The first complete, state-of-the-art organic gardening handbook for Texas

 

By María Eugenia Guerra

 

Texas Gardening the Natural Way :

The Complete Handbook.

By Howard Garrett.

Austin & London :

University of Texas Press.

2004. 396 pp., 833 color photos,

13 color illus., 6 maps,

3 line drawings.

 

 

Howard Garrett's Texas Gardening the Natural Way is a valuable and well presented resource for beginners and more advanced gardeners who want to garden in a natural, non-toxic way. Though chemical gardening can produce amazing and unnatural results, why should the birds, bees, and butterflies be collateral damage in your pursuit of greener lawns and more flowers on your ornamentals when you can follow a few basic fundamentals of organic gardening and achieve the same end?

I've been an organic gardener for decades, and it isn't just the birds, bees, and ladybugs I've obsessed about protecting. It was also the child in our home and yard, our pets, and on the bigger plane, rivers and Planet Earth. As though our children did not have enough exposure to chemicals in the air they breathe and in the very food they eat (pesticides, preservatives), why would you opt to make the yard in which they play a barefoot exposure to more chlorinated hydrocarbon chemicals?

In a city, ours, in which the concrete-lined and much degraded creeks are fast conduits for runoff to the Río Grande, think about what recent chemical application runs after a rainfall from your lawn down the curbs and streets to the creeks and then to the river and into the only source of drinking water for the two million Texans and Mexicans who live down river from us. What I really want you to think about is why you need a chemical dependent lawn that looks like a golf course when we live on the Chihuahuan Desert . There are so many excellent colorful and beautiful xeriscape plant choices that are drought and pest resistant, choices that make sense for this climate.

Off my biodegradable soap box. Here's what UT Press has to say about Texas Gardening the Natural Way :

 

This book is the first complete, state-of-the-art organic gardening handbook for Texas . Using Howard Garrett's new mainstream gardening techniques, Texas Gardening the Natural Way presents a total gardening program:

. How to plan, plant, and maintain beautiful landscapes without using chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides.

. Gardening fundamentals: soils, landscape design, planting techniques, and maintenance practices.

. Includes more native and adaptable varieties of garden and landscape plants than any other guide on the market.

. Trees: 134 species of evergreens, berry- and fruit-bearing, flowering, yellow fall color, orange fall color, and red fall color.

. Shrubs and specialty plants: 85 species for sun, shade, spring flowering, summer flowering, and treeform shrubs.

. Ground covers and vines: 51 species for sun and shade.

. Annuals and perennials: 136 species for fall color, winter color, summer color in shade and sun, and spring color. Also seeding rates for wildflowers.

. Lawn grasses: 10 species for sun and shade, with additional information on 16 native grasses, seeding rates for 32 grasses, and suggested mowing heights.

. Fruits, nuts, and vegetables: 58 species, with a vegetable planting chart and information on organic pecan and fruit tree growing, fruit varieties for Texas , grape and pecan varieties, and gardening by the moon.

. Common green manure crops: 29 crops that help enrich the soil.

. Herbs: 66 species for culinary and medicinal uses.

. Bugs: 73 types of helpful and harmful bugs, with organic remedies for pests, lists of beneficial bugs and plants that attract them, a beneficial bug release schedule, and sources for beneficial bugs.

. Plant diseases: organic treatments for 55 common problems.

. Organic methods for repelling mice, rabbits, armadillos, beavers, cats, squirrels, and deer.

. Organic management practices: watering, fertilizing, controlling weeds, releasing beneficial insects, biological controls (including bats and purple martins), and recipes for Garrett Juice, fire ant control drench, vinegar herbicide, Sick Tree Treatment, and Tree Trunk Goop.

. Average first and last freeze dates for locations around the state.

. Organic fertilizers and soil amendments: 61 varieties, including full instructions for making compost.

. Organic pest control products: 30 varieties.

. Common house plants and poisonous plants.

. Instructions for climbing vegetable structures and bat houses.

. 833 gorgeous full-color photographs.

 

Howard Garrett is a landscape architect, certified arborist, horticulturist, and organic practitioner in Dallas . He promotes his organic gardening program, "The Natural Way," through his WBAP radio and Channel 8 TV shows, weekly column in the Dallas Morning News, monthly Dirt Doctor's Dirt magazine, The Organic Manual: Natural Gardening for the 21st Century, and regional and national speaking engagements. His previous UT Press books are Plants for Texas , Dear Dirt Doctor: Questions Answered the Natural Way , Herbs for Texas (with Odena Brannam), Texas Bug Book: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and Plants of the Metroplex: Newly Revised Edition.