“How to make a container pond in a stock tank” is consistently one of my most-viewed posts, and many readers have written to tell me they’ve made their own ponds by following my instructions. Recently two people asked me how to winterize their ponds, so I decided to explain how in part 2 of what will be a 3-part series. This spring I’ll end the series by showing how to divide pond plants and prep the pond for summer growth.

Winterizing a stock-tank pond is actually quite simple in Austin’s mild-winter climate. It involves these six steps (3 of which are really inactions):

Scoop fallen leaves
Use a net to scoop fallen leaves off the surface of your pond several times a week to keep them from sinking and decomposing in the bottom of your tank. My pond is situated near live oaks, which don’t lose their leaves until March, so my biggest leaf clean-up occurs then.

Don’t divide pond plants yet
Your water lilies and other pond plants likely grew vigorously over the summer, and you may have noticed that some of them are literally bursting out of their pots. It’s amazing what these plants are capable of. By fall, my water lilies are no longer blooming as much, and their leaves may be mottled and a bit mushy, but at the bottom of the pond they are vigorous monsters, with roots creeping out of their pots and possibly supporting a fully formed baby plant. Marginal plants that live at the top of the pond, like dwarf papyrus, may have reproduced as well, with new plants rooting from fallen stems floating in the water.

It may be tempting to divide and repot your pond plants now, since they are clearly trying so hard to reproduce, but don’t. The first hard freeze will likely turn your lilies into mush, causing them to die back to the roots. That’s fine. Just pull out any mushy stems and rotten leaf pads; they should easily come loose when you lightly tug them. In our typical mild winters, your lilies may retain leaves and even bloom occasionally through the winter. Enjoy!

Drop cold-tender plants to the bottom of the pond during hard freezes
Hard freezes won’t hurt hardy water lilies (tropical lilies may need to be overwintered indoors). But they might kill your cold-tender marginal plants, which live at the top of the pond. I’ve lost dwarf papyrus and pond crinum in hard freezes, for example. So now, when a hard freeze is predicted, I drop the pots to the bottom of the pond until the air temperature is above freezing again. In central Texas, hard freezes rarely last longer than a few hours, so I’ll pull the plants back up to their perches in the afternoon. But if we get a real doozy of a cold snap, I’ll leave them at the bottom for two or three days, and they’ll be fine—a little mushy, perhaps, but alive.

Turn off your bubbler pump or fountain during hard freezes
If you have a pump in your pond, turn it off if a hard freeze is predicted unless it’s powerful enough to keep the water from freezing. I don’t take a chance, and simply unplug mine during freezing weather. The pump itself sits a foot under the surface, so it’s not going to be damaged even if the surface of the water ices over. If your pump sits right at the surface, then drop it to the bottom of the pond or remove it so that water is not able to freeze inside it.

Stop feeding fish
I rarely feed my goldfish and gambusia fish, and they survive just fine on algae, mosquito larvae (they keep the tank clean of these pests), and my underwater plants. But if you regularly feed your fish, stop when the weather turns cool. The fish will go into a semi-dormant state over the winter, and they won’t be able to digest food properly until the water warms up again. Just let them be.

Stop fertilizing your plants
Most pond plants stop growing in cooler weather, so stop using fertilizer tablets now. From late October to early April, don’t fertilize. Resume feeding after you’ve divided your plants in spring (which I’ll cover in detail next spring).

Remember: Prepping your stock-tank pond for winter may require more extensive measures if you live in a colder climate than I do—including, perhaps, overwintering your fish indoors, unplugging your pump, and even emptying your pond for the season. The winterization that I do is sufficient for my 2-foot deep pond in my zone 8b garden.

This is part 2 of a 3-part pond series:
Part 1 — How to make a container pond in a stock tank
Part 2 — Winterizing a stock tank pond
Part 3 — How to spring clean your stock tank container pond

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

As fall dances toward us, bearing cooler temperatures and gentle rains, we Texas gardeners have before us our easiest gardening season, with almost six months to get plants established (if we plant now) before the heat of summer returns. Still, last year, with its 90 days of plus-100-degree temperatures, extreme drought, and water rationing, scared us pretty badly. We enjoyed a reprieve this summer, and recent rains, but we’re still in a drought, and summers like last year’s are bound to return with more frequency. In response, lots of us are pulling out water-starved lawn grass and laying carpets of gravel accented with the occasional agave—an extreme reaction (even for agave lovers) considering our wetter-than-desert climate and the occasional flooding rainfall that central Texas is prone to.

Addressing the difficulties and the future of gardening in what’s likely to be a warmer, drier Texas, Tom Spencer, best known as the host of KLRU’s Central Texas Gardener, gave a free talk last Saturday at the Natural Gardener entitled “The Tao of Texas Gardening: Finding the Right Balance in the Lone Star State.” I found it inspiring and useful and want to share Tom’s main points with you.

Tom began by reminding us that gardening in central Texas presents many challenges, not least to our will and our energy. While in some blessed parts of the country you can stick a plant in the ground and walk away, you just can’t do that here. Even the most well-adapted plant has to be given a good start with regular water and perhaps also the addition of its most basic need—soil—since much of central Texas has only a thin layer of soil over limestone. We’re blasted by intense summer heat, but we also have sub-freezing temps in winter. As the saying goes, we’re always in drought, with an occasional flood. Despite these difficulties, as Tom pointed out, Austin is known to be a gardening mecca, with a plethora of well-stocked independent nurseries; radio and TV shows about gardening; a popular embrace of native plants, led by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center; and nationally acclaimed garden designers like Christy Ten Eyck, Mark Word, Lauren Springer Ogden, and James David. He thinks it’s partly because Austin attracts creative people and artists in many fields, and the creation of a garden is, of course, an art.

Tom sees a metaphor for central Texas gardening in the Tao’s yin-yang symbol—a yield/resist dynamic that is echoed in our desire to create beautiful gardens in this difficult climate while simultaneously trying not to get burned out from the effort. The yin-yang is echoed too in our climatic cycles of drought and flood, oppressive summer heat and fall-through-spring relief.

Even the east-west division of Texas along the 100th meridian—also known as the dry line, east of which lies the moist Southeast, west of which lies the arid Southwest—can be imagined as a yin-yang symbol, Tom suggested. And if climate change predictions for the next 50 years are correct, the dry line—which central Texas straddles, its gardens having long included both southeastern and southwestern plants—will shift to the east, and Austin will become increasingly drier and look more like San Angelo.

And yet, rather than responding by turning our yards into graveled expanses reminiscent of Arizona, Tom counseled that we should look to the western edges of the Texas Hill Country for plants that will prove suitable to our warmer, drier climate. Take Lost Maples State Natural Area, for example, which lies three hours southwest of Austin. We can look to its hot, dry highlands for plants for our sunnier gardens, or spaces that are farther from the hose.

But we can also look to its moist, sheltered canyons for plants for our woodland gardens and shady spaces. It’s a yin-yang push and pull, Tom said, between the two types of gardening, both of which are appropriate and sustainable for our gardening future.

In practical terms, how do we prepare for a drier future, while still anticipating the occasional monsoon year that we get thanks to our proximity to the Gulf of Mexico? Tom advised amending garden beds with plenty of granite, which provides essential drainage for those drier-loving plants. For dry, high-country-style beds, he suggested amending with 75% granite sand and 25% compost, and mulching with crushed granite. For shadier, canyon-floor-style beds, he suggested reversing that mixture to 75% compost and 25% granite sand, and mulching with a woody compost blend. For top-dressing and for paths, Tom recommended coarse, crushed granite rather than fine decomposed granite, noting that fine-textured D.G. can quickly become infested with weeds, which love to grow in it. Weeds have a harder time taking hold in a looser medium of coarse granite. Visit the stoneyard to see the difference, he advised, since suppliers may use different names to refer to their various gravels. It’s easy to end up with a delivery of 15 yards of fine D.G. in your driveway when you thought you’d ordered coarse granite—in fact, that happened to him once, he said.

Retama (Parkinsonia aculeata)
For the sunny, dry gardens—the Yin—of our future, Tom recommended the following plants.
Trees: Retama, desert willow, Mexican redbud, and Anacacho orchid tree. These take full sun and provide filtered shade for smaller plants growing beneath them.
Succulents and woody lilies: Paleleaf yucca, twistleaf yucca, Agave parryi, Agave parryi truncata, red yucca (both red- and yellow-flowering kinds), and sotol. These are small enough for the average garden and very drought tolerant.
Perennials, shrubs, and annuals: Cenizo/Texas sage, agarita, Autumn sage, Mexican bush sage, flame acanthus, four-nerve daisy, blackfoot daisy, pink skullcap, rock rose, rain lily, and bluebonnet.
Ornamental and turf grasses: Mexican feathergrass and buffalograss.

Rusty blackhaw viburnum (Viburnum rufidulum)
And for the shady, canyon-floor gardens—the Yang—of our future, Tom recommended these plants.
Trees and large shrubs: Monterrey oak, chinkapin oak, Lacey oak, Texas mountain laurel, Texas redbud, Texas persimmon, yaupon holly, possumhaw holly, rusty blackhaw viburnum, Mexican plum, Mexican buckeye, flameleaf sumac, and evergreen sumac.
Perennials, small shrubs, ferns, and annuals: Fragrant sumac, Turk’s cap, spiderwort, broadleaf salvias like Salvia guaranitica, Big Bend and Hill Country columbines, river fern, oxalis, oxblood lily, spider lily, and larkspur.
Ornamental grasses: Inland sea oats, Lindheimer muhly, and Gulf muhly.

Both styles of garden look to our immediate west, and both are xeric, although the canyon-floor garden is the wetter of the two.

Buffalograss lawn in a demonstration garden at the Wildflower Center
Tom also argued that there’s a place for appropriate lawn in the Austin garden. By “appropriate” he did not mean St. Augustine, which he no longer recommends due to its water needs. Rather he meant drought-tolerant grasses like buffalograss or, presumably, Habiturf—turf grasses that subsist on little supplemental water. He pointed out that lawn is often easier to take care of than a garden full of flowering perennials, and you should balance the practicality of what you can manage with your desire to create a dream garden. Tom’s own former dream garden, beautifully documented in his blog Soul of the Garden for many years, was big, lushly planted, and the envy of many who saw it on tour. It also required 20 hours of maintenance a week, he confided. That’s more than most people can do—more, it turns out, than he could do after a while. “If you can’t take care of it,” he said, “it’s not sustainable.”

Kempson Drive Garden in Austin
Tom summed up his philosophy for the future of gardening in central Texas with the reminder to look west—the western Hill Country, not so far west as Arizona—for plants for our gardens, and with a plea to continue to “be Austin.”

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Lured west by the mystery of one of America’s lesser known national parks, we packed broad-brimmed hats, sunscreen, and several gallons of water in the trunk and left behind the crowds of SXSW last Wednesday, driving for 8 hours through increasingly open country to Big Bend. Traveling to Big Bend brings home just how big Texas is, and how varied the topography. It’s not an easy park to get to. Nearly 6 hours by car from the nearest city, El Paso (or 10-1/2 hours from Houston on the other side of the state!), Big Bend is tucked in a broad crook of the Rio Grande, the river that separates the U.S. from Mexico, in remote west Texas. From Austin you drive through the rolling, green Hill Country until it gives way to the flat, brown tableland around Ft. Stockton, and when you reach Alpine or better known Marfa you head south into the stony, mountain-rimmed Chihuahuan Desert.

Unlike so many before me, I did not fall in love with the desert. The unprotected openness, forbidding landscape, and glaring sunlight felt oppressive to me. I was awed by the vistas and hiked some of the trails, but I felt no love for the place. Until the evening, that is. Each evening as the sun dropped to the tops of the jagged hills, bathing the sun-baked landscape in a rosy glow, bright stars emerged in the vast sky, a cool breeze picked up, and I breathed a sigh of relief and appreciation. These images were taken just inside the park on our first such evening.

As you can see, the extreme drought in Texas has left its mark on Big Bend as well. Even desert plants must have water, and west Texas has not seen the recent rains that have greened up central Texas. I’d hoped to see wildflowers dotting the desert floor, but almost the only plant in bloom was the distinctive ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens), a vase-shaped collection of tall, spiny branches which are usually leafless and able to photosynthesize quite nicely without them.

After a rain they will leaf out briefly, and we did see some in full leaf on our visit, but in dry springs like this one they are able to bloom without leafing.

Ocotillo and the ubiquitous creosotebush (Larrea tridentata), two of the hardiest plants in the desert

Creosotebush fascinated me with its cheery, yellow blossoms and black-and-white striped bark.

Beautiful bare branches

Alas, not all of Big Bend’s flora has fared so well during the drought.

Everywhere plant corpses littered the ground like animal bones.

Even lechuguilla (Agave lechuguilla), found naturally only in the Chihuahuan Desert, could not cope with the utter lack of rain. Entire hillsides of this plant were bleached and dead.

It was sad to see so much loss, even in this stark, unfamiliar region. But there was beauty too, especially in the sunsets.

I’ll have more pictures from Big Bend soon with a post about the Chisos Basin, Santa Elena Canyon, and other sights. Stay tuned.

By the way, my blog Digging is a finalist for Best Gardening Blog in the Readers’ Choice Awards at About.com. I’d love to have your vote. You can vote once a day (it’s on a 24-hour cycle) until March 21. So vote early and often! Thanks for your support! (And thank you to Pamela Price for the vote graphic.) Click to VOTE.

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.