Read This: A garden care guide for DIYers in Central Texas

A mates years ago, Austin gardening adept Colleen Dieter handed maine a “DIY zine for DIYers” she’d written and published successful booklet form. Titled Let’s Care for Texas Plants, the 3-part bid distills Colleen’s 12+ years of acquisition arsenic a nonrecreational gardener into an easy-to-digest format for the location gardener successful Central Texas.

I enactment the booklets successful my towering to-read pile, and determination they sat — until I heard her notation her zine connected the call-in vigor amusement that she co-hosts with Leah Churner, Horticulture Hangover connected KLBJ (which I perceive to via the duo’s engaging and informative podcast, The Horticulturati). Oh yeah!, I thought. I dug the booklets retired of the heap and sat down with them implicit lunch. And I instantly wanted to stock them with section readers due to the fact that they’re packed with utile and straightforward accusation astir caring for gardens successful our uniquely challenging climate.

Let’s Care for Texas Plants consists of 3 volumes. Volume 1 is astir maintaining and improving soil, turf, and trees. It includes basal gardening info, including Colleen’s must-have tools, her compost beverage recipe, and directions connected erstwhile and however to dispersed compost and mulch. In the instauration she pithily answers the question a batch of radical person astir caring for autochthonal plants:

“Gardeners often inquire maine wherefore we should attraction for…plants that are expected to beryllium autochthonal oregon well-adapted and low-maintenance. ‘Low-maintenance’ is not the aforesaid arsenic ‘no maintenance’. In their autochthonal homes successful Texas, these plants would person been trampled by…herds of buffalo oregon burned by the regular wildfires that were a portion of this region’s ecosystem for eons. I don’t cognize astir you, but my gait lacks wildfires and herds of buffalo. So our jobs arsenic gardeners is to imitate these forces of nature. These plants won’t dice without trimming, but they won’t look bully without trimming.”

Volume 2 covers perennial care, with attraction tips for astir 30 commonly grown perennials successful Central Texas. Colleen points retired that successful our climate, immoderate perennials spell dormant successful summertime alternatively of successful winter, similar columbine, and others stay evergreen year-round, similar damianita: “This small works tin permission you scratching your caput arsenic you fig retired however to support it. It’s evergreen, making it hard to cognize erstwhile to chopped it back….[A]s it ages it starts to get ugly….It’s besides confusing due to the fact that it doesn’t look to bloom astatine the aforesaid times twelvemonth aft year.” So true!

Volume 3 is astir the attraction of ornamental grasses, bulbs, succulents and different xeric plants similar nolina and dyckia, groundcovers, and roses.

Illustrations showing however to prune plants from Let’s Care for Texas Plants

While determination aren’t photographs successful the booklets, Colleen includes elemental colour illustrations. I peculiarly similar the ones successful Volume 2 showing wherever connected a peculiar works to marque pruning cuts depending connected the season. Illustrations successful Volume 3 showing however to disagreement grasses and different plants are besides helpful.

Colleen’s zine is disposable done her website, wherever she sells people copies and a integer version. I don’t cognize if immoderate section nurseries transportation it, but they should. One proposition though: successful the adjacent printing, a clearer, simpler plan for the covers, particularly for volumes 2 and 3, would beryllium better. With the collage-style covers, I had trouble knowing what each measurement was about. A elemental illustration and accordant rubric font and benignant would beryllium easier to grasp astatine a speedy glance.

Colleen’s works attraction zine is the how-to that each caller gardener successful Central Texas needs — oregon caller homeowner, if you’ve inherited a clump of plants you person nary thought however to attraction for. As Colleen points out, “If you work dozens of books astir selecting plants for your gait and cautiously chose them from the nursery, past dutifully followed exacting planting instructions portion installing your plants, you whitethorn beryllium amazed and bewildered, arsenic I was, however small accusation determination is astir what to bash next.”

Let’s Care for Texas Plants fills that void. It’s a must-have for immoderate gardener successful Central Texas, particularly newbies. But adjacent experienced gardeners volition larn thing new.

Disclosure: Colleen Dieter gave maine a transcript of Let’s Care for Texas Plants, and I reviewed it astatine my ain discretion and without immoderate compensation. This post, arsenic with everything astatine Digging, is my idiosyncratic opinion.

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Digging Deeper

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