Ah, it’s springtime in Texas. After our recent deep Texas freeze of 2021, we’ve been walking around the neighborhood, looking at which plants survived and which ones collapsed in our little microclimate of Central Austin. Normally we pay the most attention to which plants can survive our crazy central Texas dry summer heat: that heat that can fry the hair off your head or an egg on the sidewalk. But this year, with our worst freeze in 10 years, we lost a lot of our heat-tolerant plants. Since we plant according to three gardening types: Native, Xeriscape and Permaculture, it was interesting to see how our sustainable gardening survived the new curveball.
We started our gardening life with Permaculture, though we didn’t know the name back then. Permaculture comes from the combined words “permanent” and “agriculture” and refers to plants that both provide food and are perennials, such as grapevines, fruit trees, sweet potatoes and more. It’s long term planting, and great for lazy gardeners like myself that don’t want to put in new plants every year. But a lot of our permaculture plants also come from climates that are more subtropical than ours. So far, it looks like all of our sweet potato plants didn’t survive- no surprise there, and they’re easy to restart. Our spineless opuntia cactus with edible pads and fruit survived well, as it’s also a native, but the Mediterranean Opuntia Cactus collapsed and melted into the ground as a sad, limp dead expat. The peach tree looks alive, and hopefully also had enough frost hours this year to set fruit. All of our herbs are gone: peppermint, lemongrass, rosemary, baslil and anything else I had hoped to nurture through the winter. I’m replanting new sunchokes, ginger and potatoes now, to fill our empty pots and spots in the yard. I had thought that all of my loquat and pecan tree seedlings made it, but now the leaves have fallen off. I’m watching those and waiting….
Some years ago, we started adding more native plants into our landscape. I prefer natives that we can eat such as the prickly pear opuntia mentioned above, but any native landscape should be easier on our limited water supply, and handle the temperature extremes, also. Our huge agave unfortunately looks only partially alive, and only at the center of the base. The spiny edged agaves did better than those with smooth edges, so it’s possible some of our native agaves are used to more southern ranges. Our Chile Pequin bush looks dead and shriveled after the snowstorm; I hope it comes back – it’s another edible local native plant. The Indigo Salvias are putting out leaves again, but this storm seems to have killed my Red Sage Salvias. I’m also surprised to see my Turks Cap totally dead. The Red Yuccas are doing great, though; I’m dividing those and planting more.
Our third gardening type is Xeriscape gardening- this term was coined in Colorado when local governments were urging residents to use landscaping plants that didn’t require supplemental watering in the dry climate. While we always try to find native, xeriscape, perennial, edible plants, we are happy to find non-invasive, non-poisonous, low water plants. Our oxalis was in bloom when the snow came, and then popped right back into bloom when the snow melted. Our dandelions are the same. Too many people spray their yards to get rid of these pretty flowers and consider these edibles “weeds”, but they are worth more than any standard lawn! Some also may consider dandelions invasive, but it’s way too nutritious for that: Eat the weeds! Our other Texas cactus plants did fine, and didn’t melt. Our Mexican Ruella looks dead and terrible, but it’s borderline invasive, so I won’t assume it’s dead yet. Most of our Aloe Veras seem dead, but some pups are peeking out from under some melted, limp, dead aloes.
Overall, we lost some plants, and our dishwasher. Those have been our medium term effects from the Texas Snowmageddon of 2021 so far. And with our learnings from this extreme weather, we’ll make our landscape even more resilient before the next storm happens.