North Texas Garden Tour - Zone 8a - Dallas/Fort Worth |
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- Опубліковано 17 тра 2023
- This past weekend, we were a host garden to a citywide Garden Tour. We had many people from the community come and tour our garden. We thought it would be fun to invite you and bring you along to see the garden spaces that we have created over the past few years. We use organic and permaculture practices wherever we can - including companion planting, hügelkultur, and food forest techniques; like using nitrogen fixing plants around many of our trees and shrubs.
Interested in what you can grow in the North Texas - zone 8a - area? We often plant some things that you might not find in other gardens. We have a "Fig Forest", a beautiful hugelkultur mound that is planted with many Texas Native plants, raised vegetable and flower beds constructed using the same hügelkultur method as our pollinator friendly hugel-mound. Other things that the garden has is Blueberries, Strawberries, Peach, Plum, Apricot, and Fig trees... you might even spot a serviceberry tree is you have a keen eye.
We also have bees - both honeybees and native bees in our garden - a you might spot a special guest appearance by one of our garden guardians - that provides one of the best sources of organic pest control.
We hope you'll come along and enjoy our North Texas garden tour!
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Some links to other videos that we mention along the way in the tour:
- How to Make Lemon Basil Tea
• How to make Lemon Basi...
- How we created our hugelkultur mound
• How We Built a HugelKu...
When finished, this garden will be about 1/2 acre in size. Each year we add a bit more. We wait for the hot weather to use solarization and occultation to kill the Bermuda grass and field weeds like bindweed. We hope you enjoy the tour! If you have any questions on anything you see, leave them in a comment down below.
Your garden is beautiful. This video is very information for natives of North Texas. Thank you for sharing!
Thank You!!! It is a work in progress - and so many more projects yet to come. We really appreciate you for taking the time to watch and leave this comment!
Great video! Really instructive and inspirational. Thank you for posting!
Thank You soo much! We truly appreciate that you took the time to watch the video and comment.
Wow! Beautiful gardens! You moved an entire garden!?!
Thank you… it’s a work in progress… yep!!! We moved an entire raised bed garden… veggies, soil, and all…. 😀
Oh my goodness your garden is soo beautiful!!! Love it!!! 😊💗
Thank You!!! It's definitely a work in process (and occasionally progress)... 😀 So much nicer than when we started, but still a long ways to go.
I loved the garden tour! You’ve inspired me to add flowers to my garden 🌻
Thank you… we really enjoy having the flowers and it helps to bring in the pollinators.
lovely garden
Thank you… it’s always changing and growing (expanding). We appreciate you stopping by and commenting.
Hello. 🌿 Your garden looks beautiful. Your flowers are way ahead of mine. My zinnas have not bloomed. My sunflowers are tall but have not bloomed either. I love your raised beds. Your trellis's are very cool. Nice setup. 🌷 Have a blessed day. 🪻
Thank you Gail… it’s a work in progress… still lots to do.
Looks awesome! Thanks for the tour
Thank you!!! We love sharing (and showing) the garden. It’s been a bit of work (so much more to come)…
Re-watched full length as I was all caught up wih your videos!
You're the best! We've got lots of things in the works... it's just taking time to put everything together. Several videos coming out in the next week. 😀
@@TwoDovesBees
Hello from the Texarkana area! You popped up on my feed as I was searching for Zone 8 Planting ideas. What a WONDERFUL garden you have! Thank you for the fabulous tour! I also follow Roots and Refuge. New subscriber
Thank you so much! We are so glad you enjoyed our garden. We’re working hard on expanding our garden spaces (tough in this heat that we have now). Jess and Miah seem to be such genuine people and we enjoy a lot of what they do.
@@TwoDovesBees - I am now the PROUD Gardner of 3 tomato plants, 4 peppers, and 4 Vinca’s in containers 😝
Loved this tour Sarah. I need to find out about blueberries - something i dont grow yet. yes all figs are very different - we have a few different ones here. I love the whole layout of your garden areas. SO TIDY! My friend did Seven sisters. My pest control is ghekos, hedgehogs, cameleons and praying mantis! Much love and growing success!
Thank you! Blueberries are well worth the effort-so yummy! And you don’t have to wait long for fruit…ours started producing after one year. I like your garden too! I love all the fruit trees! Wishing you joy in your gardening adventures!
@@TwoDovesBees Thats helpful info. Thank you
Does anybody want this??? Duh! Lucky you
We still have lots to do, but it’s getting there. Appreciate you!!!
Would you be willing to share some elderberry cuttings? I live in DeSoto. I would love to see your garden sometime! I grew up in Ft. Worth.
We love sharing plants with people... and we love sharing our garden (although, the garden is fading at this time of the year). We just put in a new small bed for onions (and still have to find a place for quite a few more). We're also in the process of expanding the garden spaces (working on the next section for our fig forest and putting out tarps to kill more of the Bermuda grass for the next raised beds, etc.). We have two large elderberry bushes (which keep expanding themselves) and we can easily manage some cuttings. Do you ever make up this way? We're in Wylie...
I live in zone 8 North DFW. That area behind you along the tree line looks like 99% shade, with perhaps 1% dappled sun getting through. I have a 7 foot fence and a giant healthy Oak tree right in the middle of my back yard. I have been planting various dense shade grass seeds over the years, it comes in great and dies as soon as the summer heat arrives even though the area is 100% dappled shade or 100% shade. It sprouts up, I get excited, then it flops over and dies. In order of preference, but any option will do, I am looking for a dense shade 1) turf/grass 2) low height ground cover or 3) a plant that can take over under my giant oak tree in the backyard. Over the course of a day, I would say a square foot under the tree gets 1 total hour of sun as it moves overhead and some light is allowed through. Any suggestions?
Hello!!! That is a really tough one here for North Texas... and the answers for that type of location is doubly hard for a couple of reasons. All turf grasses that we're aware of require more sunlight than the oaks will let through... Depending on the type of oak the situation can be even more of a problem for any turf (namely Live Oaks - because their leaves take much longer to break down). We've got a stand of 3 very large Live Oaks in one part of our yard and it's similar to what you describe... not enough sunlight for grasses to grow. The common things that we've seen are to thin the branches of the trees to allow a bit more sunlight to come in - which can be done and look really good - but it needs to be done with an arborist that know what they are doing... that alone probably still won't let enough light to come down to the grasses to establish a vibrant lawn. A common plant that many use for this type of space is ajuga (very common) or pachysandra (less common)... We've seen some beautiful spaces created under oak trees where large planting beds were used in combination with those plants and other shade lovers... but it's a tough nut to crack.
@@TwoDovesBees Well now you have me thinking about something I hadn't considered yet was staring me in the face. This happens to be a Burr Oak. Each year it drops 20 bags worth of lawn-mower-mulched leaves. For years I mowed them up and sent them to the dump. This bothered me so for 15 years I have been cold composting them along with other stuff. Ajuga looks to be a good candidate for getting something to grow (so thank you for the idea), so many leaves would fall on them annually and I couldn't imagine collecting the leaves from "betwixt" about 200 square feet of ajuga. I have tried dense shade grass seed mixes, I get about 1% seeds that survive after initially sprouting like champions. When the heat comes, even though HEAVY shade, they all die. Just this year I had the Burr Oak thinned and raised, but that will probably only help a little and allow some St. Augustine to encroach/expand a bit more. However, I looked at pachysandra just now and it is now a top contender. Looks like the kind of plant I was envisioning. Thanks for tips!
@@snackymcgoo1539 - So glad to offer some ideas... It's definitely one of those things... We love beautiful trees and the shade they provide, but they can be a real challenge to try to grow things under (especially any type of turf grass). Good Luck... let us know how it comes out.
Can we plant brown turkey on the ground in zone 8a. And will it survive winter with out protection?
Also have blueberry in pot, can I plant it in the ground and would it survive zone 8a winter without protecting it?
We have 13 different fig trees in the ground (including a brown turkey). Fig trees can typically take the cold down to about 20f degrees. If we get temps 20f or less, we wrap the trees in either bubble wrap or with a tarp and then remove the wrap when the temp gets back to 20f or higher. We have one tree that is too big to wrap and it's survived for about 14 years without dying back to the ground (although I did cut it to the ground myself when we had that record breaking cold weather a few years ago).
If you have soil that is acidic enough to put the blueberry in the ground, it should have no problem surviving the zone 8a weather without protection. The key is the make sure the soil pH is right for the bush (they like the soil to be in the 4.5 to 5.5 pH range). Here in north Texas our soil is more alkaline and not good for putting blueberries into the native soil.
@@TwoDovesBees Thanks Ma’am for your reply. Will do accordingly.