- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," we're digging into our archives to bring you a special pet-centric episode all about the dogs and cats and other companions that we love to share our gardens with.

On tour, we'll revisit some truly pet-forward destinations complete with custom catios and chicken coops.

While Daphne Richards will join us in studio to share how you can keep your pets and your plants happy.

So let's get growing right here, right now.

- [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardener's" 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden, supporting a love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Narrator 1] Want to know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, H-E-B has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking and Field & Future by H-E-B trash bags.

You can learn more at OurTexasOurFuture.com.

(bright pleasant music) - Over the course of CTG's now 30 seasons, we've encountered scores of gardeners who love their pets as much as their plants.

So today, we're taking time to look back on some who really stand out, beginning with Briana Miriani, who went above and beyond for the feral cats she took off the street and into her home.

- [Narrator 2] When Briana Miriani and Mark Biechler settled into an elderly East Austin bungalow, they put their backs and creativity into its restoration.

- The most recent thing we've done is built a catio because we've got all these inside cats.

We've got five inside cats.

Four of them came from the street and were just not quite street smart.

So we got them fixed and brought them in.

And I just felt bad that they couldn't go outside anymore, but we didn't want to let them out.

- [Narrator 2] Briana and Mark have always adopted abandoned, mistreated dogs.

The cats came with the neighborhood.

- There were a lot of unfixed feral cats.

Probably 15 at one time that I set about fixing and the Humane Society has a really good program for that, thank goodness.

There were just so many cats and you see like in the neighborhood there's groups that on different blocks that look the same that you know all came from the same family.

We found homes for about seven.

- [Narrator 2] They were also fixing up the small front yard, giving it geometric diversity broadened its visual scope.

Mark offset the rectangular yard and chain link fence with curving beds and narrow strips of Palisade Zoysia.

To echo the lines of the fence and house, they laid straightforward flagstone pathways.

Their raised bed design brings together both contours.

Graduated levels of old bricks, given a paintbrush facelift, frame shapes of all kinds, rotund golden barrel cactus and leaf clustered agaves join flowering perennials.

Even edibles get a spot in repurposed galvanized buckets.

They tucked in foundling trinkets and rusty-hued small boulders.

Rather than hedge out the neighbors, fence beds alternate screening plants with breezy views.

Food and water attract an active wildlife population.

They made the backyard pet friendly.

- And things just kind of evolved around the animals, it seemed like more and more.

The dogs would play and hit any shrubs that we put along the side, they'd just take them out.

They're 70 pound dogs and they'd just take them out.

So we got the watering troughs and put plants in there.

We built the guest house in back and we do Airbnb sometimes and we have other family members, some who may be older, and we decided to divide the yard in half in back so that the dogs could be kept out of the back area.

And that kind of started this whole thing.

The grass didn't grow in back anymore because of the shade and the dogs.

So we just decided to mulch half of it where the dogs played most of the time and in the back half we just did gravel because it's shady back there too.

It's kind of a bonus back there too because, one, it's easy we can get the leaf blower out just to clean it off so it's kind of low maintenance.

Also we found that Jack, the long-haired dog, does not like baths.

And we found that it's not so much the bath, it's being restrained that he doesn't like.

So we have to, during the bath, we have to let him go several times and then he'll just run off and kind of shake and then he'll come back to us when we call him and we'll continue with the bath.

But if we lock him in the gravel part, he, when we let him go, he sometimes will roll around on the ground, but it's the gravel.

So he's not like rolling in the mud as he would be doing in the grass.

The mulch part has its, you know, part for them to play and, you know, it's softer and then the back part, also good for bathing.

- [Narrator 2] Then they built the catio to let their feral cat rescues enjoy the outdoors.

- [Briana] We decided to make it match our back gate and our fence.

It's still kind of evolving.

There's a lot of stuff we've learned about it, but it's good.

They like it.

There was a small learning curve of a couple weeks.

They all kind of acted like we were gonna put them back out on the street, which we weren't, but now they just go in and out constantly.

We realized that you have to put the shelves and you have to stack them so they're like a ladder.

You know, you can't just, they have to go, be able to go from one shelf, jump to the other shelf, jump to another shelf to get to the highest shelf.

- [Narrator 2] She advises to research cat doors.

- You're putting it into your wall so it's gonna be there a while.

I mean, or your door.

We got one for the wall.

I didn't want something that's gonna fall apart and we're gonna have to open up our wall again, but I know it's got like a metal interior.

The flap is really thick too.

It really, and it's got, I mean, maybe they're all like this, but it works really well.

And it's got two magnets.

When the cats go out, it hits those magnets again.

And, you know, in the heat of the summer, we just keep thinking, "Oh, the air conditioning's going out."

But it's, there's a thick plastic door and it seems to work really well.

Our house is about three feet up with the piers so we had to build a little platform and then build a ramp down from that.

So it ended up, there's a little doghouse kind of design back there by chance.

And I put a little dog bed under there.

So they do use that.

Sometimes it's cooler in the summer, you know, and sometimes some will be like way up on top.

We did put grass in the bottom.

It's like the only grass in the backyard.

It's struggling a little bit.

I think it might not be getting enough sun, but I'm gonna see if I can make it go rather than put artificial down there.

But they do really, they go down there and roll in the grass.

Everything I do, I have to see if it's toxic because they're gonna chew on it.

You know, whether it be just a little toxic or a lot.

But years ago I had a cat get ahold of a kalanchoe leaf and those mother of millions or whatever with the, that are all around here.

And he just, we brought it in for the winter not knowing it was super toxic.

And he just got one leaf and chewed on it, carried around and played with it.

And I had to feed him through a tube in his throat for about two months.

I mean, it was, it was horrible.

- [Narrator 2] In their garden, home, and neighborhood, Briana and Mark want to make a positive impact.

- The Humane Society has a free spay and neuter for feral cats, which is just an amazing program because I'll go in there, you drop them off between like 6:00 and 8:00 AM and they'll have like 80 cats sometimes.

They do it two and three times a week.

And in one session, they'll have that many cats.

And I just think, what if people weren't doing this, bringing these cats in and trapping them, what would it be like?

It's still a problem, it's a huge problem.

It's kind of amazing, there's a lot of people behind the scenes doing a lot of stuff.

- If you live in Austin or unincorporated Travis County and would like to take advantage of the free spay and neuter services Briana mentioned, you can simply drop your community cat off at Austin Animal Services between 11:00 and 5:00 Monday through Friday.

No appointment is required.

But cats aren't the only animals that make great garden companions.

As Julie Nelson and Kay Angermann showed us back in 2022 when we visited them at the Southwest Austin property they dubbed Katie Bird Farm.

- When we first walked onto the property, well, we started designing it at that moment.

But we had to back into it.

Literally, our bodies, because... - [Julie] Well, we had to chainsaw a path so we could actually pull the truck into the property.

- [Kay] First of all, we had to locate all of the oak trees.

- We have twenty... - Twenty six.

- [Julie] ...six oaks.

- So we cleaned it, cleared it all out, figured out where we were gonna build the house and all.

This was over the course of a year.

And then, all of a sudden, the Blackfoot daisies started showing up and some blue bonnets... - The native Yucca.

We have the yuccas everywhere.

- ...Four-nerve daisies and some grasses.

And we were like, "Oh my gosh."

Once we lifted that canopy, it was like everything woke up.

- Yeah, we love birds and we want to make sure that we have a lot of habitat for them.

So some of it was native.

Some of it we've enhanced.

All of those cedars, that's protection for the chickens because it's less room for hawks or owls.

- Predators to come in.

- For predators to swoop in.

- Everything was done in such an organic way.

Julie and I never wrote, drew a plan out or, you know, had a plant list that we wanted.

- I built all the raised bed gardens and we have to raise bed our vegetables because it's so rocky out here.

We tried hay bale the first season and that was okay, but then we realized we actually needed a different solution.

(soft string music) - Julie is really good at building and I'm really good at holding things while she builds them.

(both laughing) - [Narrator 2] They did hire out for their sturdy and safe chicken coop.

- [Kay] And it's a mobile coop, so technically it could be moved.

It's on wheels.

I actually brought it in on my little John Deere Gator UTV.

And then we've kind of just, you know, made it our own thing, you know?

- [Julie] We attached an old, we have an old dog kennel and we attached that to it and then created a little fencing.

- Created more space.

- [Julie] So they can free range some but we can can have them in a protected area at times as well.

- [Kay] We completely close them up at night so they are completely protected.

- [Narrator 2] The happy hens are watched over by Our Lady of Guadalupe, rendered by graffiti stencil and mural artist Federico Archuleta, known as El Federico to his many fans.

Then the chickens got company.

- The donkeys were clearly a midlife crisis for me.

Some people go out and, you know, get a sports car, do something crazy.

I got donkeys.

It was just something that, you know... - She had always wanted.

- That I had always wanted.

And we wanted to have a little hobby farm.

- [Narrator 2] One feature honors a resident road runner who adopted them from day one.

- She followed me around yesterday and sometimes I would come out and she would literally follow me all around the property.

It was crazy, she's Katie Bird.

- [Julie] And we're Katie Bird Farm.

- Julie and Kay recently relocated to Santa Fe, but don't worry, their donkeys have been happily rehomed to a nearby ranchette and their chickens have been taken in by a local master gardener.

Their property's new owners have even elected to keep the Katie Bird name intact.

Just up the road aways from Katie Bird Farm, you'll find the Petriceks, a Southwest Austin family who found the key to keeping snakes away through some four-legged friends of their own.

- This area was a backfill for a lot of the houses that were built long ago, so there's a lot of rock back there and we thought it would be the coolest thing for a little boy.

But guess who else likes rock?

Snakes.

So I thought, "Okay, what could we have back there that could handle, animal, the heat?"

And you know, we can't have dogs outside all day long.

It's too hot for them, but goats are desert animals and snakes don't like that foot traffic stampering in the yard.

So we got the goats for several reasons, obviously, I love goats, but I also thought they could keep snakes at bay.

They love, you know, trapezing through the yard and balancing themselves, it's so cute.

- They don't like rain.

So basically this house is a bridge.

So where the lot falls off, there's this playroom just is the cover.

So the house just continues.

So there's a huge area under there that's totally covered and sheltered.

We had to do all that terracing because when we, so they excavated back and then we realized when it rained, it wasn't going to stay there and there wasn't any real thing we could do about it.

So we just decided to do very simple, you know, steel terracing and try to put plants down there that the goats can't or won't eat, which is actually really tricky.

They eat almost everything that you want and almost nothing that you don't want.

And they eat even many cactus type plants that are thorny, they can eat.

- And most importantly, the kids and adults, everyone loves the goats.

They bring branches.

They know that they can come to our yard anytime they want.

And basically treat it as a playscape or a place to enjoy and relax since we do not have a playground in this neighborhood.

- On Halloween night, we watched the cameras.

We weren't in this neighborhood.

We were trick or treating elsewhere and we watched the cameras.

Kids taking stuff, going back to see the goats.

- Yeah, it was really awesome.

- It was great.

This year, people trick or treated in the daylight so they could all come back here and see the goats.

- [Cleo] Yeah.

- Cleo and Shea's goats, Archimedes and Copernicus, both recently celebrated their ninth birthdays.

And as Cleo told us back in 2022, their neighborhood didn't come with a playground, so she and Shea have actually since taken it upon themselves to add one to their property and open it up to the community.

If you're a longtime viewer of CTG, you're no doubt well familiar with Daphne Richards, who has happily been answering your viewer questions in our "Down to Earth" segment for 17 years now.

Here she is answering a canine-connected question back in 2011.

(lively old-timey music) - Hello and welcome to "Down to Earth," I'm Daphne Richards.

We've been getting some great questions from our viewers and this one's no different, so keep them coming.

This one's from Jean and she wants to know if you can use doggy doo in your compost pile.

This is a great question.

You want to think about carnivores versus herbivores when you're thinking about using manure in your compost pile.

Dogs are carnivores, so you don't want to use their manure in your compost pile.

They do eat meat and they can have some diseases that don't get composted because as a home composter, your compost doesn't get quite hot enough to kill those diseases.

- We are joined now by Daphne.

She of course is no stranger to the studio as you've just seen, but we are excited to have her today as a guest in her own right.

Daphne, welcome.

- Aw, thanks John.

It's so great to be here at the same time as you.

- I know, this is really special because we've never been in the same studio at the same time, right?

- Yes, that's true.

- Wonderful.

- Yes.

Well, let's go at it here because I know there's a lot of people want to know a lot of stuff.

But let's talk a little bit about your history.

You joined CTG 17 years ago.

- It's insane to think it's been that long.

It just seems like yesterday that I landed back into town after being out west for quite some time, starting my career in El Paso as an Extension Agent and then coming back home to Austin, was so excited to be here and just happy to be on the show.

- That's wonderful.

So how did you, tell us a little bit more about how you got that sort of connection.

- Well, you know, Extension, the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service has always been so blessed to be a part of this show.

From early days, went from Ted Fisher, who was two agents ago, to my great friend and friend of the show, Skip Richter, they were both on the show from early days.

And so when they both moved on in their careers and I came and took Skip's place in the Extension office, it was just natural for me to take over in the hot seat here on the show.

And so, it was great.

It was a little challenging in early days for me to kind of get my sea legs, you know?

I'd done some live stuff out in the field in El Paso and had had my own radio show, but very different to be in a studio with a great team supporting you and the teleprompters and all the fancy equipment that comes with that.

And it's just been a great experience.

- Wonderful.

Well, let's talk about that.

I mean, 17 years, you know, when the show first started, gardening was a bit different than it is now.

So I'd like to ask you, what are some of the big changes or challenges that you see now?

What's that big difference?

- When I first arrived, it seemed like everyone was planting desert plants.

So high desert and low desert, neither of which can be appropriate.

They can be appropriate for here, but neither of which are always appropriate for here.

And then as we started to really notice or the community started to notice that, yes, the climate was changing, but it was very much a rollercoaster.

So some years we would have extreme rain, and some years we would have none.

So we'd call it drought to deluge.

Then people started to adjust once they lost those desert plants, which are so, so beautiful.

And I love them so much.

And I fell into that same category.

I brought some of my favorite plants from the High Desert, Chihuahuan Desert with me and put them in my landscape and very promptly lost them when we had a year with too much rain and especially a winter rain.

So that changed and people are kind of now adjusting back to native plants and getting back to our own Central Texas native plant roots.

And I think that's been a great change.

We've always been a community that's very focused on sustainability in our gardens and that's not changed.

I think that's only gotten heightened.

Also, balcony gardening, you know, we have so many people moving to Austin that are young and maybe don't have a home and a big garden to grow in.

But having a patio, even just one tomato on your patio, or on your balcony in one container, patio gardening has come up quite a bit as well.

- That's wonderful.

What's interesting about the xeric gardening, a challenge that I've seen about that too is that because we do tend to get rain too, they can tend to be hard to maintain because it's not necessarily gonna be that so sparse with the rock and so clean, it really starts to make some challenges in that as well.

- Yes, I think this year's a good example.

We've gotten a lot of weed growth.

We've had so much rain this spring.

And when we get that spring growth, everything grows out of its bounds.

And maybe when you planted it, you thought it was gonna stay nice and small or not get so wiry, and then it gets big and everything's very crowded.

And then just recently in my garden, I was out there, needed to do some cleanup and everything had grown so much and was so close to the ground that there was, a snake came out from there.

And so, we kind of have to be careful with that too.

- Well, cool.

Well, this theme of this show really is about pet-centric gardens.

You know, over the years we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about your wonderful sidekick, Augie.

And would just like to ask how he got his start in show business as well.

How did you bring Augie onto the set?

- Complete serendipity.

I was on my way out of town one day and gonna do a taping on my way out of town.

And so, I had the car packed to go see my family.

And Augie, of course, was packed up and sitting down in the car, parked car.

And when I told Linda Lehmusvirta, the producer of this show, longtime producer, that he was down there, she said, "Well, go and get him."

So not only did we go and get him, but she put him on my lap for that episode and it was all downhill from there.

So everything changed.

You know, he got his own fan base, and after that, if he didn't appear, everyone wanted to know why.

What was wrong?

Where was he?

And often when I travel, I would have to take him to what I lovingly call Camp Papaw.

He goes to stay with my dad.

And so, when he's at Camp Pawpaw and not on the show, Linda would get email asking where he was.

But that's how it happened, just kind of by accident.

- Wow, that's amazing.

I know that I was, I am a big Augie fan and really enjoyed seeing him and I just figured he was off doing another show.

- Ha ha.

- [John] Because he was so professional that he probably was doing the big leagues.

- [Daphne] Yes, that would be much better, wouldn't it?

Yes.

- Well, we're gonna miss him so much and we're really excited because he was such a big part of the show that, he still gets to make appearances from now and then.

- Oh, absolutely.

I mean, he got recognized more often in the community than I did when I was out with him.

And he loved meeting people.

He was such a people dog for sure.

He loved being here in the studio and running around.

- He had the looks for it.

He was a handsome mug for sure.

- Yes.

- Well, any pet updates for you now?

- So I do have another Dachshund, her name is Lulu.

She just recently turned 12.

And I've had her for ages, but she's just not, she doesn't have the same personality.

She's such a Nervous Nellie.

Just for example, she one time jumped into the window, the drive-through window at Starbucks.

So she doesn't get to go out as much as he did because she's not really ready for primetime.

So, that's why she hasn't made any appearances.

But she's a lovely little girl.

Great sidekick.

And I do have, I take her lots of places.

She just doesn't come onto CTG.

- Well, as we're talking about gardening and pets, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges for folks who want to have a garden and might have a pet or a couple of pets?

- You know, I think especially with the larger dogs is having a place for them to run and play.

A lot of people want to get rid of their lawns or their turf grass and save on water, which is a great environmentally-conscious thing to do.

But if you have a small amount of space or if you have a dog or if you have children, having a lawn is really great for them to have them to have some space to run around.

And then being able to maintain that.

So we of course then would get questions, a lot of questions about urine spots on the grass and those just grow themselves out.

It's just that urine is a very high nitrogen and it just burns the same way a fertilizer would burn if you used it in too concentrated a dose.

And so we get a lot of questions about that.

And then cats and digging around in garden beds, kind of keeping that in check.

You know, those instincts in animals, it's hard to curb their instincts.

But especially with something like a cat digging around in a garden bed.

And then I guess mostly we get questions about poisonous plants and safety of plants in the garden.

Which there really isn't too much that you could plant that would be poisonous for a pet that they would be then tempted to eat.

Generally, they know well enough to stay away from something that's poisonous in my experience, yeah.

- And so, but there's a lot of rewards, right, to have a garden for your pets.

- Oh absolutely.

There's nothing cuter than seeing your pet laying out in the grass enjoying the sunshine, or just sitting by your flowers and getting photos of that, we got lots of photos over the years of people's pets in their gardens and there's nothing I like to see more than people with their pets out in their gardens.

- That's probably the best criticism that you can get of your garden design, right?

Is if your pet's loving life.

- Yes, for sure.

- Well, Daphne, you are the best at answering questions, I'd have to say.

And so, we're actually gonna throw it back to you, Daphne, with another clip.

This one from 2019, where you fielded a feline gardening question from one of our viewers.

(lively old-timey music) - Our question comes from Evelyn Myler, who, like many gardeners, wants to know if she can plant vegetables in a bed that cats have used as a litter box.

Well, Evelyn, I'm so glad you asked because the short answer is no.

Unfortunately, pet waste can transmit toxic diseases if it comes into physical contact with the plant part that we plan to eat.

And it takes pet waste a long time to decompose in the soil.

And in the case of cats, we have to be extra careful of coming into contact with the waste ourselves due to the potential to contract toxoplasmosis.

Good hygiene practices such as wearing gloves can greatly reduce the risk when we interact with soil containing pet waste, but it's best to just avoid the possibility altogether and limit contaminated areas of your yard to ornamental rather than edible plants.

But in better news, if you have space in your garden for an alternate site to grow edible plants and can implement some strategies to keep pets out of that area, we can give you some workarounds.

For ideas on how to deter cats from garden beds, we checked with Molly Pikarsky, Flora and Fauna Manager at Lake Austin Spa, and mom to lots of pets.

She points out that cats are creatures of habit.

So note where kitty likes to go and replace a section of your normal garden soil with sand in that area.

You could also set up a new area of sand and try to tempt your kitties into that designated area and consider planting catmint or catnip nearby as an extra enticement.

Another strategy is to apply a very thick layer of large aggregate hardwood mulch around your vegetables.

Since it's harder for kitties to scratch through those large pieces and reach the soft, finer texture of the soil below and will make the sandy area that you've ceded to them more appealing.

You could also apply some type of physical barrier such as chicken wire between the mulch and your soil, taking care to leave enough room for plants to grow without being restricted.

One drawback to this strategy is that garden snakes may get caught in the wire so that solution may not be for everyone.

- Be sure to check out centraltexasgardener.org for tips, resources, and to watch online.

Until next time, remember to adopt the pace of nature.

Her secret is patience.

(light music) - [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardener's" 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden, supporting a love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Narrator 1] Want to know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, H-E-B has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking and Field & Future by H-E-B trash bags.

You can learn more at OurTexasOurFuture.com.

(light windpipe music)