Herbs for the HOT Texas Garden! (basil, lavender, & more!)

I'm running out of time to show y'all this. It has to be now and it has to be this video because it only happens once a year. It'll go on for like the next week. It's absolutely spectacular and I know that y'all get tired. If you watch me on TikTok, you're tired of me talking about this tree. You're tired of me talking about the tree. You're sick to death of hearing about this tree. But as I stand here, it is absolutely heaving. Heaving with every kind of pollinator imaginable and I have to show it to you because it's just stunning. I know it can be really difficult to see in the camera and I'm having to keep my mouth closed or try to keep my mouth closed while I'm talking to y'all and not let it hang open because as they go from panicle to panicle, it's like snowfall because they're hitting these blooms and the little petals are falling off. Western snowberries are native to my area of Texas and it is easily the toughest tree I've ever come across. It's always doing something, y'all. If you have an opportunity to get your hands on a western soapberry, it makes for a beautiful small shade tree and the wildlife benefit is off the charts. There's truly nothing like it in the spring or early summer when it's blooming like this. It is so covered in pollinators. You can hear them from across the yard and in the wintertime, the berries are beautiful. The fall color is stunning. There's nothing like it. I truly don't know why it isn't sold more. They do seed around a little bit but they're very easy to pop up out of the ground. I just think it is one of the most exceptional native trees that we have. I absolutely love them. You don't have to, this tree can take anything, anything. Doesn't need a drop of water, doesn't need anything from you. Incredibly, incredibly exceptionally tough tree. Super tough tree. Highly recommend. I've half a mind to just start growing them and selling them myself because I never see them for sale. Speaking of native and insane, look the prickly pear is blooming. This looks like it's going to be one of its biggest years of flowering ever. Do you see all these blooms? I just love. Let me get the light better for y'all. This beautiful color of yellow is so exceptional. Just so clear, lemony. Hold on, I need to show you one more thing before we go get our plant victims for the day. Okay, last but not least and then we'll go get all the herbs that we got to plant. Look at this. This is a red pillar and althea. Don't these blooms look almost fake? They look almost fake. I've been seeing the hummingbird over here taking advantage. We wound up having to put together this little shade cloth type area because the plants were sitting in the on the pallets and just baking. It was getting impossible to keep them happy. Impossible. So we got the shade cloth thing set up. Let me show y'all, give you a close-up of how these inch and a half pvc are stuck in the ground. So there's pie right here that's driven into the ground and then the pvc is just sliding inside of it and then bent over in a big hoop and then we zip tied the shade cloth all up and down it. Which by the way was a game changer because now when I come check on the plants in the afternoon they don't look like they want to leave this earth. They look fine. They're still looking healthy. I used to come check on them in the heat of the afternoon. They're just wilted down. They're bone dry. They're upset. They're upset with me. So the shade cloth has been awesome. This is I'll link the kind that I got. It's extremely inexpensive. I got it off amazon. Like I said it's just zip tied. I do anticipate that being a annual expense for me because given our weird weather, storms, hail, wind, I don't know that this will hold up for years. Anyway today is an herb planting day. Let me show y'all what we got. I'm a huge fan huge fan of herbs in the flowerbed. I think they're a very low cost and generally very tough. Texas tough type plant to incorporate into your flowerbed and they're inexpensive because they're sold everywhere. They're sold in them little burpee four inch deals. Those are like a couple of bucks. They're very easy to grow from seed. Very easy to propagate. There's a lot of bang for your buck. You can cook with them. I don't cook with them because I just like I don't like I don't like to. I'm a fan of very plain food but either way they're beautiful in the flowerbed beloved by pollinators. Most of them are perennial and extremely cold hard like drought tolerant. It's it's I promise you it's a win to use herbs in your flowerbed and the ones that we are going to plant today are also incredibly beautiful. First things first we got to get some of our lavender in the ground. So we started lavender from seed. You and I together over the winter time we started very lavender from seed. They're all grown up now looking beautiful but I also bought a few different kinds of lavender when I was plant shopping a few weeks ago because I love to try new kinds of lavender. Let me introduce you to chill out blue. An English lavender which for me historically the English lavender that I do tend to use the most which is super blue has been very very very very tough. This being an English lavender it looks like it gets about the same size. I have high hopes for this one. I have very high hopes. It has an absolutely gorgeous gorgeous just compact habit. Beautiful silvery leaves. This this plant smells good just as I when I pick it up to move it. It smells incredible. We also need to get all of our other little lavender babies that we started from seed over here. Oh crap. Y'all I went to Walmart yesterday and bought a new hand spade because I lost mine. I was doing weeds and I need that thing like I need if I'm in the garden I need that hand spade because it's how I pop Bermuda grass up out of the flower beds. I move the mulch. I dig it in. I pry it and then pop it out and then like that it looks like no one's ever been there but now there's just not Bermuda in the flower bed. That's how I go around and weed. I need it. If I had a pocket big enough in these it would be in the pocket but I don't so I just carry it around and hope that I can keep up with it. I didn't the other day and I lost it and I looked I probably spent an hour of my day looking for the spade thinking it's buried under the mulch. It's in a cart somewhere. It's I don't know the dog I even was suspicious of the dogs. It's right here. It fell in between the slats of these pallets and yesterday before I saw this I did go and buy a new a brand new spade so now I guess we have we have two of this kind. These are my favorite kind. These ones from Walmart. While we are under the shade I want to tell you about these two basils. Get out of here lavender. You might be the star of the show but the people want to see the basil. Okay I have two I have two things here. This one you saw on a short maybe like a week ago and this is a let me show you the tag purple ruffles. It is so beautiful. I knew as soon as I saw it that I could not walk by it. It is obviously quite ready to to go. It has this one single wooden stem and it's just kind of waving around like a dragon tail. I think that's so pretty and then this other is an African blue. Now I have heard about the African blues from the fellow Texas garden community and they have said I need to get an African blue if I want to see an insane pollinator show later. This allegedly will get upwards of four feet tall in a single season. Obviously these are both going to be annuals for my area. They're not frost tolerant but I'm very excited to see this this basil get huge. The pollinators allegedly absolutely adore the blooms. You can see it's starting to set a bloom right there but it wants to be in the ground. It wants to be in full sun and we are going to find spots for all of this. But also before we go out into the garden look at my little beauty berry propagations. There's one of them looking very happy very happy. It rained last night like quite suddenly out of nowhere. Look my clematis props. Those all rooted and they're doing really good. Another little beauty berry prop. I don't know if this rooted. Oh yes it did. Look there's white roots coming out the bottom. So I got one, two, three, four, five props out of no hold on six. I've got six beauty berry props and I propagated those several weeks ago when the material on the beauty berry was was kind of ideal to do that and yeah I got new beauty berry plants out of it. I have a hedge of beauty berry right in front of the kitchen window. That's my pride. My pride and joy are those beauty berry shrubs. I love American beauty berry for a part shade. Berry producing native hedge. I think they're fine alone but when they're in a hedge and you have a good berry year there's nothing like it. I'll put some video right here of what my berries did last year. It's so gorgeous. It's so gorgeous. So I want to finish out that hedge because it does kind of peter out at the end and I kind of want to fluff. I like it very dense in there so I propagated those so that we could plant those. We'll plant them. We'll get around to it. I'm gonna try to zoom in on these two goofballs. Look at them. They are so funny. These whiptails. They're in this flowerbed. I'm guessing they have a nest. I'm gonna try not to bother them too much. I'm gonna plant way away from them. I think that this is as good an area as any for this phenomenal that I have. You know if we have to if we have to bump the flowerbed out a little bit to accommodate later on in life that's fine. I imagine this flowerbed will get bigger as time goes by. It started out kind of small just because I didn't have that much to pack it with but y'all know how that goes. You always need more plants and more plants and more plants. So phenomenal does get really big for me. It gets bigger than the tag for me. If sighted correctly and if cared for correctly they do get quite big. Y'all have seen the ones that I have on this channel several times. Four foot spread sometimes. So we are going to need to give it some some room maybe on this side but I would kind of like to see it maybe like touch this rock and this is zexmania. This is a rose called hop cream I think. Stunning. Stunningly beautiful. I cut all the blooms off when I put it in just so that it could chill out and not have to worry about the blooms and making hips and all that stuff. So when it does bloom next year which I do expect it to it's not going to do anything this year. It's not gonna do anything this year. It's supposed to just chill out and root in but when it does bloom next year the white the blue the purple I think those will all just be absolutely gorgeous together. This won't take much fuss at all. Tiny plant. Very wet because it rained and the dirt is very wet because it rained so this will be all that it takes to plant this plant. We'll be done. That's a little y'all plant your lavender high so that the water can run off from the crown of the plant. Lavender won't tolerate sitting in water. It hates that. That's all she wrote. That was quick. I think it's gonna look good. I do think I'm gonna put this chill out right here and that is because I like seeing the lavender just kind of dotted around near the edge of the flower but it allows it to get full sun and good airflow and this chill out stays really small like super blue size. Let's see 10 by 18. This tall is going to get and it won't get a whole lot wider than that so I do want to put a lavender here that stays on the small side. Dutch is way too big for over here and phenomenal is way too big for over here. Those both get those both get pretty big at maturity so what we will do that is a glad that I don't want and I do have we have quite a bit of drip in here which is not ideal. Oh I forgot my spade. See if it wasn't attached to me I'd forget it. Okay I found it. There is like I was saying quite a bit of drip right here and I'm gonna have to come back and correct that later because while I do have some drip on some of the lavenders it is very difficult unless I know exactly what your soil is like to recommend how much drip to put on it. Listen the the dirt in this bed drains very quickly very very very quickly and as many many weeks as we go without rain and as hot as it gets here lavender does like it warm but it doesn't like the kind of heat and humidity that we have. It's native to the Mediterranean right? Warm dry days cool nights that's what it tends to like that's why it does so well in places like the Pacific Northwest and the area in the Olympic shadow if you're familiar with that area of Washington where it rains very very very little it's very dry and the lavender tends to do really well there. The foliage is able to stay dry it's able to stay free of fungal diseases so the amount of drip that I have over here which was for marigolds which got decimated by something I don't know and and they appear to be doing the same things to these zinnias so I don't have high hope for annuals in this flowerbed anymore it just is what it is but I do want to put this chill out because it's going to stay small so I'd like to do that. A gorgeous plant love love love y'all in order to plant that blue basil that I showed you we're gonna have to take out this this caryopteris y'all it's driving me crazy it's not happy it looks terrible it looks terrible look at this close like look at it close up and you'll see why we're gonna pull it and you won't feel bad for it it is so chlorotic and unhappy now like I've said in the past the deal with caryopteris is in my experience they do good for a couple of years and then they really start to decline really quick and you got to replace them which I'm fine with because a caryopteris in its prime it's unlike anything else in the garden it absolutely just draws the pollinators in in droves and I think this is a blue beard or maybe a blue knight I can't remember but either way I'm fine with replacing the caryopteris every couple years I feel like that's bang for my buck I'm not mad about it it's very hard on things in this flowerbed to look good because it is so incredibly alkaline so hard on these plants that really high ph dirt it just does not allow them to take up the kind of nutrients that keeps them very lush and green it binds iron if you look over here you'll see that's an a that's an echinacea purpurea that's a native coneflower it hates it over here there are some that are doing really good in this flowerbed but that has hit a pocket of pure limestone and it hates it echinacea echinacea echinacea echinacea almost completely yellow with chlorosis don't even get me started on the liatris they're almost white with it white and then you have this bad boy over here he's completely fine but this caryopteris is not doing it for me anymore it's gonna have to go so let's pop it out and we will put the basil in its place because I think it will really like it right here how well rooted in this thing is in my experience tearing out a caryopteris is usually pretty light work gotta step over this do y'all see this right here there's some mullion that's a monster mullion I grew mullion for my sister over the winter time from seed because she wanted mullion and um I had some leftover and I put it here it's a monster they're biennial so that's all it's going to do this year is them big them big leafies and no flowers not yet um wow this got really messed up by the hail too um that's not gonna come out as easy as I thought so don't you love it when your firebed gets so full that you gotta watch where you where you step um what was I saying oh it's about to be so hot that my phone's gonna stop working oh we're on solid rock no wonder he's not happy whoa wow there we go that's all done all that stuff that's laying around it is broken parts of the caryopteris that I just want to break down in place there's nothing wrong with them they're just chlorotic they're not really diseased in any kind of way it's just it just is a matter of that kind of plant just can't handle this level of alkalinity and look good they will continue to yellow and and burn and just slowly decline and if this basil likes this spot it will fill in really nicely here next to this big old sunflower that's a brown a smoky bronze fennel um I think that would look really good here and those will just break down in place and disappear very quickly I'm trying desperately to fill in the tiny wildlife pond flowerbed so I think that if we just let it kind of hug one of these rocks I think that'd be really cute so like I don't know right there I might even take some cuttings later just to kind of I'd like to have more than one it's not marked so we're free to we're free to do as we will with propagating looks like there we go very last location for the lavender that we grew from seed is going to be in the beautiful cut flower garden area and I think the sun's going to finally make an appearance it's been very cloudy and very humid kind of like sprinkling and being weird for the last 30 minutes but what I'd like to do listen this doesn't look great right now when here in about a month or two it will be an absolute riot of color there's flowers and drip tape running along either side of this there's a goldfish tank in the center and up the middle I usually leave clear to get a cart through but honestly last couple years even with leaving the cart or even with leaving the middle free it's not possible to get a cart through here because things get so thick and the celosia seeds so thick and everything gets very thick in here it's not possible to get a cart in so I think I want to try a lavender hedge right down the middle because I have never grown a hedge of lavender and I want to see if I can make it work and given that we grew these from a seed they're the vera lavender you can get it from seed therapy they're they're fairly easy to start from seed in my opinion lavender is pretty easy to start from seed it costs it'll cost us next to nothing to try out this experiment and we'll just see we'll just see what happens but I think if I could get a little row lavender going right here I think that'd look really cute I am racing a weird random storm that just all of a sudden come in look I had to do it let me show it to you real quick before I sign off because I think it's about to dump let me show you how I had to do it because I forgot when I first put this uh little cut flower area in I made these little steps out of brick extra brick we had and laid them out in a cute pattern so I could put pots of herbs and I did for the first couple years now I don't do that anymore I forgot that they were there so I kind of had to be like bob and weave my lavender hedge it's not so much a hedge anymore but that doesn't matter because they'll fill it in touch at some point so yeah here they are here's one step you can see my steps throughout here but they go like this and I think they'll fill it in touch I think it'll look really cute with the oregano I let always let my sunflowers just kind of go to seed and do whatever the birds eat them in the fall and winter and then during the growing season they're beloved by pollinators so what's not to love anyway if it is really going to rain for the rest of the day I want to get a few more things planted before it really starts to dump so I will see y'all in the next video and thank you for watching!