Last Friday, part of the BG crew celebrated National Bike to Work Day by strapping an electric weedeater, propane blower, weed bags, and hand tools to our backs and riding to perform our weekly landscaping duties at Austin City Hall.  With some bikes borrowed from the best bike team in town, we enjoyed free breakfast [...]

Like the ones that have come before it, this season will change everything forever.  The dust will eventually settle under the humidity of summer, and we’ll be a little older, a little wiser, and a little closer to the place we really want to be.  Some premature reflection half way through: We’ve been testing a new [...]

The Missus and I are shivering towards progress, one morning at a time, in the Fonda San Miguel vegetable garden.  We’ve cleaned out 3 of the 14 beds, worked in a cubic yard of Turkey litter compost, and have planted 1,500 carrot seeds, 1,500 radish seeds, and 20 4″ broccoli plants.   We’ve made some [...]

Austin’s Fonda San Miguel is considered one the finest interior Mexican restaurants in all the land.  In the Fall of 2008, the restaurant owners invested in converting an unused space at the end of the parking lot into a 100′ x 60′ organic vegetable garden, which caught the attention of Austin news media as one of [...]

We don’t maintain any landscapes on Sunny Slope Drive, so it took a little sleuthing to figure out how Ollie’s collar found its way to a chicken coop 82 miles from its home.  But Ollie might like to know about the trip his collar took since it went missing, so I’ll do my best to [...]

We have two 30-gallon Texas Mountain Laurels left over from a project, and they’re looking for a new home. They are about 5′ tall (once they’re in the ground) and 5′ wide. They can take full sun or shade.  Austin native.  Will become small 12-15′ trees, bloom purple clusters in spring.  Evergreen. $200 installed.  First [...]

The Wildflower Center, American Society of Landscape Architects, and the United States Botanic Garden have completed a four-year colaboration to create guidelines and a measuring tool for sustainability in the landscape.  Their 232-page document establishes a rating system for new or renovation landscape projects, encouraging sustainable practices from planning stages, through construction, and through ongoing maintenance once [...]

Rooftop gardens are the rage in Central Texas right now.  Landscape architect and design firms are all over the news for their efforts to turn high rising frying pans into cool pools of grasses that blow in the wind and protect buildings from searing Texas heat. Lofty gardens present new challenges for landscapers:  they’re shallow; they’re hot; [...]

The 84 of us who actually were dumb enough to subscribe to Batch 6 of Austin Energy’s GreenChoice program aren’t as stupid as we look.  Our family likes to bounce around from house to house, (it’s good for the kid, roots and community are way over-rated) and contribute to about 1.4% of the City budget [...]

During this time of year, especially this year of record soul-melting heat, we focus on everything but new plants.  Most installation work happens from March through May, then September through November.  The dormant months of summer and winter are time for seasonal cleanup, regular maintenance, and planning and hardscape phases of installation projects.   Even native [...]