Garden
Hands in the dirt.
Native landscaping and vegetable beds in Central Texas — zone 8b, alkaline soil, a summer that wants to kill everything. Working ecology-first: replacing turf with natives, growing food year-round, learning the land one season at a time.
The best possible counterweight to distributed systems. The feedback loop is slower, the failure modes are weirder, and nothing here scales horizontally — which is exactly the point.
The wall
Documented progress.
How it started
Four years ago this was a grass lot.
The first move was two small native beds along the back fence, lined with limestone — abundant in Central Texas, free if you know where to look. As the plants established and outgrew their footprint, the two beds connected into one continuous run along the fenceline.
The garden kept pushing toward the house. Now the entire perimeter is landscaped, almost entirely with natives.
Recently joined the Native Plant Society of Texas. Mostly to stop pretending I'm not serious about this.
What's here
One bed, an orchard, and a yard gone native.
The bed
One large raised bed, built by hand. Filled Hügelkultur-style — a base of collected sticks, leaves, and yard debris that decomposes over time, holds moisture through Austin summers, and builds soil as it breaks down. The closest thing in the garden to infrastructure that maintains itself.
Typical season runs 8–13 varieties of tomato plus whatever else is in rotation. Right now: Italian sweet peppers (red and yellow), Turkish delight eggplant.
The trees
Planted in-ground around the property — separate from the raised bed.
Fruit
- ·Two figs — one Haupt (a local Central Texas variety) and one Celeste
- · One loquat
- · One Parfianka pomegranate
- · Two Methley plum trees
Ornamental & shade
- · One anacacho orchid tree
- ·One burr oak — currently about 10 feet, eventually massive
The landscape
The rest of the yard is mostly Central Texas natives — drought-tolerant, ecology-first, increasingly self-sustaining as the established plants take over.
A few tropicals break the rule (plumerias, mostly), because some things are worth the extra water.
Where it comes from
People, places, plant sources.
Tomato starts
Every season, from a close family friend who helps run Sunshine Community Gardens in central Austin. Hard to beat plants from someone who knows the soil and what grows here.
Favorite nurseries
- · The Natural Gardener
- · Site One (Pflugerville)
- · The Great Outdoors
- · Barton Springs Nursery
Inspirations
The roots run deep.
My grandparents on my mother's side maintained a beautiful English garden in Kent— the “garden of England” — and my parents were avid gardeners too. I grew up helping plant things alongside them. None of this happened by accident.
Travel adds to the file constantly. Botanical gardens are non-negotiable on most trips. Walks around the neighborhood produce more notes than I'd publicly admit.
The deeper draw: it's the antidote to a job spent in terminals all day. Garden time runs on a different clock and rewards a different kind of attention. Inheritance and escape, in one practice.
In the pipeline
More detail, season by season.
- ·Seasonal log — quarterly notes on what worked, what didn't, what's next
- ·Tools & resources — nurseries, soil amendments, the books I actually trust