliser. I learned that certain plants (cosmos, heliopsis, goldenrod, daisies and more) and designs (e.g. interplanting, hedgerows, etc) will attract insects which eat or otherwise get rid of the pests. So, I set off to find some of these plants around town that would attract insects like ladybugs, lacewings, assassin bugs, tachinid flies as “pest managers” and also attract other beneficial insects and pollinators like butterflies and bees. The garden expanded from a garden “for people” to a garden “for people and other animals” - an expansion that wasn’t explicitly in mind for the garden from the start, but a product of my desires to learn how to produce a yield with organic approaches. To feed and shelter the other animals, we added cosmos, marigold, zinnia, common yarrow, cilantro, dill, Gregg’s mistflower, fall aster, Mexican honeysuckle. For the humans, we added Mexican oregano, oregano and basil. I did see an increase in ladybugs, assassin bugs, robber flies and lacewings in the garden. Ironically in one case, I found aphids on some cosmos - a plant meant to attract ladybugs. And they did! I just didn’t think it’d be by attracting aphids to cosmos and thereby giving ladybugs aphid meals :) Anyways, I was grateful to notice “beneficial” insects more.

Northeastern Hammertail, a robberfly, in the garden

A drawing of the garden layout in summer 2024, with added plants to attract “beneficial insects”

A photo of the garden in fall 2024

A drawing of the garden layout in fall 2024

Learning in community - Summer 2024

In parallel to re-starting gardening, I’ve been a guide with www.familiesinnature.org for a few years now. At the guide summit in April 2023, I was in awe at people’s ability to discuss the plants we saw on our hike. I learned about a really cool phone app called Seek - https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app - which helps you identify plants, fungi, and animals. At a big Families In Nature event at McKinney Falls in April 2024, right when I was starting the garden at home, I reconnected with the founder of The Monarch Sanctuary Project who I had met at an event 2 years earlier. I was also introduced to the Xerces Society which focuses on conserving invertebrates. More connections into the conservation world.

Among other things, Xerces Society taught me to keep the leaves in the yard in some way

A call for help was sent out to our kids’ school community to establish gardens. It was one of those moments in life where you know you have to do it. My YearCompass “year of the garden” intention, my learnings from www.thegreatsimplification.com and wanting to take action to set the world on a better course, my recent experiences with irrigation, garden beds, and basic gardening. My free time. The experiences were coming together with the intention to manifest a new part of my life.

So, of course, both Mar and I responded saying we’d like to help. I ended up joining as an organizer, helped us build the initial garden beds, setup and manage the irrigation system, helped kids make seed balls, plant food, plant native perennials, get students out into the gardens and more. Through this school garden project, I’ve met many new friends, learned so much about plants, and even got exposed to the importance of native plants.

A few of the beds at the school garden in fall 2025

Adding a nice smelling plant for the kids - Summer 2024

Part of the potato harvest in summer 2024

In summer 2024, after the kids smelled some new hand soap, we got a star jasmine plant because the kids liked the way the soap smelled, and the idea of a fragrant blooming beauty on our porch sounded incredible. We went up to Green N Growing in Pflugerville to see if they had any Jasmine. They helped me learn about Star Jasmine and showed that it “did well” in Austin per the city’s guide on native and adapted plants. I bought some thick wire fence and borrowed a stronger wire cutter from a friend to make a simple trellis for the vining jasmine. During winter, I loathed the star jasmine’s inability to withstand the freeze without dying back as I wrapped it during our few freeze spells. But, it did bloom and smell nice in spring 2025 :D Though maybe not enough for my effort.

Learning about native plants - Fall & Winter 2024

In the fall of 2024, I planted again with a heavier focus on natives and density. I made a new 6x3 raised bed in the backyard for Native American Seed’s Butterfly Retreat Mix which contains a mix of Texas native wildflowers, and their Shade Friendly Wildflower Mix in our front garden and surrounding our front trees. I also edited the 8x4 edible garden and planted collards, kale, cauliflower, dill, onion, Mexican mint marigold, peas, pinto beans, radish, beets, cilantro, parsley and soooooo much carlic. Some of these plants were for the humans AND other life - like cilantro, dill, parsley attract natural pest controllers and/or pollinators. The Butterfly Retreat garden germinated with pink evening primrose, winecup, bluebonnets, and lemon mint.

The butterfly retreat garden in Spring 2025

Unfortunately, the Shade Friendly Wildflowers in the shade had only 2 plants germinate. I wonder if the Shade Friendly Wildflowers were too shaded, or were eroded away by the neighborhood cats and gentle downslope of the land there or just need more time to germinate in a following season.

Also in the fall of 2024, we had our house slab foundation piered and lifted, and during this work two of our three Burford Holly bushes (native to China) had to be removed temporarily, and didn’t recover after re-planting. While a little sad to lose the plants that have done so well, I was excited to learn about native shade friendly plants to replace them.

So I went researching! In January 2025, I read parts of Native Texas Plants by Wasowski & Wasowski, and parts of Landscaping with Native Plants of Texas by Oxford Miller. I also found the Native Prairies Association of Texas had Nine Natives booklets. From there, I had two great lists of shade friendly plants - one with Texas native from the Nine Native booklets, and one with Texas Blackland Prairie natives. I had heard about Native Plant Society of Texas through a school garden colleague and found their fabulous database to be wildly helpful, in particular because I could search by ecoregion. I also used the Wildflower Center database when the NPSOT database didn’t have a plant. In February 2025, I took a 90 minute course from Ben Vogt titled “Natural Designs for Small Gardens”.

Also in February 2025, I started volunteering for the Native Plant Rescue Project. At my first event, we translocated remnant native prairie - a first in Texas. At my second event, we rescued plants before development from a few acre remnant native prairie and I learned a little about the rescuing process. I was able to transplant these rescues to the school garden, making a new area for native plants, and my new sunny parkway garden at home. And I’ve been on numerous other rescues since those early ones. If I get plants, I generally bring half to the school. I’ve also done seed collecting rescues. Sometimes rescues are of common native plants, but other times, they’re of a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Species of Greatest Conservation Need. I’m very happy that this project exists and I can help conserve these species and ecotypes.

Rescuing remnant native prairie

As I researched and learned, I realized I would be overhauling the entire front garden with a few goals in mind:

• Relocate sun-hungry plants to a full sun spot
• Add shade-friendly plants which are native to our ecoregion (Texas Blacklands Prarie)
• Plant densely to have the most plants and the most wildlife habitat and to mainly outcompete the “weeds” (using a matrix design that Ben Vogt teaches)
• Plants should have similar self-propagation intensities so one doesn’t eventually overpower the others (Ben Vogt refers to this as sociability), similar heights (but not all the same), variety of bloom months, variety of colors, low/medium water requirements

Planting natives - Spring 2025

With those ideas and seed/plant availability, I planted stuff in Spring 2025.

I got seeds from Native American Seed

• American beautyberry - red, purple - shade friendly
• frostweed - white - shade
• scarlet sage - red - shade
• gayfeather - purple, white - sun
• black samson - purple, pink - sun

All of these seeds came in packets which said they could be spring planted without stratification. However only 2 of these sprouted by April 2025, so I added more seed and put a little bit of soil on top of them to hopefully keep them in place and not wash away, in case that’s what happened to the previous seeds. But only the scarlet sage germinated. Perhaps these really needed to be planted in the fall so they could stratify through the winter – I’ll try again then.

I got plants from Greensleeve’s

• Cherokee sedge - green - shade
• heartleaf skullcap - purple - shade
• lyreleaf sage - blue, purple - shade
• white avens - white - shade

Part of the front yard overhaul was removing grass near the street and moving the sun-hungry red yucca, plumbago, and purple iris near the street. Since there was some extra space, I also planted some Mexican mint marigold (yellow) and native wildflowers (western ironweed - purple, gayfeather - purple/white, and black samson - purple/pink) - most of which didn’t germinate. Transplants of native wildflowers did well - gayfeather, autumn sage, firewheel, mealy blue sage.

The parkway garden in summer 2025

The parkway garden in fall 2025

The gayfeather, Liatris punctata, this a native rescue from a nearby remnant prairie, attracting bees in October 2025

Of course we planted food again in spring 2025: eggplant, poblano peppers, basil, watermelon, cantaloupe, pinto beans, butternut squash, spinach. And our Swiss chard from a year ago is still going strong!

A drawing of the garden layout in spring 2025

Reflections

Our plants are growing

I feel grateful that gardening has helped me meet my needs for being outside, connecting with people, and learning. I find myself engrossed with plants all around me - I notice the grass and bluebonnets bursting from our nearly spring medians, I gander at the vines draping down the railings outside of my gym, I see trees blooming, I pause and exclaim when I see butterflies, I wonder what plants are that I’ve never seen. I talk about plants and gardening with gobs more people now than before. Earlier this week Luke asked what was on my mind lately, drumroll, shady native plants. Suffice it to say, plants are growing on me.

Support natives

I started into our first year of gardening without much knowledge, and especially none of native plants. I was coming from a food crop perspective, which had me initially looking at which food plants could grow here like basil and spinach. Thanks to influences of plant and animal nerds I have the pleasure of knowing, my plant lenses expanded. Plants in my yard aren’t just for my hobby, they aren’t just for the pleasure of the humans in my family. They CAN be supportive to life near my yard. Having a densely interplanted garden provides habitat and food for invertebrates. Birds visit the yard to snack on plants and bugs. And so on and so on, the biodiversity helps balance the ecosystem.

Native plants have been in the area for much longer than we have. Native plants along with the insects and wildlife they support are much more adapted to our place than introduced plants. Native plants just need less after establishing - less water, no fertilizer, less covering during freezes, etc.

I now see and honor the more realistic role of plants in the intertwined webs of life, supporting biodiversity and ecosystems, rather than simply as food for humans. So, I’m adding as much native biodiversity as I can.

Year of the

If 2024 was the year of the garden. 2025 was the year of native plants. And maybe 2026 is the year of native grasses :)

A poem

I wrote my first poem in a long time. Can you guess the topic? Plants: The undoing

Rhizomes, sociability

Two of the plants we planted in our backyard were perennial Texas natives - Gregg’s mistflower and fall aster - but were too big to fit into the veggie garden, so I put them in a rectangular pot. They got really dry and sad in the summer, but came back to life in the fall, especially with more water. In hindsight, now in spring 2025, I’m so glad I kept these out of the veggie bed since they both have spread quite vigorously away from the spot of their original roots in the pot. I think they’d do better in the ground, to let them take over. There are a few areas of the St. Augustine which get a lot of sun and the sprinkler system has a harder time reaching. Maybe I’ll put these natives there where they can expand more and more to help me reduce our St. Augustine footprint.

To raise the bed or not

The native wildflower Butterfly Retreat raised bed rusted. So, I let the manufacturer know, and they sent me a new bed! How awesome. I need to leave them a great review.

So, now I’m wondering if I should bother replacing the raised bed. The natives I’ve been planting in the front yard are doing fine in the ground. Maybe I’ll remove the raised bed from the native wildflowers and spread the soil and seed bed out onto the ground. To be determined!

Weeds

In our Butterfly Retreat native wildflower raised bed, I was watching some Maximillian Sunflower grow so tall. It was almost 7 or 8 feet tall! I even added a stake for one which was leaning. Then I sent a photo of it to a native plant friend and they taught me that it was, in fact, an invasive weed - horse weed. WHAT? I had staked a weed!? How did it get there? From the native seed packet? Did I expose a seed from the seed bed when preparing the raised bed? Did it just float into the yard? We’ll probably never know. But, in anger I cut it out of the bed. And then remembering a conversation I heard on the Prairie Pod, I looked into the uses of the plant - even though it’s invasive here, maybe it has some uses that were beneficial in it’s native environment. Sure enough there are plenty. How conflicting is all of this? Is it a weed or not? I surely see it taking over fields around town, crowding out the balance of the local plants.

Additionally, I’ve become well aware of johnsongrass and KR bluestem. Two other invasives in the area which are prevalent in disturbed sites - roadsides, construction areas, etc. I was so pleased to see a decent biodiversity of native in the median on Parmer Lane in Tech Ridge from spring through summer. The city let the plants grow until mowing in early September. A sad day when I couldn’t watch the sideoats grama or little bluestem anymore. But, I can see both of them coming back. But I can also see KR bluestem and bermudagrass coming back faster and denser - it makes me wonder how many more times the natives can be cut back before the invasives crowd out the natives. Time will tell me.

Appendix

My life, my writing, and my interpretation of reality is influenced by my environment. So, here is some of what was going on around me during writing of this post:

Consuming

• (podcast) The Great Simplification - systems thinking, energy, toxicity, climate change, species loss, meaning crisis, etc
• (podcast) The Prairie Pod - a conservation podcast from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and The Nature Conservancy
• The various books and websites referenced throughout the post

Doing

• Climbing
• Soccer
• Rescuing native plants
• Gardening at the kids’ school

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