48: Xeriscaping with Leah Churner and Colleen Dieter Transcript
Hallie: Hello and welcome to One to Grow On. A show where we dig into questions about agriculture and try to understand how food production impacts us and our world. My name is Hallie Casey and I studied and currently work in agriculture.
Chris: I’m Chris Casey, Hallie’s dad. Each episode we pick an area of agriculture or food production to discuss and this week we’re talking about xeriscaping.
[Background Music].
Hallie: This week we have on the podcast two amazing women. We have Leah Churner, the founder of Delta Dawn Sustainable Gardens here in Austin, Texas. She’s also the creator of Hothouse Podcast and a co-creator of the Horticulturati Podcast. And we also have Colleen Dieter on. She is the creator and brains and brawn and everything behind Red Wheelbarrow Plants and a founder of Central Texas Seed Savers, as well as the second half of the Horticulturati Podcast. Welcome you all.
Chris: Welcome. Thank you for being here.
Colleen: Thanks.
Leah: Thanks for having us.
Hallie: Was there anything that I missed in you all’s intro?
I know you have many accolades to your names.
Colleen: No.
Leah: I think you got it.
Colleen: Generally, awesome people.
Hallie: Yes, absolutely.
[Laughter].
Chris: Those are the only kind of people we ever have on the podcast, so here we go.
Colleen: [Laughs]. Okay. Good. We’re in good company then?
Chris: Absolutely.
Hallie: I know I mentioned that both of you all have two different gardening companies, but I was wondering if you guys could give a little background about the work you do and how you got there.
Leah: Colleen, you start.
Colleen: Oh, okay. Alright. I was going to tell you to go first, but I’ll go first. I help my customers by alleviating their anxieties about their yards. Primarily, I help homeowners who are do it yourselfers who want to garden and want to landscape their properties, but they just don’t know where to start and they just have a lot of worries and trouble and so I can come in and give people advice about what to do and how I got into it was through 20 years of experience as a personal gardener in Austin. Before I had my consulting business, I had a set group of customers who all had really complicated yards and I took care of their yards basically and learned all about plants in Central Texas that way along with a short stint, working at Natural Gardener. I studied horticulture as my minor in college at the Ohio State University and I was a philosophy major. That’s my story.
Leah: I’ll go. I’m Leah speaking here. I’m a landscape designer and gardener and like Coleen, my background is into the maintenance side of things and so I was doing that sort of same personal gardening maintenance for people for a long time. I still do that, but now I also do design and consulting and I’m very hands-on from the point of conceiving of ideas to putting them in to trying to maintain them over time. I’m a control freak in that way. Yeah, that’s what I do and I am also teaching planting design at ACC starting on October 12th and that’s what I do.
Hallie: Super cool.
Chris: Yeah, very nice. I got to ask is the Ohio State University, the only university in Ohio State or the only university called Ohio State or is the, just part of the name?
Colleen: The, the is just part of the name. It’s like a branding thing.
Chris: Got it. Okay.
Colleen: It’s silly when I say it, I’m saying it partly with pride, but also partly sarcastically.
[Laughter].
Chris: Very good.
Leah: It’s like Talking Heads, when you talk about the band Talking Heads, you don’t call them the Talking Heads.
Colleen: Yeah, or Sustainable Food Center. Is it the Sustainable Food Center or is it just Sustainable Food center?
Hallie: A lot of people think there’s a the, but there isn’t. In fact, no the.
Colleen: But with Ohio State, there is a the.
[Laughter].
Leah: I did not know that.
Colleen: It started like around the time when I started in school there. They did that branding thing. It’s just a silly thing.
Hallie: You two both have immense experience and you guys are both so knowledgeable and you guys highlight that beautifully in Horticulturati, your podcast. But I specifically asked you guys here to talk about xeriscaping because one it’s like something we’ve gotten a lot of questions about from our listeners and I know a bit about it, but I was pretty sure you two would have a lot to add.
Leah: Oh, great.
Hallie: Two, it’s like a big buzzword here in Texas. It’s something that a lot of people talk about, but I think that the idea of what it actually is, is very incorrect, so I was wondering if you guys could give a little definition about xeriscaping.
Colleen: That’s a good question.
Leah: Well, I’ll hazard.
Colleen: Go.
Leah: Or do you want to go Colleen?
Colleen: No, you go.
Leah: Okay. So xeriscaping is an approach to landscape design that I believe originated in the eighties in Colorado in Denver and I think it was the Denver watershed protection department that came up with it and trademarked it. I might need to fact check that, but it was definitely out of Denver and it was a trademarked term just to refer to designing landscapes in a way that they require very little water and very little supplemental irrigation. I think there’re seven principles and they include things like using mulch, using plants that are well adapted to the landscape. Colleen, do you remember any of the other xeriscape principles?
Colleen: I think one of them is like keeping plants like do you need more water up closer to the house and grouping them together so that the higher water use plants are up near the house? I’m trying to remember what some of the other ones are, but yeah, it was really laid out. I mean, the spirit is that it really was a concept that was laid out in a really specific way with these seven principles and now has evolved over time to mean something different as a buzzword like you were saying.
Hallie: I guess from you all’s perspective as designers and gardeners, what is the perspective now of xeriscaping? What do you guys hear people referring to when they talk about xeriscaping?
Leah: Well, do you want to go first, Colleen? Then I’ll tell my part.
Colleen: Well, yeah. The term that is being used instead, so xeriscaping is X-E-R-I, like xeri and that refers to a dry environment, but now people hear that and they think it means zeroscaping, like the number zero where it involves removing a lot of plant material from the landscape and then just putting rocks or gravel on top of the soil and then calling it done. People will often call me and say I’m interested in xeriscaping. Excuse the pun, it’s gotten watered down over time.
[Laughter].
Chris: Very good.
Colleen: It has lost a lot of its meaning and has been sort of I guess not purposely co-opted, but sort of transformed into a concept that has been divorced from its original intention I think of creating rich landscapes that use less water than a conventional landscape that has a lot of turf grass in it and plants that demand a lot of water use.
Leah: I had a chance to look up the seven principles and they’re really quick. I’ll just throw them out there. They are planning and design, soil improvement, practical turf area, not having the entire yard be St. Augustine lawn if you don’t need that much turf grass, you would have to irrigate, efficient irrigation, mulch, low water use plants and appropriate maintenance. Never anywhere in that definition is take all the plants out and cover everything with rocks. There is no nowhere in there.
That is what as a buzzword xeriscape has come to mean, unfortunately, is that idea that just put rocks everywhere and gravel and there’s a lot of problems with that.
Hallie: You mentioned problems and you say, unfortunately, can you talk a little bit about the issues with this rock scaping and the crushed granite with cactuses look of a landscape?
Leah: There’s a few things and I’ll let Colleen chime in too. First of all, there’s two really big problems. One is that gravel reflects light and heat and raises the ambient temperature, whereas plants and mulch absorb light and heat and they lower the ambient temperature, especially if we’re talking about like trees. There’s a heat Island effect when you use lots of rocks and that can be very uncomfortable during the summer and raise your energy bills and be really hard on the plants and trees that you do have. Then the other issue is that because we’re not actually in the desert and we get what 34 inches of rain a year and the most of those rain events happen in a few big storms throughout the year, things are just going to get super weedy because we don’t live in a desert where we can just cover everything with rocks and have a kind of a Southwestern landscape. Doesn’t quite work where we are because we just get a little too much rain and then plants really want to grow anywhere where there’s a sunny spot.
Chris: I’ve seen people put like trash bags or whatever all over their lawn to sort of kill the grass to put something new and usually, they follow up with covering it with rocks and maybe some succulents, but even giving it that treatment after some time, some weeds are going to sprout up.
Colleen: Yes, for sure because as long as the wind blows and birds fly, there’s going to be weeds because there’s just seeds everywhere.
Chris: Got it.
Colleen: In fact, especially with decomposed granite, the grittiness of decomposed granite, which is almost like sand that grittiness of that texture, catches more seeds and that material holds water for quite a while too and so it’s really a nice place for little tiny plants to start their lives. It becomes really weedy over time. At first it seems fantastic, but it doesn’t take more. Usually, after a year or two it becomes really weedy and can be really high maintenance and it’s counterintuitive because you would think it would be really low maintenance, but as Leah and I have both found as professional gardeners, when we’re caring for those types of yards, they tend to be the highest maintenance yards.
Chris: Oh boy.
Leah: Because it’s not very fun to weed gravel.
[Laughter].
Leah: It hurts your fingers and it’s hot. I mean, also another problem with doing that solarizing thing where you put the plastic down is that one of the principles of xeriscape is soil improvement and if you are basically zapping the landscape with the sun and the plastic, you’re actually really going to degrade the quality of your soil because you’re going to kill not just the grass, but also although microorganisms and the soil biology that you have in the soil, and it’s going to become a real sterile soil and that can also make it hard for plants to do well as I’m sure you guys talk about a lot on One to Grow On.
Colleen: Yeah, and not to mention if there are any trees growing nearby, you can also damage the tree roots by heating up the soil to try to kill other plants. You can inadvertently damage tree roots too and that’s the thing in Austin. We’re so fortunate to have such tree cover in this city and it’s very rare that you find a property that doesn’t have any trees on it and surrounding trees with gravel can have a negative impact on their lives as well.
Leah: I think Colleen and I would both agree that even though it sounds kind of counterintuitive, one way to really, if you want to keep weeds down, plant more trees because you want to shade those weeds out. Then also if you do have a bunch of grass that is growing in the shade or something that you want to get rid of, you can actually do a similar thing. You can smother it by sheet mulching, so that would be using a ton of organic material, cardboard, compost, and mulch just piled up lasagna style on top of the soil and that will actually help do that same thing that the solarizing is doing, but it’ll do it a little more gently and it’ll not harm the soil biology, but it is a little bit harder to do that. It’s just a little bit more intensive.
Chris: How terrible is my St. Augustine?
Leah: You’re saying Augustine? It’s not so terrible.
You don’t have to feel bad about having some grass. I think there’s a place for it.
Chris: Excellent.
Colleen: For sure, like Leah was saying when she was reading off the xeriscaping principles, you could have turf grass where it makes sense. If you have established St. Augustine grass, that’s in a dappled shade situation, which is where St. Augustine grass likes to be and you’re caring for the soil underneath it, which is another one of the principles, you’re caring for the soil underneath it so that the soil is so spongy and will hold water for longer and you’re caring for the turf grass using organic methods and mowing correctly, like mowing with the mower blade on the highest setting possible and leaving the clippings on the grass. If you’re doing all of that, then it’s not the worst. It just depends on what your perspective is and if it’s providing a service for you, then I think it’s fine. [Laughs].
Leah: Sometimes you want a little bit of lawn to be some kind of nice negative space of green and I think there’s a place for that. There might be some tiny little spots in what I would design.
Chris: Awesome.
Colleen: I agree. Like, at my house, I’m a plant collector. I have tons and tons of plants and the grass doesn’t really serve a purpose for me, but if I had dogs or children or I didn’t collect plants, then I would have kept some of the St. Augustine grass that I had in my yard that was really well-established and in the right light and actually didn’t need that much water.
But if you’re trying to grow St. Augustine grass where there’s full hot sun and you have to water it all the time, then that’s a problem. I think that’s the spirit of xeriscaping. I that’s when they developed this in Denver. I think that’s what they were after was just getting people to be cognizant of how much water they’re using on their landscapes and to put a little bit of thoughtfulness into it.
Hallie: That’s what I really wanted to dig into on this episode. We did an episode in the past on turf grass and we talked about the water needs, but I would love to hear you all’s perspective. Like say, you get a client who calls you and says, I want to xeriscape because I want no water and I’m just going to do cactuses. I don’t want any of those stinking flowers that I have to prune and fertilize and all that stuff. What would your response to them be?
Colleen: I would educate them. Sometimes that’s all people need and that’s why as a consultant, people call me because they want ideas and they want to be educated and so sometimes people think that that’s what they want, but when I come to them and I say, okay, listen. In my experience, those landscapes are the highest maintenance and here’s the alternative. You could have some relatively low maintenance plants that only need to be trimmed like once a year, that will attract butterflies and other wildlife and we can design it in a way that we can handle any like erosion problems that you’re having or something like that. I make sure that they understand that what they think they need is not what they actually need because people will usually say, I want a landscape that is really low maintenance, so I’d like to just install rocks over the whole thing. Then I’ll say, well, there’s this misconception that we’re talking about right now and then people are like, oh, okay.
Then I’ll show them photos of other landscapes and tell them what care they require. I have a stable of plants for customers who just really don’t want to do any maintenance at all, who maybe are retired and travel a lot and plants that are like evergreen and need very little care that I’ll do for those particular customers, which is actually a rare situation. Most of my customers are interested in gardening and don’t mind doing some trimming and transplanting and stuff like that, so it just depends on the situation, but I try to really listen to people and hear what they really want and then educate them about the best way to go about getting what they want.
Chris: I’m definitely one of those no maintenance people, if I can help.
Colleen: Sure.
Leah: I actually had someone that I talked to on the phone today say that she wanted to xeriscape part of the yard and like her neighbors had done. When that comes up, I’m like let’s look at it. Let’s talk about it and I try to use the term water-wise, which is a term that I borrow from the sorry, Austin watershed protection department that they use a lot and I like that term because it’s not always appropriate to use Zurich plants. You might need plants that can tolerate periodically wet conditions, like maybe plant something by a downspout or in a low spot in your yard and also just the term Zurich, in terms of ecology, it refers to an upland location, a higher elevation where the most of the water runs downhill. So that’s why it’s so low water because it’s up high and then you have the mesic zone, which is kind of in the middle. Then you have the hydroxyl zone, which is low down in the valleys where the water congregates or whatever. You got to think about not every situation is correct for cacti and succulents.
There’s certain places that it’s going to be much more appropriate and effective to use plants that can handle a little more wet conditions.
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Chris: Welcome to the break.
Hallie: Welcome to the break. Dad, did you know that on our Patreon, we have outtakes and extra research.
Chris: We do have outtakes that are frequently hilarious. I’ve heard your sister laugh at them on more than one occasion.
Hallie: [Laughs]. Very often hysterical and hilarious.
Chris: Extra research.
Hallie: Yes, we have extra research from the episodes as well as other miscellaneous cool articles or additional reading. I try to put tons of really cool information into the Patreon and so if anybody is interested in learning more about the topics that we’re talking about on the show, if anyone is interested in laughing out loud, who isn’t? In these times, am I right?
Chris: You are right.
Hallie: You can find all that info on our Patreon, which is patreon.com/onetogrowonpod.
Chris: You can join our wonderful patrons, especially our starfruit patrons, Lindsay, Vikram, Mama Casey, Patrick and Shianne.
Hallie: We are so, so grateful for all of you. You do so many wonderful things to our hearts and brains. When we think about how much we love you, sorry, that turned a little bit weird there at the end, we are grateful for you. You make our world spin and you make this podcast happen and we hope that you are having a wonderful day wherever you are. Shall we get back to the episode?
Chris: Back to the episode.
[Background music].
Hallie: Can you tell me more about water wise gardening? What do gardeners need to think about and you all as professional gardeners need to think about when you’re thinking about water-wise gardening?
Leah: When I think of water wise gardening, I just think of really matching a plant to its site conditions carefully and one of the best resources for figuring out what goes where is the Grow Green Guide that the city puts out and it’s free and you can get it at any nurseries and a lot of different like hardware stores in places. It’s a little booklet that the watershed protection department puts out and has a list of all these native and adopted landscape plants and has their water requirements and pictures of everything and it’s just such a cool resource. Starting to think about, what plant would work here? What’s the right plant for this spot is part of what I think of when I think of water-wise gardening? Like Colleen said, maybe putting some of the wetter plants near the house. Did you say that Coleen?
Colleen: Yeah, near the house and around the downspouts like you said. That’s a great tip putting plants that require more water up near the house. If you have gutters, then you could plant those plants near downspouts and then if you don’t have gutters and you’re going to get more rain off of the roof. So just having higher plants that prefer a little bit more water up closer to the house. By the way, you can download a digital version of the city of Austin’s Grow Green Guide from the Grow Green website. Something else that I always think about too with water-wise landscaping is again building the soil. It’s really important to me. Leah was talking about sheet mulching as a way to eliminate existing grass or plants that are not desirable in a particular landscape. Sheet mulching is a really great way to build soil as well and building soil is important in xeriscaping like I said earlier because you want the soil to be alive with microorganisms and that soil that’s alive and healthy will act like a sponge and will hold water for the plants to be able to use in the long-term as opposed to a degraded soil. Degraded soils are going to be really hard. A lot of the water when it rains, the water will run off of a degraded soil and it won’t be able to soak in as deeply. Sheet mulching is a really good way to build more life into the soil and create a soil that’s going to be spongy and healthy to support the plants and will also reduce runoff during storms and prevent flash flooding.
Chris: I think if Hallie had a battle of cry, it would be soil health.
Hallie: [Laughs].
Colleen: Yeah.
Hallie: I do really like that word spongy though because I feel like talking about soil health is still something that’s harder to get across if you’re talking to newer gardeners because it can be abstract and I think that word spongy is so helpful.
Colleen: Definitely. You have to have metaphor because a lot of people I’ve never even really had the experience of trying to dig a hole before and understanding what it could be like and understanding what their soil is like in their particular situation. You have to use metaphor to make that real for people.
Leah: We’re not saying that Brock’s need to be banned or outlawed either.
Colleen: For sure.
Leah: Just like there is a place for turf. There’s also a place for rocks and one of my favorite things to design is dry creeks for helping storm water runoff and stuff like that, controlling the water in the landscape and doing it in a way that’s pretty more visually appealing than just putting in French drain or some elaborate underground system, making a dry creek bed. Those are really, really fun to design and they involve a lot of rocks, but you can also incorporate plants into those. We’re not against. I don’t think Colleen or I are anti-rocks and we both enjoy using rocks and boulders in the designs.
Colleen: No, for sure. Chris, you were saying that you really want to have a super low maintenance landscape and I often include boulders in my designs for folks who are in that situation because the boulders can add a lot of interest and can be really fun to look at because they attract a lot of lizards and stuff like that and they don’t require any care or watering. [Laughs]. But I don’t want the entire landscape to be just boulders. That would be really expensive and really hot and really weird.
[Laughter].
Colleen: But a boulder like here or there, it can be really, really cool.
Leah: I love boulders. I just wish they weren’t quite so heavy.
Colleen: Agreed.
Chris: Well, when I was a teenager, I was in Colorado with my mom and my cousin and we were driving around and every once in a while she would see a rock that she really liked and she would have me or my cousin get out of the car and pick up the rock and put it in the car and before long, we had a suitcase full of rocks that she really liked and I’m pretty sure they’re still in her garden somewhere, but when we went through airport security, we put it on the conveyor belt and the lady at the x-ray machine probably gave her the exact look that you’re imagining right now and said, mum, are those rocks?
[Laughter].
Leah: I get it. I understand that. I mean, sometimes you just see a rock and you’re like, wow. That rock is nice.
Chris: [Laughs].
Colleen: Definitely, your mom and I share that interest because I definitely have gone through airport security with rocks in my bags more than once.
Leah: I’ve got pictures of rocks in my camera roll on my phone.
Hallie: One time I saw a rock in Costa Rica where I was on vacation and I saw one, I was like, oh, my grandmother would love that rock, so I tried to bring it back and airport security actually confiscated it because they said it was a blunt object that I could use to bash someone’s head in on the plane.
Leah: Oh, no.
Hallie: Which I felt could be said for a lot of contents of suitcases.
Colleen: Seriously?
Chris: It’s true.
Leah: [Laughs]. Wow.
Chris: See the shoe. It’s a blunt object.
Leah: It’s imaginative.
Hallie: I’m curious, did you guys learn this stuff in school? How did you get educated on what xeriscaping is not and water-wise gardening?
Leah: Well, we both worked at the Natural Gardener for a time. I didn’t go to school for horticulture or anything. I studied art history. But I learned a lot of stuff through doing some nursery work at the Natural Gardener, just doing garden maintenance and going to the Grow Green program that the city of Austin puts out. They do it every year, a couple of day seminar that teaches sustainable landscaping and just taking classes here and there, but I don’t have any formal training in this stuff.
Colleen: Yeah, my background is the same as Leah’s and how I picked up this stuff along the way. Just through that experience of firsthand caring for these properties as a personal gardener, one day I would be at a house without a garden that a master gardener put together. I had some customers who were master gardeners for example, and they loved gardening, but they hurt their back or something like that and couldn’t care for the garden. So they would hire me to take care of it while they were recovering and stuff like that and those yards are just so fun and rich to be in and just gave so much back to me as a gardener, but even more to the homeowners that had seen blooms and the animals that would visit and the changing of the seasons, these little subtle differences that you could enjoy throughout the years. Then the next day go to a yard with a much more professionally designed yard. By the way, a professionally designed and installed yard that was full of gravel, the whole thing is gravel and just a few plants here and there and it was hot and miserable and I would work for hours and hours and just feel like I didn’t even make a dent in how much work there was to do in that yard. It just got me thinking like, is this really what we should be doing? Is this really saving water? I noticed too, that even those yards, sometimes they were so poorly designed that they would end up using just as much water as the master gardeners yard that was providing so much joy and so many ecosystem services too. I just wanted to learn more about what the right thing to do was like, how do you create a yard that gives back to the homeowners and how do you create a yard that doesn’t require as many inputs and pays off?
One way that I have learned a lot about is just by talking to other gardeners and other landscapers, especially people who volunteer at the Wildflower Center or people who work at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. I learned a lot from just conversations like that.
Like, hey, are you having this experience with decomposed granite that you had to weed it all the time and stuff? People being like, yes. Then just doing my own research too in addition to taking the Grow Green classes and classes at the Wildflower Center and stuff like that. Yeah, just that accumulation of knowledge of just talking with other gardeners and people who work at nurseries and stuff like that is how I learned about water-wise concepts.
Leah: I was just going to say, that’s how I met Colleen as she was teaching a class on perennial maintenance at the Natural Gardener and I was working at the Natural Gardener at the time and they let me sit in on her class. After the class, I went up and asked her some questions about weeding gravel probably and I really think I was asking her about like, how do you get nutgrass out of ARD and how do you do that? That led us to become friends and so that’s a big way of making friends with gardeners and spending a lot of time geeking out about gardening things
Colleen: Especially around here where the climate is so different from so many other parts of the world. It’s so unique here that there’s not a lot written about gardening here. So you really have to ask other people because there’s very few books that you can pick up at that will tell you how to do any gardening in Central Texas. There’s some really good ones, but for the most part, you end up still having to collect information from other gardeners and be friends.
Hallie: I think that’s so beautiful and I think that Colleen your description of different types of gardens and this one garden that’s just so joyful is so evocative. I’m curious, this is my last question that I had. Is there anything that you all are seeing changing or any new things on the horizon for you all’s industries for you all sector?
Leah: I mean, for one thing, I will say that people are spending more time at home because of COVID and they’re thinking about their landscapes a lot so I don’t know. I feel like gardening is on the rise as far as like things on the horizon. I don’t know.
Colleen: What I’m hoping is that people will start to understand more about how regenerative the landscape can be and what’s going on right now with organic farming and people who are practicing regenerative farming to try to combat climate change by sequestering carbon in plants and in the soil. I hope that those ideas and concepts could get carried over to the landscape too because trees are so incredible at sequestering carbon pulling carbon out of the atmosphere to combat climate change. So right now, tree planting is a super-hot thing and it should have been hot all the time. I hope it’s not just a trend. Like we should all be planting trees all the time. What I’m trying to say is everyone’s excited about tree planting right now because of climate change and trees are one of those things where you do so little. It requires so little effort to plant a tree.
Depending on what tree you choose, like you could plant a live Oak tree in Central Texas and it could live for a thousand years, sequestering carbon, mitigating storm water runoff, providing shade, cooling the atmosphere around it, providing habitat for animals, providing food to us as humans. I mean, there’s so many things that trees do for us and they ask for so little in return. To me, that’s the thing I’m most excited about is the tree planting and the concept of regenerative landscaping, where trees are going to be helping to combat climate change and that individual people on their own properties just by planting trees can help fight climate change.
Leah: Colleen, can I piggyback on what you just said just for a minute?
Colleen: Yeah.
Leah: I was just going to add that in addition to planting trees, also just thinking about wildlife habitat and I think that’s because of climate change, I think that’s another thing that people have started to think about and that’s very important to me as well. I mean, definitely planting trees and also just having places for pollinators and birds to be and all kinds of little critters that you can connect with because I think having those connections with plants and animals and insects and stuff, does give you more of a feeling of connectivity toward nature and that is going to make you someone who was hopefully more active in regards to fighting climate change.
Colleen: For sure, oh my God. Almost every day, every new customer who calls me tells me that they want support bees because they’ve heard about the decline in honeybee population or they want to support butterflies because they’ve heard about the decline in the Monarch butterfly population or they’re just really interested in birding because they just want to see something cool out the window. So that’s like really been big lately. Even more, that was always something that my customers told me, but lately it seems everybody’s whose calling is asking for that.
Hallie: Yes, I love that. That’s amazing. Plant all the trees and it attracts all the birds and pollinators.
Colleen: Yeah.
Chris: Love a bee.
Leah: Bees and trees.
Hallie: Absolutely. Well, you all, it was absolutely phenomenal to have you both on. Is there anything that you all would like to plug or any places that people can find you if they want to know more about your work?
Leah: Sure. I’ll plug our podcast, the Horticulturati. It is kind of bi-weekly and we have a website that is horticulturati.com. Let me try to spell that. It’s H-O-R-T-I-C-U-L-T-U-R-A-T-I.com. Did I get that?
Colleen: I think so. It’s like the illuminati or the glitterati, but it’s about plants. So it’s just Horticulturati with an I at the end, without an E.
[Laughter].
Chris: Link in the show notes.
Leah: Yeah, okay. Thanks.
[Laughter].
Leah: Since we know everyone who’s listening to the podcast right now has a pen and paper ready to write it down. [Laughs].
Colleen: They’ve got their pens.
Chris: That’s right.
Leah: Mostly, I’m hoping that we’ll just get some of your listeners will check out our podcast too. That’s the main thing that I’d like to plug.
Hallie: Definitely go check out the Horticulturati. It is wonderful. Thank you guys both so much for being on. It was so wonderful.
Leah: Hallie has been on the Horticulturati, by the way. I’m just going to say that too if you want to hear it where we talked about soil with Hallie.
Hallie: It’s true.
Leah: Yes, it’s fantastic.
Hallie: It was so much fun.
Leah: It was good. Thank you so much for having us.
Colleen: Thanks.
Chris: Thank you for being here.
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Chris: Thanks for listening to this episode of One to Grow On.
Hallie: This show is made by me Hallie Casey and Chris Casey. Our music is Something Elated by Broke for Free.
Chris: If you’d like to connect with us, follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at One to Grow On Pod or join our Discord and Facebook communities and leaf us your thoughts on this episode.
Hallie: You can find all of our episodes and transcripts as well as information about the team and the show on our website, onetogrowonpod.com.
Chris: Help us take root and grow organically by recommending the show to your friends or consider donating to our Patreon at patreon.com/onetogrowonpod. There, you can get access to audio extras, fascinating follow-ups, exclusive bonus content and boxes of our favorite goodies.
Hallie: If you liked the show, please share it with a friend. Sharing is the best way to help us reach more ears.
Chris: Be sure to see what’s sprouting in two weeks.
Hallie: But until then, keep on growing.
[Background music].