– We didn’t really know exactly what we were doing, but we did know what we wanted.
– Gardening to us is working with what Mother Nature allows, and there are a lotta plants that we’ve tried and most have made it, not all do.
I think you have to keep an open mind about what you want out of a garden.
– Well, my name’s Kat Sherby.
We wanted to have kind of an in town countryside look and feel to this home.
– We moved in in 2008, and we didn’t buy the house because we loved the house, we loved the neighborhood.
We’re fortunate to have about an acre of land, and coming from our previous home of 10 acres, which was a lot to manage, this gave us just enough of a, we can do a lot with this.
And so, there was very little done to the land we moved in, but we knew we wanted to be more Texas, native Central Texas landscape specific, and just add onto it little by little every year.
Our soil composition here is clay in the front and caliche in the back, so we have to amend our soil virtually every spot, which is kinda fun to me anyway.
I like to mix and match and specific to the plant.
We had a slope on one side of our house that water would drain towards the house, so we built in a berm to direct the water around the house.
We put in a pathway to help also drain water away from the house and just try to work with what Mother Nature is gonna send us.
We like a habitat that will encourage swallowtails, monarchs to come through, hummingbirds.
We plant flowers that are red in nature because that’s what attracts hummingbirds, and we’re happy to see the same results year after year.
We enjoy putting our heads together and coming up with a plan for this specific bed or that bed, and then, Kat will have her garden bed that she wants to do, and I’ll have my separate garden bed that I wanna do.
And, that’s what makes it fun.
We work together really well, but we also like to do separate and have my thing and Kat’s thing, so.
Started gardening as a young child.
It was because my mom would be like, “Okay, put the plant here, “and this tree goes there and that goes there.”
So I got a lotta early gardening experience from I think my mom just because that was the weekend and that’s what she did.
When I went back to see my childhood home decades later, all the little trees that I put in at this big were now like, 40, 50′ tall.
I said, “Wow, that, that really worked, good for you mom.”
Also, when I met Kat 31 years ago, she had a gardening thumb, and I took inspiration from that as well.
– My keyhole garden is a galvanized aluminum tub that is filled with garden soil, and a tube goes down into the middle of it.
It’s a tube made of screen, so that when we put the compost into the tube, the compost decomposes and feeds plants from below.
We even put in cardboard, so that it could decompose and then put the soil on top of that.
Then you can plant anything you want.
– One of the gardens that we have is an herb garden, and I started the herb garden because I wanted to have fresh herbs for cocktails.
(both laugh) So I planted some fennel and certainly, basil and sage and.
– [Kat] Mint.
– Yeah, mint for sure.
We make our own composts because we’re believers in recycling, and virtually everything that comes out of kitchen that’s fresh, that’s green, that’s leafy, coffee grounds, goes into our tumbler, and it’s a two-sided vessel.
One side is what we transfer the cooked compost into, so we are always taking from that and spreading that around into our gardens.
I like to collect seeds and propagate plants from seed because I enjoy the whole process of gardening from start to finish.
We take our dogs to neighborhood parks quite a bit, and there are some times during parts of the year where the flowers are blooming, and I’ll make a mental note of that and will go back later, when the seeds are starting to replicate themselves, and I’ll collect seeds from around our neighborhood from plants that I admire.
And I have a potting shed.
I’ll put them in jars and containers and propagate the seeds from there.
A lot of the canna lilies that we have, a lot of the flame acanthus, a lot of plants that we have came from seed.
It kind of goes back to my childhood science background, when you’re learning about nature and how science works and how nature works, and that’s always fun for me.
There’s a point where Kat will ask me, “What’s in that pot?”
And I go, “I don’t know.”
We have harvested rainwater for gardening and personal use for decades.
When we lived out by Hamilton Pool, we converted from well water into a rainwater collection system.
When we moved here, it was probably the one thing that I knew we wanted to do, and so when we did a remodel on our house, we did part of our roof in a galvanized aluminum roofing.
But we collect off of all surfaces, including a typical asphalt shingle collection.
We use all of our rainwater for gardening at this point.
We have three different tanks.
We have two 1500 gallon tanks, and we have another 1000 gallon tank, so we have 4,000 gallons.
Our rainwater system is split between a gravity feed with a hose, and then the other two tanks are on a pump system, but also through a hose.
The house came with a irrigation system, but we don’t typically use it.
And plants just respond so much better to rainwater than they do City of Austin water, and we like the idea that we’re not using our drinking water to keep our plants alive.
– We like our cowboy pool because it’s so refreshing in the summertime in the brutal Texas heat.
We like to have a cocktail in the pool, around the pool.
The pool has a pump that circulates, and sometimes, I get in there on my float and just float around in the pool, it’s wonderful.
And it is just a blessing in this Texas heat.
Well, the outdoors for me is such a playground.
The Merlin app is a great resource for recording birds in your environment.
In a half an hour this summer when there was a migration going on, I recorded 16 different birds in 30 minutes on the Merlin app, and it is just fantastic.
And when the pandemic arose, it was like I didn’t go anywhere, but there was so much to draw and paint and appreciate in our own backyard that I could just be out there every day.
Sometimes I would go out and sit in the gardens and just draw little line drawings of all the flowers, and then I would make cards out of those, or I even sold some online.
And have had a lot of success in just letting people know about what I’ve been doing and how much they appreciate it.
It’s been so rewarding for me.
– When someone is contemplating a garden, there are a lotta things that go into it, in terms of what you have to do to manipulate the land, the kinda plants you’re gonna put into it, the kinda plants you’re not gonna put into it, the amount of time that you have to spend on your garden.
What I love about our gardens is they give us a place to contemplate.
The gardens that we have are specific to us.
I think that’s the beauty of gardening is you can make it whatever you want.
I would suggest to anybody, if you’re contemplating on starting a garden, is to make a list of what you wanna get out of it.
I’ve seen many gardens in “Architectural Digest” and related magazines, that are nothing but stone and rock and a chair to relax in and have a cup of tea.
It doesn’t always have to be chock full of plants.
We love it because of the give back to nature, when we have hummingbirds and monarchs and swallowtails and anoles and the lizards and everybody that we see interacting out there, certainly bees, that gives us joy.
That’s a garden that’s specific to us.
It doesn’t have to be that for everybody.
I think when you get into thinking about a garden or designing a space, make sure you put into it what you wanna get out of it.
It doesn’t have to be the same as your neighbors.
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