Long Term Maintenance

The first year of a new a garden requires the most maintenance.  The mulch will settle down after a while and quit jumping out onto the driveway, the rocks will become less wobbly, and the plants will begin to become mature. If you follow good weeding technique and keep plenty of mulch on the gardens, the first year will be the worst for weeds.  Just don't let the garden get out of control.  Eradicating weeds (without herbicides generally) can be difficult, but it is absolutely possible given enough time in the garden.

Don't forget the part about pulling the weeds before they set seed and that the typical weed can set nearly one hundred million billion seeds.

Watering

Supplemental watering is not required in these gardens once the plants are established. During normal summers, many of your plants will go dormant.  They basically stop blooming and growing until soil moisture returns. In really severe droughts some of the plants will brown off or just drop their leaves.  When the rain returns, so will most of the plants. A couple of good deep waterings in August and September during dry years will boost the plants into their fall bloom period.  To keep your plants in spectacular shape throughout the growing season, water when the ground beneath the mulch starts getting dry.  During the summer, this could take place in a month or six weeks after a period of normal rainfall. But a really dry winter may never see the ground dry out.

Year 2 to 4

Sometimes between the second and fourth year of a new garden everything starts getting easy. You may find it difficult to spend more than a couple minutes a week pulling weeds. Now all you have to do is add a little mulch every year and control the more aggressive native plants that you have installed in your little ecosystem.  If a plant likes where it is, it will usually expand it's territory until it becomes a nuisance.  Then it's just another weed or, a gift to a friend or neighbor.  Luckily, most of the desirable plants are relatively easy to control once they start proliferating.  Simple weed pulling (using good weeding technique) is all that is required.

There are plenty of native plant sources in the area for your amusement.  Just be careful of your selections.  Always research your purchases before you put them in the ground.  It's awfully hard to jerk a beautiful new flowering plant out of the ground after you have planted it when you learn that it is not native to this area after all...  You will be surprised at the lack of knowledge at the typical nursery.  If you can, stick with  the natural gardener and Barton Springs Nursery.  But even here you still need to double-check the native status of your purchases.

Research and Plant Material Additions

Buy native plant books and gardening books.  But beware of those gardening books put out by Ortho and other Chemical manufacturing concerns.  They are obviously biased.  See the Least Toxic Pest Management Section for more. Knowledge is power in the garden, but your brain and powers of observation are worth at least as much as any old book.  Look for plants in the wild.  Rescue them from developers.  You will find that many developers don't want anything to do with plant rescuers because they smell like environmentalist. That's ok, there are many more plants needing rescuing out there.  Always obey trespassing laws.

When you dig up a plant, always have a jug of water right there to dowse the roots and vegetation.  If you can, cut the vegetation back by 1/2 or more.  After all, when you cut back the roots, the plant can't get enough water to support the foliage, so cut back the foliage. Immediately place the plants in a cool dark place and keep dowsing them with a little water until you get them in the ground - which you should do immediately.  Don't wait till the next day.  most transplants will die in that amount of time.  You can often bare root transplant .  Which means digging up as many roots as possible, and forego trying to keep a ball of dirt intact around the roots.  You will find that in the Hill Country, this is almost impossible anyway. Follow the new garden watering tips found in the Early Maintenance Section  once you have the plants in the ground.

You might find yourself stopping on the side of the road to get seeds from native plants here and there.  This is great as along as you don't decimate a seed source.  Always leave plenty for mother nature.  And try and stay away from just broadcasting collected seed into the garden.  Because of differing sprouting mechanisms and competition form established plants, it is really pretty tough to get plants going using this method.  Instead, plant the seeds in a pot and wait. More often than not you will be successful.  Grow the baby plants until they are 3 to 4 inches tall then set them out in the garden.  All it takes is research and hard work.  Like Bob Dylan sings "know your song well before you start singing".

Annual Cleanup

Most years you will want to clean up all of the dead canes on those plants that freeze to the ground every year.  Simply cut or break them off at the ground and compost them. Some plants have shorter lifespans than others.  The blackfoot daisy and verbena only live 2 or 3 years while yellow bells, pavonia and anisicanthus live for decades.  If you lose a long lived plant in a relatively short timeframe, don't plant the same plant back in the same place.  Put a different one there and replant the original in a different location.  Sometimes it's really hard to tell why a plant failed in one place or another, That's where persistence pays off.  Keep up the hard work and one day, you just might get that plant to grow somewhere.

Do a little mulching in the winter during cleanup too.  It's so much easier, and less damaging on the plants to lay down new mulch when the plant's vegetation is dormant or hidden for the winter.

This is a great time for quick transplants too.  In mid-winter, because most plants are dormant, you can literally jerk root stock out of the ground and pop it into a small hole in a new location and forget about it.  Make sure it has an appropriate mulch cover and water if drought persists.  Otherwise, be amazed in the spring when the transplant takes.

Repairs and Rework

There will always be a few areas in your garden that do not perform well.  Maybe a portion of a walkway always gets covered up with floating mulch or drifting leaves.  Or one big rock has settled a little too much or has become a leaner or a fallover rock.  Don't be afraid to rake back the mulch and do major surgery. You can use rope to tie back shrubs to keep them out of harms way.  You can transplant small plants, or even temporarily dig up plants and put them back where they were once surgery is complete. You can put a little dry concrete mix underneath troublesome rocks, and in a few days, the ambient moisture will have cured the concrete and that rock will be stable for a long, long time.

When you do a temporary transplant, remember to mulch  any bare roots, or cover the root ball in soil.  after planting (or replacing the plant from where it came) water the transplant daily for several weeks, and follow the new garden water tips in the Early Maintenance Section.

You can also add flagstones, or move walkways, or change the position of giant rocks.  How do you move a 3,000 pound rock? It's done with levers and wedges and hydraulic jacks and comealongs and skids.  I have even drug one particularly large rock across the yard with a pickup truck.  I jacked it up in the air with a rock bar as a lever and put 2x4 skids underneath of it.  I tied a rope around the rock and pulled it along the skids with the pickup.  It didn't hardly tear up the turf grass.

The Mature Garden

My gardens are so old now that they have mosses growing on the tree trunks.  I usually leave my last years canes intact these days.  It makes the garden look more natural, but it does reduce the vigor of the individual plant.  It's tougher for a plant to regrow each year if there are  dead canes in the way.  After a decade your trees and shrubs will be getting pretty big too.  Most folks always plant too many trees.  Trees are great, but one small to medium sized tree can shade most of a small front yard.  And most flashy landscaping materials prefer full sun.  So trim up trees to provide more sun, or consider taking out particularly large and shade providing tree.

You can ignore your gardens pretty much after a decade. They will still produce a fair amount of bloom, and the butterflies will still be there, but the number of species will diminish and the fabulous bloomers will kick back and rest.  The gardens at this stage really become like the natural environment.   Birds and reptiles take up residence, natural mulching begins to become effective (the plants sort-of mulch themselves). By now, all the  plants in the garden have moved around to a location where they like growing.  More often on their own than you might think.  The forest edge loving plants have moved over next to the shrubs, the full sun stuff has become a little more limited in scope because of increasing shade due to larger shrubs and trees, and the shade loving plants are beginning to proliferate because those shrubs are now small trees where understory plants can survive.

A mature garden can be reworked to the new garden stage with a shovel and dump truck full of mulch.  Then you start the whole process over again.