Hi, gardening friends. Thanks for joining me today for episode three of my new podcast, airing on October 16th, 2025. I'm Colleen Dieter, a landscape consultant at ATXGardens.com. Some of my customers told me that they wished they could get alerts or reminders from me about what to do in their yards, and I thought a podcast could be a good way to keep everyone in the loop about what's happening in our Austin and Central Texas gardens.

Today's episode is all about what to do in your garden in the second half of October. But before we get to our gardening to-do list, this episode is sponsored by my landscape consulting business, ATXGardens.com. I help my customers by alleviating their anxieties about their yards. During a consultation, you can ask me anything about what to plant, how to care for your soil, tree problems, lawn maintenance—anything you can think of. You can make an appointment with me for a landscape consultation for your property at ATXGardens.com.

Alright, now let's get to the show.

This week I met with Danielle and Alex in Buda. They have a huge yard with mature trees and some ailing plants. They have two kids and one on the way, and they were wondering if they could grow turfgrass so they have an area for their kids to play. I told them to try watering one very small area of their property where there was still some St. Augustine and Zoysia turfgrass surviving, because I thought it would probably rebound and the light conditions are right for those types of turfgrass. Planting new turfgrass sod would negatively impact their valuable heritage oaks.

Minimizing turfgrass space in your yard is crucial to the success of the turfgrass, and it's also the more eco-conscious choice. I’ll talk a little bit more about turfgrass later in the episode. You know, the types of questions that I answer for my customers vary a lot from day to day, so if you have questions like that, make an appointment today at ATXGardens.com.

So, moving on to what we can do in general in our landscapes right now.

As I have mentioned in the last two episodes, don't trim your trees. Don't trim your shrubs. Don't trim perennials right now. Trimming at this time of year will stimulate new growth, and we need the plants to stop actively growing in order to get ready for winter. Plus, most of the perennials are blooming right now, so if you trim them now, you'll be removing flowers and they will probably not have time to grow more flowers before the first freeze.

Now, today I did a little bit of trimming on some perennials to just put a little space between them to make them look a little tidier. So a little teeny bit is okay, but you don't want to do any major pruning at this time of year.

I also mentioned in the last two episodes: do not feed your plants with fertilizers after October 1st. Fertilizer stimulates new growth right now, and this is when we need the plants to slow down and stop actively growing. Again, like I said in the last episode, a little compost, seaweed, or soil amendments are great to use instead of fertilizers right now.

The second half of October is a good time to plant and transplant any type of plant, so get to it. At this time of year, most of the plants are reaching their maximum size, so if you have plants that you have to trim over and over again because they're growing into walkways and driveways, transplant them now instead of trimming them all the time, and it will cut down on the amount of work that you need to do overall.

So now we're moving into the section of the podcast about woody plants.

October is the best time to plant woody plants like trees and shrubs, woody vines, and that also includes roses. Planting them now as they're going dormant gives them plenty of time to get settled in before summer heat. I am a big fan of the “found roses.” That's a category of roses that horticulturists have found growing on the roadsides or in abandoned places. In some cases these roses came up from seeds on their own, but in other cases, they’re antique varieties whose names may be lost to history or are just waiting to be re-identified. The bottom line is that they need very little care to thrive.

Some of my favorites include a variety called ‘Old Gay Hill.’ There's another one called ‘Highway 290 Pink Buttons,’ and my very favorite is ‘Katy Road Pink,’ which was rebranded as ‘Carefree Beauty.’ Those are available from the Antique Rose Emporium out in Brenham, and you can order online from them. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Some of your established trees will start losing their leaves in October and November. Keep as many leaves as you can and use them as mulch around your existing trees, in your planting beds around fruit trees, and in the vegetable garden. They'll decompose and feed your plants. The leaves provide habitat for insects, including fireflies.

According to the Xerces Society's website, the vast majority of butterflies and moths don't migrate. Instead, they overwinter in the landscape as egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, or adult, and use leaf litter for winter cover. For example, luna moths and swallowtail butterflies disguise their cocoons and chrysalides as dried leaves, blending in with the real leaves. The Xerces Society is an international organization protecting invertebrates. They encourage gardeners to “leave the leaves,” and if you need to remove leaves, use a rake, broom, or blower to avoid shredding leaves, which kills insects that look like leaves.

For me, I think the trick is finding the right balance, because there are some downsides to leaving all of the leaves. For example, in places near walkways and driveways, chopping the leaves up with a leaf vacuum or a lawnmower can prevent the leaves from blowing around so you don't have to clean them up over and over again. And some smaller plants like cedar sage, columbine, and shade-rush can be smothered by a deep layer of whole leaves on top of them, depending on the size of the leaves. There's a big difference between tiny elm leaves and huge magnolia leaves.

If you leave all of the leaves, you need taller plants or aggressive plants that can grow through the leaves or grow above the leaves. And in Austin, you can get too much of a good thing with too many leaves. A very deep layer of leaves here in Austin can provide a little too good of a habitat for our Texas roaches. So I recommend splitting the difference at about a three-inch depth. The further away from your house, the deeper the leaves should be, and shredding some of the leaves around walkways and driveways I think is okay. Try to leave as many leaves as you can further away from the house because it's really good for the butterflies and the fireflies.

Be sure to wear some nice gardening gloves when raking leaves, as raking can cause blisters. Check out my shop at ATXGardens.com in the tools section for some links to different kinds of gloves that I like.

So now we're going to have a little mid-podcast sponsor break.

Hi all. This is Colleen Dieter and you are listening to the ATXGardens Podcast. You know, I give plenty of garden advice on the show, but there's nothing like meeting in person to get the best information for your plants and landscape, and that's what I can do for you. Visit ATXGardens.com. As a certified arborist and professional gardener, I've been giving advice to do-it-yourselfers for over 20 years. I help my customers by alleviating their anxieties about their yards. Visit ATXGardens.com to book a consultation with me. During the consultation, we'll walk through your yard together and answer all of your questions. Also, at ATXGardens.com, you can shop Colleen's favorite things—that's gardening apparel, tools, and books that I often mention during the podcast. From trees to vegetables to wildflowers, I'm here to help. Make an appointment at ATXGardens.com.

Okay, so now back to the show.

Now I'm going to talk a little bit about fruit trees. Rake up and remove fruit tree leaves and any fruit that may be laying on the ground, if possible, from your domestic fruit trees like peaches, apples, plums, and pears. I encourage folks to keep other leaves from other types of trees, but the domestic fruit tree leaves can harbor diseases that can reinfect your trees next year. So try to pick up as many of the fruit tree leaves as is practical, and try to pick up any fruit that's lying on the ground too that the animals didn't eat. I've got the cleanup crew at my house that come through and eat them all up, so I never have to pick anything up.

After you rake up the fruit tree leaves, gather some shade tree leaves from the landscape, spread them around in your orchard, and mow over them to add organic matter to the soil. You don't have to worry about the shade tree leaves spreading diseases to your fruit trees.

Okay, now I have a little bit of a special segment for episode three. It's a segment I'm going to call “Listener Mail.”

I got a question from someone on Instagram and they said, “Can you update us on the concept that is/was the Everything (parenthetical bagel) Garden?” And they go on to say, “I think I've fallen into a trap that you guys perfectly described on The Horticulturati, where normal people with lives and jobs outside of the garden get inspired by these incredible perennial gardens, try to imitate, and then fail to keep up with the tremendous amount of maintenance that it requires. If the Everything concept worked for you, I'd love to hear about it.”

Okay, so for those of you who don't know, or you need your memory jogged, you can listen to The Horticulturati episode from July 27th, 2023 to learn more about the Everything Garden concept. I had another podcast with my friend Leah Turner called The Horticulturati. On that episode from July 27th, 2023, I introduced a concept that I implemented in my front yard that I referred to as the “Everything Garden.”

Basically what I did was I planted one half of the yard with warm season perennials in full sun and the other half of the yard is planted with cool season perennials on the shady side of the yard. And all of these perennials are pretty big and robust, and when they go dormant, I just mow the whole thing. There are very few shrubs or succulents that would get in the way of mowing. So everything gets mowed. I mow the cool-season side in the summer, and I mow the warm-season side in the winter when the plants are dormant.

So to answer the question: the concept is working out pretty well in my front yard. I think it's a little too messy so far for most mainstream American households, but I am working on some ways to make it a little more acceptable. I wish I had sheet-mulched the areas where I planted before I planted them. I think that would have really cut down on weeds in the first year.

I just added another section of the yard this year. I sheet-mulched another area, which is in the shade, and I added warm-season, shade-loving perennials in that area and it looks really good. I also planted it with a much smaller number of species—narrowed it down to just a few species—and that's looking really great. I think that strategy of sheet-mulching and just a few species together is going to be a lot more acceptable for most people's aesthetics.

That part of the yard has been in for less than a year now, and I haven't mowed it yet, so we'll see how it performs. So that's a little update for you. Eventually I want to write a book or launch a website or something to share everything that I've learned with this experiment with the Everything Garden. Stay tuned for more; I'll keep you posted on how it goes. Thank you so much for that question on Instagram.

So, moving on to perennials and bulbs.

The second half of October is your last chance to plant perennials, bulbs, and ornamental grasses. These plants typically grow up from the ground in the spring, bloom in summer and fall, and then the tops die in the winter. Then they grow back again in the spring. Examples include lantanas and Indigo Spires salvia.

If these plants are planted too late in the fall, before they have a chance to get established and we get a freeze, the tops of the plants will die and they may not be established enough to grow back in the spring. Sometimes we don't get freezes until later in December or January, so sometimes we get lucky and you can plant perennials a little bit later into October and early November. But we often get freezes in mid-November or early December, so I've had very mixed results with certain plants and late fall planting—especially with perennials that are sort of tropical, like trailing lantanas and Esperanza (yellow bells). Even our native Texas yellow bells were a little finicky when I've planted them in late fall in the past.

So if you already have these plants on hand, try to get them all into the ground ASAP. If you haven't purchased any yet, or you haven't gotten any from friends or anything yet, wait until spring to get any new perennials, grasses, or bulbs if you don't already have them. Just wait until spring for planting at this point.

The exception to that are the cool-season perennials. Some of my favorite plants are perennials that have an opposite lifecycle of a typical perennial. Plants like white yarrow, spiderworts, and lyreleaf sage grow back from their roots in the fall. Then they're green all winter, they bloom in early spring, and then their tops die in summer. Then in the fall, they do it all over again and grow back from the ground. They usually grow under trees and have adapted this lifecycle to take advantage of the extra sun that comes through when the trees lose their leaves in the winter. Now is a great time for planting cool-season perennials because they can typically tolerate our freezes.

Now is your last chance to divide perennials, bulbs, yuccas, and agaves, and you can also divide grasses at this time too. But it's your last chance; you really want to do it before November 1st. At ATXGardens.com, you can purchase my three-volume set of booklets called “Let’s Care for Texas Plants,” and those booklets have diagrams and instructions about how to care for and divide your bulbs and perennials. So check that out.

Now we're going to talk about vegetables.

There's still time to plant your cool-season veg in the second half of October. Add some compost to the soil and then plant your cool-season crops that will live through the cold weather this winter. It is time to plant fava beans. I've never tried them, so I think that's really interesting.

And same as last episode, you can plant more arugula, radishes, Swiss chard, mustard, turnips, bok choy, beets, collards, carrots, lettuce, and kale. They can all be planted by sowing seeds directly into the garden soil. It's a good idea to do successive plantings of these crops so you never run out. You’ll harvest the older plants and then the new plants will be available for eating later.

Broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbages can be planted in the garden as small plants. Now it's your last chance to plant artichokes and their cousin cardoons as small plants. If you don't get them in now, you can wait until January and you can plant them as crowns instead. I'll talk more about that in my January episodes.

Now is the time to start onions from seed. It's also a good time to plant garlic cloves directly into the ground. It's your last chance to plant peas from seed as well. Everything's getting ready to change in November, so keep listening to future episodes for more updates.

Get ready for freezing weather that could come as early as November 15th, which is hard to believe, but true. Even though our cool-season vegetables can survive cold weather, they can be damaged by freezes, and that will set them back so they won't produce as much good food for you. That makes them more vulnerable to pests and diseases too, when they've been damaged by the cold.

A one- to two-inch layer of mulch over the soil around the plants helps hold moisture and warmth in the soil, and that will help protect the plants from the wildly fluctuating temperatures that we have at this time of year. I like tree leaves or pine needles best for mulching the vegetable garden. Keeping the soil moist and the plants fully hydrated is crucial to success in the fall and winter vegetable garden, and I'll talk more about that in future episodes.

Now, moving on to the herb garden.

You'll want to start cool-season annual herbs like cilantro, parsley, dill, calendula, and fennel from seed at this time. You might even want to try some cool-season annual herbs for teas like chamomile and feverfew. You can plant from seed right now. You could also plant any of those from little transplants as well, so you can get those from the nursery and put those in the garden.

These are plants that will only live through this fall and winter, and then they'll go to seed and then they will die when it gets hot in springtime. These plants will thrive this winter if you provide them with some cover during freezes, so a little bit of row cover fabric or some cloches, or you can toss a blanket over them. Just be ready to cover them up when there's freezes.

This is your last chance to plant perennial herbs before winter, but be aware that some are sensitive to cold—like certain varieties of lavender and thyme—and they may not survive an early freeze if they're not established. So be ready to protect them if you're planting them in late October. Really similar to what I said earlier about perennials: when you're planting a little bit later in the second half of October, they may not be established yet before we get a first freeze, so you just want to be ready to protect them if it gets cold.

This episode, I'm going to do something a little bit different and I'm going to talk a little bit about lawn care.

I'm always asking my customers and listeners to limit the amount of lawn they have if possible and replace that lawn with food crops, herbs, trees, or native plants that benefit us and other creatures in ways that lawns do not. On rare occasions, lawns have their place—mostly for dogs and kids: a place for a small dog to run and poop, or for kids to kick a ball.

If you're still caring for a lawn, it's going to be going dormant now. Give it a final mow for the season. Be sure to set your mower deck as high as possible. Leaving the grass as tall as possible will help prevent winter weeds by blocking light to the ground. Cutting the grass too low in October exposes sensitive parts of the grass to freezes, which kills the runners and roots and will cause the turf to thin out.

If you use a reel mower, I applaud you for your eco-friendliness and commitment to a solid workout routine, but they tend to cut the grass too short, so borrow a regular mower for the final mow to prevent winter weeds. Clean the wheels, deck, and blade before mowing with a borrowed mower to prevent the spread of both turfgrass diseases and dog diseases that might be carried by dog poop.

In the second half of October, if you have a lawn, run the tree leaves over with the lawnmower to chop them up and leave the chopped-up leaves on the lawn to feed both the trees and the lawn. If you let the leaves sit on top of the turfgrass, they will shade the turfgrass and kill it, and that's one common way that lawns become patchy. Some leaves do not chop up very well, and they stay a little too big, so you need to vacuum or rake up and remove them from the lawn completely. Use them elsewhere as mulch. There's a small adjustable rake that I like very much, available in the store on my website at ATXGardens.com. As an Amazon affiliate, I earn commissions from those sales.

Lawns are a complicated subject of much controversy. If you are considering removing lawn from your yard, please hire me for a consultation before you do, so that you know what you're getting into. Make an appointment today at ATXGardens.com.

Also a little different for this episode: I'm going to talk a little bit about annual flowers.

Mid-October is time to switch out any warm-season annuals you have for cool-season annuals. So if you have a pot or a small display of warm-season annuals like zinnias, coleus, pentas, or purslane, now is time to remove them and replace them with pansies, violas, snapdragons, sweet peas, or cyclamen. I have a hanging basket of purslane that I will replace with violas, and I really like to get orange and dark, dark purple violas, and I'll put them in the hanging basket just in time for Halloween.

Now, moving on to everyone's favorite subject in Texas, and that is wildflowers.

This is the last chance to plant wildflower seeds in the second half of October. Bluebonnets and Monarda citriodora, also known as lemon beebalm or lemon horsemint, are two great choices that you can plant now at the last minute. If you planted wildflower seeds earlier this fall, think about how badly you want them to grow. It has not rained this fall, and without rain, the wildflowers will not grow. It's been very disappointing this year.

If you have a very small patch of wildflowers, you could water them to get them to grow. But remember, once you start watering them, you can't stop. If you water the seeds and they start to sprout and then you stop watering them and it doesn't rain, they will die. Most people plant wildflowers because they want to save water and time, so make sure you aren't defeating your original purpose with a desire for a spring show. And let's hope that we get some rain here coming up this winter, but I think the outlook is not great with a La Niña coming on.

I have a bunch of classes and events coming up, and all y'all are invited.

Okay, Saturday, October 18th, I'll be teaching a basic organic vegetable gardening class from 12 to 2 at Givens Park at the Healing Roots and Wings Festival. That festival runs from 11 to 4; like I said, I'll be there from noon to two.

Saturday, November 1st, Central Texas Seed Savers is having our fall festival fundraiser at Greenlee’s Nursery in Pflugerville. Nessa from MicroLife and Jay from Texas Gardener Magazine will be speaking, and I am putting together a very special presentation about seed saving. I'm going to talk about how seed-sharing initiatives prevent mass extinction, reverse climate change, and cure loneliness. Food, drinks, raffles, and all kinds of fun will be happening at our fall festival. Purchase tickets on the Central Texas Seed Savers website. All proceeds go to Central Texas Seed Savers. We are preventing extinction of our special Central Texas plants through seed sharing.

Now, speaking of seed sharing, Saturday, November 8th, Central Texas Seed Savers is having our big yearly seed swap at the Austin Public Library Central location in downtown Austin. It's always tons of fun. I look forward to it every year. This year it's in the gallery area of the library, which is new, and I'm sure it will be splendid. Join us between 11 and 1. You can bring any seeds you have to share, whether they're packaged or commercial seeds, or if you have them right from your gardens, still attached to stems. Even if you don't have seeds to share, you can still come and get seeds. We'll take vegetables, tree seeds, herbs, flowers, native plants, wild grasses— all seeds and all people are welcome. The event is free and you don't need to register. Just come.

Also that same day, Saturday, November 8th, my gardening bestie and my co-host of The Horticulturati Podcast, who I mentioned earlier, Leah Turner, has one of her landscapes that she designed, called Pollinator Paradise, included in the Garden Conservancy Open Days tour. Please get a ticket and say hi to Leah. I'll be stopping by to congratulate her and enjoy that beautiful garden that she designed after the seed swap on November 8th.

Monday, November 17th, I'll be speaking to the Williamson County Master Gardeners at their monthly meeting, which starts at 6:30. That'll be about proper tree planting techniques.

Of course, for more information about all of those events, go to my website at ATXGardens.com. That's ATX as in Austin, Texas.

Alright, gardening friends. That's it for this episode. Please like and subscribe to the show. Write us a review. Please share this episode with a friend. Connect with me on Instagram—it’s @ATXGardens_—and check out all the links in the show notes for tools and events. Alright, thank you so much and we'll catch you next time.