- We want to attract as many hummingbirds and bees and butterflies as we can.

Hi, we are Michelle and Louis Lay and we bought our house in 2018 and we started on the garden in fall of 2019.

We started out with kind of basic builder plants, not much interest, and slowly, over years, we've been replacing the plants with native plants.

- When we first bought the house, as far as we know, it was a rental for a long time.

And so the yard was in a state that you would kind of expect.

There wasn't much here.

We had the trees, we had the Cenizo, but pretty much everything else, we ripped out and replaced.

We started with a lot of the adapted plants and we noticed that by the end of the summer, a lot of them were starting to look really bad or dying.

And so that's when we kind of made the move to all native plants because they can take the heat without us having to water it every day.

- We have mainly clay soil, but there's a variety of different conditions.

So our front yard is gently sloping down, so it is a little bit better drained.

And then there's other portions in our yard where it's a little bit of a denser clay soil.

So you really need to experiment with your plants and see which plants can tolerate that dense clay and which need better drainage.

And then a lot of parts of our yard, because we are so close to the Edwards Plateau, have a lot of limestone within the clay.

So depending on the exact location, it can be clay or a little bit rocky.

Our yard is a mix of Bermuda, Horseherb, some other random grasses.

It's too much to fight the Bermuda to get it all out.

So we just treat it as just a mix of everything in the yard and mow it as if it's, you know, a turf lawn.

I think for, you know, kinda separating stuff out, one, it's good to have a barrier to be able to mow and edge against.

- So for our foundation bed, it started out with a lot of old hedges and we didn't like that the hedges were covering up our windows and blocking our light in the house.

So we, you know, ripped all that up and kind of made the bed a little bit bigger and we started focusing on flowering perennials that would be shorter, that would give us a lot of blooms throughout the year, so that we could kind of enjoy and invite people into our space and make it look really cheery.

Starting from the left, we have some heartleaf skullcap, some native cacti, a flame acanthus, some different coneflowers.

One of the larger perennials is the Texas lantana.

We also have Engelmann daisy, which bloom in the early spring.

We have coreopsis that bloom a little later in the spring and then winecups and prairie verbena that kinda also give those continuous blooms.

And the inland sea oats on the left side gives some height over on that other side and fills in a space that's pretty moist that not a lot of other stuff will tolerate due to the gutters.

- We're fortunate that there's a preserve two blocks away from our house.

And so we would go in there, see what thrives and works in there.

And then if you can find that plant at the nursery, you know that it's likely to work in your yard.

We started out focusing really on perennials because we didn't want to have to necessarily replace our plants all the time.

We wanted lower maintenance and as time went on, we realized we also wanted those annual wildflowers to give us really, you know, fun pops of color and just add some variety.

So we've added a lot of annuals using seeds as well.

And it's a little bit more difficult to tell what's going to happen with the seeds and you have to be patient.

So it's definitely a learning process, but it's well worth it.

By the left fence, it used to just be turf grass there and we decided, "Let's use this little corner "and take some of the lawn out and put some more plants."

So we ended up cardboard mulching it for a whole season.

It was a long season of just, you know, ugly cardboard sitting there, but it did work.

We have some stuff for the hummingbirds over there.

We have the standing cypress and the mealy blue sage, which are great.

In the back corner is the evergreen sumac, which is a really beautiful evergreen shrub for here in Central Texas.

And then we have red columbine, four-nerve daisy, a Nolina and a skeleton-leaf goldeneye in the middle.

So the best time to plant native perennials and also native wildflower seeds is in the fall.

And so we try to do most of our new plantings in the fall, but we do still do some planting in the spring and even during the winter, if we can try to get away with it.

We know it's a little bit of a risk, but to really get it ready to fill out, sometimes we plant in the spring as well.

So the desert-willow strip.

So originally, that was a really large Arizona cypress that was here when we bought the house and we did really enjoy it, but we lost it in the 2021 freeze.

So when we took that out, we decided to start over, kind of keep the same boundaries that we had had where the Arizona cypress had created kind of its own little bed with its needles.

So we replaced it with the desert-willow and then kind of just surrounded it with perennials.

And then in the spring, we have lots of wildflowers to fill in.

- The woolly ironweed should be really fun when it starts blooming.

It gets bright purple blooms and attracts a lot of pollinators.

We started going to Native Plant Society local chapter meetings and started learning a lot more through that venue.

And that's been really, really helpful.

And then I also got more and more interested in volunteering and completed Texas Master Naturalist training in 2022.

So the right driveway strip started with really just that large Cenizo and a couple of Salvia greggiis.

When we first moved in, we weeded it and then over time, we just started adding to it.

It really does draw neighbors into our yard.

A lot of times, if I'm out there weeding and someone's walking their dog, they'll stop and look at the flowers and it'll start up a conversation.

Right at the curb, we have kind of a micro-prairie where we have grasses, wildflowers, a lot of prairie plants in there in front of the Cenizo.

We don't have a sprinkler system here, and it's not really practical for us to install one in this small of a yard, so we really just do everything by hand.

So that means some intensive watering, right when things are planted for about a week or two.

And then we kind of let them gradually, you know, wean off of any watering.

And so most of our plants don't get supplemental watering, other than in the middle of the summer if it's, you know, very, very dry.

As you enter into our backyard, we have two strips on either side of the sidewalk where we have dappled shade.

So we've really filled those up with a lot of dense native plants, including some hummingbird plants.

We love to attract the hummingbirds and see those every day.

My office overlooks those gardens, so it's really fun to see the birds there.

We have an area in progress that we are planning to turn into a rain garden.

Our goal with that will be to dig that out a little further, deeper and capture stormwater as it runs off.

- And that part up against the house has been another, like, trial and error area because it gets the really bad afternoon sun.

But also, when it rains, kind of the water consolidates there.

So you have to find plants that can deal with the the dryness and the sun, as well as can deal with periodic flooding.

- While the wildflowers are all really vibrant right now in the spring, in parts of the middle of summer and also in the late fall and winter, they will start to look different.

So they'll be more brown, they'll be going to seed, they might be going, you know, dormant if it's too dry.

So part of what we want to do to maintain habitat is to let those seeds be, so we don't necessarily immediately cut everything down as soon as it starts to look brown.

You can leave some of the messy parts for wildlife and still have a good relationship with your neighbors.

When I started my Instagram account for the garden, I called it @falsedayflower.

That was the first wildflower that popped up in the yard and I thought it was kind of a nice name to use for the account.

We have gotten a lot of nice, friendly feedback from our neighbors.

A lot of people enjoy seeing the wildflowers, so it creates a talking point to get to know each other and say hi and it just, you know, it's good to know that your yard is putting a smile on someone's face, you know, on their daily walk.

(gentle upbeat music)

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7sa7SZ6arn1%2BrtqWxzmidq6eeqXq6rdGdZKeZpJ7DpnnPpZinrF2stq2wy6KdnmWYlq%2BqwMCtZHFwopa2qns%3D