Old Things New

My last duty station was near Fort Walton Beach Florida.  I had bought a home there and was interested in not mowing every square inch of it, so any information that I could find to make that easier would be ok with me.
After I got out of the Air Force in 1992 I went through several job changes and finally worked for a national commercial pest elimination company.  One of my accounts was a gulf side hotel that had a wonderful tropical garden throughout that the owners did not mind me getting cuttings from.  That was around 1997.  I had been doing the normal thing of foundation plantings, and there was a row of pine trees along the west side of my property that I had been placing pine straw and live oak leaves.                                        If you have ever been to the Emerald Coast, especially Destin, which is where my home was, you know that the sand there looks like sugar.  After years of placing the pine needles and oak leaves deteriorating had made the soil go from white to black, and very fertile.  I could sink the cuttings and 90 percent would root.  About that time there was a show on HGTV called The Designer’s Landscape with Gary Alan.  He showed how NOT to use foundation plantings and using French Curves and layering with perennials to reduce mowing and to increase the value of your property.
So, as I stated in my last post my wife and I moved to Texas and have bought a home south of Austin.  I was looking for landscape ideas on YouTube and found my old friend Gary Alan on it.  The home that we bought only had Razzleberry foundation plantings under the front window, so, as before, I started using Gary’s suggestions.  I have lowered the amount of my lawn, which is the most costly planting per square foot on your property.  You have to water it more, do more maintenance and fertilize more than perennials and annuals that have a mulch covering.                                                                    So, here we are, 20 years later, and what I learned so long ago is still just as accurate today as it was then.
Just as that info is still valuable, so is an event that happened almost 2000 years ago!  That we need redemption, and that one day we will be in a better garden than we can build today if we accept that redemption.