Bold and Succulent Small Garden On A Budget

Bold and Succulent Small Garden On A Budget, Julie Patton and Eric Pedley put some pizzazz into their small yard, once home to lots of lawn. And then we wanted to spruce it up! The former owner was a mason. I don't think that plants were really his thing. He built a lot of really great stone structures that we can work with. When the owner of the house lost his eye and stopped building the wall, it was just cinder blocks, so we just stucco'd it and got some nice tiles and got a Texas star. I just kind of like orange and blue. Those are my favorite colors together. We filled in the end cinder blocks where he stopped and made planters out of those.

We don't barbecue too much so a lot of that area is just plants. Eric chose succulents to enrich the stucco style with their bold lines and softening colors. On the patio, the old handcrafted smoker makes great staging for container succulents. We used it once, but we didn't do that well with it. . I'm from Utah, I never learned how to barbecue. So how did Eric, from Utah, get into succulents, and actually start an East Austin nursery selling them? A friend of mine gave me some plants when he was moving to Costa Rica and that kind of sparked my initial addiction, and then I went to a succulent society show and sale and won some plants in a raffle, and then I just wanted more and more. There was no plan.

Bold and Succulent Small Garden On A Budget

Bold and Succulent Small Garden On A Budget

I was never a plant person. I just have an addictive personality. You know, as a kid it was football cards, Mad magazines, garbage pale kids. In his backyard, Eric propagates many of the plants for East Austin Succulents in greenhouses that are more addictive than mowing grass. In one green house he grafts some plants onto various fast growing cacti. In his hoop house, he grows succulents and seasonal vegetables. Since this is their home garden and after work hangout, Julie put a new face on the standard concrete patio. It's a concrete stain, yeah. You have to etch it, you have to do a chemical to it so that the concrete stain stays. Paint would never stay in a high traffic area. While Eric recycles plants, Julie recycles nursery pallets.

I just couldn't even believe the things that you could do with pallets. So I started picking up pallets and just trying little things. I had a ton of pallets, but I've only come up with this chair and this table so far. I'm not finished. And your compost bin inside. Yeah. I have a compost bin I made inside. But it's really neat and it's a cheap way to make your backyard look really pretty. Their rescued pets approve. She pepped up a foundling chiminea to match their vibrant scheme. I love color. I love it. I just, literally, I got the brightest color red spray paint, and I just sprayed it every so often I didn't do it all at once. I would just do it when I would come out here. That way I could see spots that were kind of dirty and keep the dirtiness there.

That way it looked a little more natural. Eric crafted some of the furniture too. I went through a woodworking phase, but I started getting scared because I didn't know where the hospital was. I just wanted to make a bench and I found out that all the mills, mill yards, are out in Bastrop. And there's a few of them, so my buddy and I drove out and bought a log. It's aromatic cedar. Every time you sand it, down each season, new colors come out. It's a really pretty wood to work with and the cats love sitting on it. I wanted to build a ladder that was artistic and useful and permanent. I wanted to be able to get on the roof of the shed, watch the sunsets and chill out with the cats. It's not scary when you walk up it. You can carry stuff up and it's not just really shallow. It's not skinny. And as far as everything else, like recycling, I mean, like these pots here.

All of these I get them for free. They were all free. You've got to take advantage of craigslist. You've got to just, you know, keep your eye out for things. And you can make really beautiful things and have it not cost anything at all. They enriched the gardens and containers with homemade compost. For succulent containers, Eric mixes finished compost with wood chips, gravel or perlite. To water their vegetables and their succulents when they need it, Julie and Eric head to the rain barrel. And a lot of people get rain barrels and spend a lot of time scooping their thing in and watering slowly or raising it up and getting a little trickle out of the hose. Bold and Succulent Small Garden On A Budget. 

But if you just get a little fifty dollar sump pump and attach it to your hose, you can have great water pressure to water all of your plants, and you have oxygenated magnetized water that's really healthy, and you can add all of your nutrients and you can add soap for bugs, and it's just a really easy way to fertilize your plants if you have a lot of plants. Eric raids office supply surplus stores for file cabinet planters drilled for drainage at the bottom. Here is his tip to save on soil in massive planters. Just Styrofoam blocks usually. Just shake your dirt down with big Styrofoam blocks or even logs, upside down buckets, that's good way to fill in that space. As far as design for the file cabinets, you just put height to the back and trailing stuff to the front. I just keep it simple. There are rules you want a spiller and a filler, and something else, I forget what it is, but..spiller, thriller.... you want a spiller, thriller.... oh my god what is it?

So your thriller is kind of the star of the show and I love agaves for that. Just something that's the crown of an arrangement. And then you have your height to the back and then you have something that's going to kind of trail over. And you want odd numbers. Simple. I just want variety. Most of the things out there are just from a six inch pot. It's a young yard. Just things I can get for cheap that will grow really well. I always put the yuccas to the back, because they're going to grow a lot taller than the agaves. And then throw in some ghost plants, because ghost plants are really cold hardy and they soften things.

Bold and Succulent Small Garden On A Budget

They make little cute spots. So with every agave that you plant, you can just throw in some ghost plants or some aptenia cordaflora, like the ice plants. I don't know any landscape design at all. I just kind of stick things where I like them and change them if I need to. It's just the desire to get rid of more grass, bit by bit over the years. Since Eric is growing on heavier soil, he trimmed the trees to allow full sun. And part shade gardens provide good drainage since soil won't dry out as quickly after rains. And top dressing makes everything look ten times better. If you just have some gravel on top, covering up the dirt, it looks great.

For a more organic look, Eric edges with scavenged stones, easily moved when he wants to broaden his plant avenue. That makes it prettier. Or even paver's stones flipped up. You know, the skinny way, the wrong way. And you kind of bury them in the ground. You kind of make little statues around the yard for free. Julie and Eric lucked into a brick mailbox from the former owner. Heat loving shallow rooted succulents handle this postal position quite well. A lot of succulents like a confined space. A lot of the mailboxes around here have empty spots, so I'll just go late at night and fill them in. I know them, so they wouldn't get too mad, but you know... 

Yeah, he's all, "do you think they'll be mad at me?" and I say, "No! It's awesome, go do it." Yeah. Eric's made lots of new friends since he met his succulent destination. Well I had eleven jobs my first year in Austin. I have a degree in environmental studies that got me into the Peace Corps, but I never really used it because you have to be environmental science to get good jobs, and so I was just doing what I needed to do to pay the bills bartending and I'm really glad that I fell into it because I discovered a passion. I like doing what I'm doing. And it's been nice. And I always have spines all over me and my back hurts and my feet hurt, but I love succulents. Bold and Succulent Small Garden On A Budget.

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