- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," meet three young families.

Cleo and Shea Petricek unite family and community, indoors and out, to give their young son a lifelong love of nature.

In Manor, Matthew and Charity Wottrich planned their new home's gardens to grow up alongside their first baby.

Kristen and Philip Knight are raising a family and their first garden too, where they're cultivating creativity on a budget.

So, let's get growing, right here, right now!

(uptempo cheery music) (birds chirping) Cleo and Shea Petricek designed their home and garden around family and neighborhood connectivity.

- I'm pretty artistic, I mean you could tell from my red hair and loud colors, but my husband's an engineer who also is artistic, and if I have an idea, I'll just have it, and then he can do it.

- [Narrator] When Cleo and Shea Petricek moved to Austin and designed their home in 2014, they built it around family, friends, and neighborhood engagement.

Cleo planted roses for her beloved mom, and flowers for wildlife.

Shea hand-crafts his designs in a contemporary red barn workshop, while Nigerian goats frolic on the back's steep cliff.

Mainly, they wanted to give their son, Graham, now eight, a fun inside-outside connection.

One of the things we asked the architect to do is give us a large playroom or homeschool room, but we wanted the kitchen, playroom, and outdoor space to be easy to see, easy for kids to get in and out.

So we have a big sliding door, and the house could just open up.

And then there's the nature of the lot meant that this deck had to be kind of this elevated thing above the space below.

So that created kind of a very interesting, you know, setting and then, Cleo likes to plant things everywhere.

So we worked out to have these cool planters hanging on the railing, which actually just kind of transformed the deck into this, something that instead of just feeling like, well, it's just a porch to something that really feels like an extension, you know, a real living space, so it's really, really nice.

- [Cleo] And also a place for my mom that she would sit there and watch the kids play.

- [Shea] Yeah, we have a swing under there, several swings.

- So in 1995, my mom was hit by a car the same week that I graduated high school, and before that, I always grew up with her garden.

You know, we grew up really humble beginnings.

My parents are Mexican immigrants, and my mom even brought some of her plants from Mexico to her house in Dallas, and we actually still have her plants that she brought over.

And that was something that she always taught, no matter, you know, wherever you are, and what station of life you're in, you can have a garden.

That's something that I appreciate from her, and what I wanted to replicate here, 'cause me and my sister share custody of her.

S he has brain damage, and the way that I orientated the house, and the garden, the rose garden particularly, she loves roses.

I wanted them to be for her every other month that she stayed with us, you know, she had fresh cut roses, and the house smells like the roses, and it's impressive, so that's what we did for my mom.

And I love to tell neighbors who walk children or older people about plants, because if engaging them in any way, either by learning the history or smelling them gets them to want to try it themselves that gives me so much joy, because that's what it was for me and my mom.

They give so much, given that you only have to do things for them, you know, every couple months.

The plants that require the water obviously are roses, but a lot of the other plants don't, and they give so much like passion flower.

- [Narrator] This perennial even survived the 2021 freeze to quickly ramble over ornamental trees that didn't make it.

Screening the driveway from late spring to frost, abundant flowers feed bees and butterflies.

- The Gregg's mistflower that we planted.

Another thing that I really wanted there because of, we have 100s of butterflies, the kids, they get so excited seeing all the butterflies.

There's so many plants that I wanted, the hummingbirds, and the bees, and the butterflies to have.

The frogs, we get so many animals that I've never seen before, and it's really cool that this has fostered an environment where we can have an abundance of all kinds of animals.

- [Narrator] Cleo sprinkles around colorful trinkets for even more discovery fun.

Parents and kids alike check out the little free library.

They even bring composting right out front.

- We have neighbors who bring their fruits and veggies that have gone bad in there, and it's the best dirt for our garden.

- [Narrator] To conserve water, they replaced the lawn with artificial turf, bordered with a curving strip of river rock.

They mulched around the pecan tree's wide canopy as a welcoming family friendly hangout.

- [Cleo] And for this neighborhood in particular, there isn't a park, so I wanted something that was interactive for the children, we're getting more kids in this neighborhood.

- Graham loves this, when we put this turf in, he loves to come out here in the shade on this turf, he and his friends they love to come out under this pecan tree where this soft grass is, and they'll bring Pokemon cards out here, and just spread out., it's kind of cool.

I didn't expect that.

She doesn't like fences.

She decided she didn't want anything that was too tall where you couldn't see the house.

So we don't have a fence in the front particularly, but we do have the rose trellises, which are substantial.

So you do get some separation, but you can see through it, and then between the neighbors where you'd actually want some privacy, we use the bamboo, so it doesn't feel hard, but it's actually, once the bamboo's going, it really does provide pretty much in, you can't see through anything.

So it feels very soft, and inviting, but gives you the privacy you want.

- And it's a noise barrier too.

Before the freeze, it was double that size, but you know, that is all new growth.

We had to cut it all the way to the ground early this year, but it's already, you know, picking up steam, and growing back to what it was before.

These are all babies that I tried planting in other places, but either didn't make it, or I need to baby them.

So it's basically my little ICU unit (laughs) that we look at, and see if we can recover or rehabilitate.

For my husband, he really loves to do the vegetable gardens.

- Last year I didn't have the classy looking, I just had stock tanks, but what I noticed was the metal would get so hot in the sun that I thought it was not good for the roots.

So this year, I decided to, you know, dress 'em up a little bit, and build that little wooden skirt.

I just drilled holes through two different shapes of wood, strung up on a cable, and the wood doesn't wrap all the way around, and I just attached the cable ends around behind the stock tank, with a screen door spring.

You know, it's just a facade, but it keeps the tank cool to the touch.

If you touch the metal behind that wood, it's totally cool in the summer.

It actually looks really substantial, and kind of architectural, but it's really nothing more than a bunch of scrap wood, and some screen door springs and cable.

It was kind of both to improve the appearance, and to try to improve my gardening yield on my tomatoes, which is so far been abysmal (laughs).

- This area was a backfill for a lot of the houses that were built long ago.

So there's a lot of rock back there, and we thought it would be the coolest thing for a little boy, but guess who else likes rock?

Snakes, so I thought, okay, what could we have back there that could handle animal the heat?

And you know, we can't have dogs outside all day long, they're too hot for them, but goats are desert animals, and snakes don't like that foot traffic, stomping in the yard.

So we got the goats for several reasons.

Obviously I love goats, but I also thought they could keep snakes at bay.

They love, you know, trapezing through the yard, and balancing themselves, it's so cute.

- They don't like rain.

So they, basically, this house is a bridge.

So where the lot falls off, there's this playroom just is the cover, so the house just continues.

So there's a huge area under there that's totally covered and sheltered.

We had to do all that terracing because when we, so they excavated back, and then we realized when it rained, it wasn't going to stay there, and it wasn't any real thing we could do about it.

So we just decided to do very simple, you know, steel terracing, and try to put plants down that the goats can't or won't eat, which is actually really tricky.

They eat almost everything that you want, and almost nothing that you don't want, and they eat even many cactus-type plants that are thorny they can eat.

- And most importantly, the kids and adults, everyone loves the goats.

They bring branches, they know that they can come to our yard anytime they want, and basically treat it as a playscape, or a place to enjoy and relax since we do not have a playground in this neighborhood.

- On Halloween night, we watched the cameras, we weren't in this neighborhood, but we were trick or treating elsewhere, and we watched the cameras, kids taking, going back to see the goats.

- Yeah, it was really awesome.

- It was great.

This year, people trick or treated in the daylight, so they could all come back here and see the goats.

- Yeah.

The koi pond was actually my little boy's horse tank pool that we used, and we didn't want to throw it away.

We just reused it and used it for the koi.

We use some of that water for our roses, obviously that's the best fertilizer.

- [Narrator] During the pandemic's shuttered months, Graham's fascination, curiosity, and lessons in the great outdoors grew right at home.

- I hope that it's something that when he's a young man will continue to know the beauty, and appreciate nature, and how it, it gives you this peace.

And through a pandemic that we didn't have a park to go to, so this was it, and we were able to use this as a place to nurture our soul, and, you know, we spend a lot of time working, and planning new things during that time.

And I hope that it carries for him, like it carried for me and my mom.

Wherever you are and whatever circumstance you are, you definitely have time to make, to take care of plants and to appreciate them, 'cause they give so much to you.

- Minutes after Matthew and Charity Wottrich moved into their new house in Manor, they were planning gardens to grow up with their baby on the way.

- I don't wanna say nowadays kids are just on their computers inside, but I'm a software engineer.

I understand the pull towards sitting in front of a TV, but I think it's wonderful to get outside, and reconnect with nature in a meaningful way.

I'm Matthew Wottrich.

- And I'm Charity.

- And we bought this house six months ago, so this is our second home.

This backyard garden is really cool, and it's coming along really well.

When we bought a home in February of 2020, I still had very low interest in gardening, but I bought a couple of fruit trees for my wife as a birthday gift.

- It's funny, it was actually, the first trees were a birthday gift for me, and then suddenly with him watering them, he took to gardening (laughs), and the trees became more like his prized possessions, than my birthday gifts, but I love it.

- Once we had to stay at home- - I love it.

- I was doing all of the weeding, and take care of these fruit trees, and I found that gardening was just super therapeutic.

I needed something to get away from my computer, and just get out a few times a day.

So when we bought this house in October, it was a completely empty lot, freshly laid turf, and your cookie cutter suburbs, and I am not a fan of cookie cutter suburbs, I'm not a fan of bland lawns with no weeds.

I wanted to plant something really eccentric, so that our backyard felt more like a park, rather than just, you know, somebody's yard.

And I planted out these peach trees and fig trees in kind of like symmetrical settings.

I wanted to utilize my large space in my backyard to plant a whole bunch of different things, and in order to get started with that, I needed to build a raised bed.

In Central Texas, we have this really dense clay soil, especially in these new suburbs, they bring in a lot of clay soil, which means there's a ton of drainage issues.

But I spent some time digging out a 30-foot-by-four section of my backyard, lifting up the turf, putting down a whole bunch of granite to improve drainage, so that water isn't directly touching the pine boards.

The right way to go about filling that would have been to buy high quality soil from a soil yard, and cut that with compost.

So there's 4.7 cubic yards of soil in that raised bed.

You can go to a soil yard and have them bring it to your home and kind of dump it in your driveway.

We chose not to do that, because we just moved in here six months ago.

We got an HOA.

There's people looking at homes in this neighborhood, and so.

- Yes, and you were very eager to start IT.

- I was very eager to get started right away.

What I did instead was I just bought bagged soil, and it's mostly raised bed soil, I did cut it with a little compost.

So I don't use any herbicide, anything, I do all of my weeding by hand, and we still deal with a lot of runoff.

There's a one-millimeter deep river running through our backyard.

- River (laughs)?

- And man, if you stand up and look over at the neighbor's houses, as you can see how it's sloped, and the drainage is right behind Sugar's doghouse, kind of past the fig tree, and over to the back of there.

And so that little river that's running through our yard, I wanna try to build a French drain at some point soon to channel that a little more closely.

But even the raised bed, part of the big reason I built it is because fallout from Roundup, 'cause, you know, your neighbors use super toxic, just like nuke the dandelions type stuff, and if you've got, you know, tomatoes right over there, it's gonna be a problem.

- We were able to bring some stuff from our last house in containers, 'cause at our last place we had a very small yard.

So that was that was part of the motivation for moving here to have a bigger yard, especially with a baby coming, we want a yard for our kids to be able to play in down the road.

So with the yard not being big at the last place, we have all these container things.

You've experimented a lot with growing.

He's grown sweet potatoes and potatoes in just a five-gallon buckets.

- The main reason that we're still planting things In containers is because Texas just has very unpredictable, inhospitable seasons, and in the summer we wanna be able to move our containers into partial sun, into the shade where the shade of our home can kind of protect them from the heat, and then in the winters, many of the things that I'm growing in containers are totally inclement to Texas, we bring them into our garage, and put a bunch of 10,000 lumen work lights over them, it's kind of like a makeshift winter grow station, and this winter we only lost our habanero peppers.

Our friends, Hannah and Raj, are in the process of moving, and they planted a whole bunch of things in containers, because they love gardening too, even though they don't own this home, they wanna be able to grow flowers in containers that they can take with them.

We brought pineapples back from Hawaii, so we've been growing those for about a year.

My wife and I got married in the spring of 2020, and so we had a very intimate ceremony.

It was obviously peak pandemic, and we were not able to go on an anniversary trip.

- Well, a honeymoon trip.

- A honeymoon trip, right.

- So we ended up going on an anniversary/honeymoon trip to Maui in last year, 2021.

One of the things we did was tour a pineapple farm, and they gave us these pineapple, and we ended up bringing some back, and you did an excellent job of planting them.

- So I made a couple of different YouTube videos on how I rooted the pineapple crowns that we brought back from Maui, and they've been growing for about a year now, and so here's hoping, they take about 18 years to fruit, or 18 months- - 18 years (laughs)?

- 18 months to fruit.

So here's hoping.

I think this fall we might get some pineapples.

Part of the the beauty of learning as you go is that I've made so many mistakes, and those have really helped me improve.

One of the main aspects of the hobby of gardening is watching your plants die.

- You do say that a lot.

- That's true for indoor gardening, that's true for outdoor gardening.

If you're going into it expecting to have a green thumb, expecting that all of the things you plant will turn out great, you know, it's funny, part of the reason I love gardening so much is because I started home ownership and gardening in February, March, April, and I thought, "Wow, I am really good at this."

You know- - 'Cause it was the right time to start.

- Everything I plant just turns green and produces fruit.

I should really do this more.

And then I was humbled that fall and winter when that fall was like super wet, super nasty.

And then that winter, of course, was winter moving into February 21 of the historic winter storm.

So I got to learn that like, man, probably of everything in my yard today, and everything that's still alive at the old house, that's probably 10% of the things that I've attempted to grow.

- You're working with nature, so you can't predict that it's gonna work out.

But when it does work out, I think it's very satisfying.

- Yes.

- Especially like regrowing like food scraps, like you've you've grown celery, avocado, the pineapple, obviously, from our trip to Maui, and like leeks.

- All sorts of herbs, coriander, onions.

A lot of people have this vision of it where you're like putting flowers in the ground, your trees are putting off fruit, and you're just loving it, and delighting in it, but gardening is such dirty and difficult work.

- For me personally, my love for the outdoors is less on the gardening side.

Although I love your garden, and I do help water, and those things, but nature really inspires me.

So I'm actually a writer and a painter, and so I love painting landscapes.

I think that gardens are such a awesome opportunity for learning and for sunshine and for exercise, so when our little baby, Eden, comes, I think it'll be really awesome for her to be able to run around the yard, help her dad water and things like that.

There's so much learning that can happen there, and I just think she's gonna love it.

If she doesn't love it, well (laughs), she'll definitely like, I think just appreciate, appreciate the garden space and outdoor time.

- [Matthew] We're very excited to welcome our daughter.

- New gardeners, Kristen and Phillip Knight, are cultivating creativity on a budget.

- [Narrator] Kristen and Phillip Knight are raising a family along with their first garden.

In a standard backyard, they're cultivating organic food, flowers for pollinators, and creativity on a budget.

- I was pregnant with my daughter, and when we got here, there was absolutely nothing in the backyard.

This apple tree here was just a little twig sticking out of the ground, and then we had the pear tree, but other than that, it was absolutely just grass.

The idea of edible landscaping just really captured my attention, and I think I wanted a place just for the kids to play that was colorful.

It just sort of started slowly, and went from there.

Of course, I'm a rookie gardener, so I planted right into the ground, and everything would just sort of die.

I planted right into clay.

- The first lesson, improving soil with compost.

- I joke that I ended, I think now we have a garden, but before that, it was literally just a series of science experiments, and then of course, it's just season after season, you learn more and more.

I would say the thing we bring the most in is mulch, because I do use that sheet composting process where I put some sort of barrier down, sometimes it's newspaper, sometimes it's cardboard, sometimes it's just if I have a ton of leaves, I'll put the leaves down, and then I'm basically layering the greens, and the browns, and the greens, and then if I get ahold of some manure or anything else that is just sort of a nitrogen source, I put that in there.

Then I let it just do its thing, and I cover it with mulch.

Once a year I need to go through and cut everything back, so I end up with way too much just plant material, and I don't know what to do with it.

I don't want to put it in the trash.

I'm an environmentalist at heart, and so I've got to find a place for all this stuff, and so what I do is usually try to get it chopped up into as small as pieces as possible, and I just throw it in the corner of the yard, and cover it with mulch, and that is how I get the berms that I have in the back, and you know, they're kind of ugly the first year.

You'll have a stick sticking out here, or a big leaf branch sticking out there, but by a year and a half, you've got some really good soil in there, and the plants really like being up that high, and get the good drainage.

And then when you can add the element of food or a fruit, that is just sort of the culmination of all of that, and you get to take that food into your house, and feed your family with it, and my husband is a passionate cook, so I absolutely love that I can bring him these interesting varieties.

I had a party and one of my friends was sick, and so I got to send her husband home with just a tea sample that I could just rip off.

I had some chamomile, and some hyssop, and some lemon balm, and some other mint, and that's a really good cup of tea right there, but it's also great if you have a cold, and things like that.

What I love about this garden is all the stories that are tucked in to everything, where I got certain plants.

I have a gardening friend, and he gave me a bunch of zinnia seeds, and I just sort of scattered them everywhere, and now they're popping up here and there, and it's delightful, and you know, we go to a ranch to celebrate all of our holidays, and when I'm there, if I see a plant that I think I can, That I know well enough, like, "Okay, that'll work in my yard," I just grab it, throw it in a bag, and as it blooms, it just brings back all the memories of being out there at the ranch, which are really special times for our family.

- [Narrator] To structure up for climbing plants, like a wine grape, and to break up the rectangular yard with distinct destinations, they salvaged ideas.

- I think that that's what I might enjoy most about working outside, is the creativity of trying to find some sort of solution with what I have laying around, and I've had fun creating trellises, and just things for the plants to climb up.

Almost everything back here, as I was walking around, has some story of how it ended up back here.

It's either from somebody, (slow relaxing music) or somebody didn't know what to do with it, and they figured I could use it in some way.

Every piece, it seems, has had three or four lives, as well.

The arbor that's over there used to be a trellis of something that had died, and so then I tried it somewhere else, and somewhere else, and then it ended up there.

And the same thing with what I have covering the carrots right now used to be for a chicken run.

When you come out here and it's just your space, that time to be creative, and just have fun.

And again, it's your space, and I think sometimes it's charming to give something new life in a new way.

It's part of the fun of it.

- [Narrator] Super big fun was bringing wildlife into the garden.

- I definitely wanna support the wildlife, and it's a Wildlife Habitat Certification, so I started working on that.

The plantings that I made were strategic so that I would have berries available in the winter for the bees, or for the birds, and I have ample plants for the pollinators.

And we needed a water source, and so I just took on a project to create the pond, and I always joke that this is my first pond, so now I actually know how to make one, and I really think my next pond is gonna be probably over the top, because I know what I want now, but it was a fun project.

My son helped me do it, and we've had a lot of fun, just even having the little fish in there.

- [Narrator] Their durable lawn handles foot traffic of all kinds.

They reserved pockets of rock for a corner hangout, and a strip near the patio.

- I like the look of the rock, also cleaning everybody's feet, hopefully before they head towards the house.

That's the thought, at least, but something that we've discovered that I think I wish I knew about earlier before all of the sore backs that I had, my husband has a pickup truck, and we found out about this tool.

You put down a tarp that's connected to a crank, and you basically crank the tarp off, and everything falls off the end of the pickup truck right into, we have two wheelbarrows that we both work on together, so we can empty an entire pickup truck bed in two hours.

- [Narrator] In this family neighborhood, Kristen and Phillip's garden excites both kids and their parents eager to do it themselves.

One thing friends ask, how do you do it with a full-time job, kids, and pets?

- I don't like the idea of doing things to impress other people, but I do like the idea of doing things to inspire other people, and what I love is that when I have friends come over, they see this, and they see that three years ago this was nothing, and then they say, " "Wait, okay, wait, so what are you doing?

How do you do this?"

You don't need to find time to find your joy.

I'm sneaking out here before work sometimes, because it really makes me so happy to be out here, you know, you get a great workout in the fresh air, my kids can be here with me, so I can stop doing a project, kick a soccer ball, run around with my kids.

My daughter's swinging right by me, so it's family time.

It's also great therapy.

(slow relaxing music) You know I can solve the problems of the world when I'm out here, and just working with nature, and getting the simplicity back.

It really does recharge me.

Also, it's my artistic outlet.

I just love playing with (slow relaxing music) the textures, and colors, and the animals, and then you have this idea that whatever it is you create is in constant motion.

It's gonna look different in two weeks, and then it's gonna look different in the fall, and then it's gonna look different in the winter, and so that's a really exciting, interesting challenge for your creativity.

- Find out more and watch online at centraltexasgardener.org.

Until next time, remember, adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.

(uptempo cheery music) (birds chirping) (uptempo cheery music)