The Garden

Introduction

Welcome to our garden! We are working on making our yard a pleasant place for both wildlife and ourselves. We are doing this by using all native plants (except for the herb area) and following the wildscape principles.

Our garden is a certified National Wildlife Federation Backyard Wildlife Habitiat and Texas Parks and Wildlife Texas Wildscape Backyard Wildlife Habitat.

History

We turned our yard into a garden. We started by having buffalo grass installed in the back yard by the builders (who had scraped the lot months before we found the house). We then added mostly native plants around the fence edges and the areas the builders had already mulched.

Next thing we knew we ripped up all of the St. Augustine grass from the front yard and covered it in mulch and are gradually filling it with plants.

The Plan

Our current plan is to make the back yard mostly full sun prairie, with a thicket under the lone live oak and shrubs around the fence edges. The front yard will exclude tall grasses since we don't want to upset the neighbors.

We are currently adding little bluestem specimens we collect from various rescue sites around Austin. We are also currently planning a small pond to attract some frogs.

Residents

Plants displayed in green text appeared on their own (no planting or seeding by us). Notes about growing are in gold text.

"Weeds"

Unidentified Plants

None currently

To Do

Other Features

Tech

This page is generated by a Python program I tossed together. Both the residents and weeds plant lists are XML files that are parsed by a combination of a Python XML class loader and renderer I wrote and the python-XML package SAX library. The source code to my loader and renderer can be found here.

Jason M. Spangler, jasons@wumple.com