“I feel a little about companion gardening like I feel about pruning. If it’s a good day for it, I’ll do it,’’ she says, with a chuckle. She does recommend that novice gardeners learn about it, and they can do that best by talking to organic gardeners at Farmers’ Markets.

WORKS FOR FLOWERS TOO

Back in Austin, Jenny Stocker, another gardener on the Austin tour, also veers from a strict companion approach to gardening. The walled, mostly floral gardens that surround her Hill Country home rely mainly on a vast diversity of species for the health of the whole.

She follows a natural path — inter-mixing herbs with vegetables and flowers, using drip line irrigation and re-purposing on-site cedar branches as trellises and tomato supports.

Vegetables are a smaller part of the plan at the Stocker garden, which rambles over a two-acre lot filled with pavestones, gravel, arid plants like Agave and native wildflowers as well as adapted plants, many in raised beds with soil that had to be move in because the site sits on the rocky Balcones stone escarpment

Though only one of seven, mostly walled garden areas is devoted to vegetables, Stocker grows many tomatoes, especially Romas, which can be roasted and frozen. Sometimes, she supports the plants with retired pantyhose, a practice passed down by her mother in England.

“I am a big saver and re-user of stuff. We have cedar trees, probably about 10 foot cedar sapling poles that we use as a bean trellis.”

But Stocker, who volunteers at the Wildflower Center, and her husband David, a retired engineer who crafted the garden’s extensive stone and stucco hardscape, say their gardens’ foremost raison d’etre is to provide outdoor living spaces.

“We love to eat outside,’’ she says. “We can have a seating area for every time of day and part of the year.

Increasingly, eating, or rather, eating better, is a motivation for setting up or expanding a garden, says Cooper. It was the catalyst for Bakatsa, a chemical engineer with a degree from UT who stepped out of the workforce to home school the couple’s daughter.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5