Food forest on Central Texas Gardener

For those of you who aren't familiar with this, Central Texas Gardener is a long running and award winning gardening program on PBS. They air seasonally appropriate episodes with a garden tour, and interview and a couple of informative expert demonstrations in a half hour program each weekend. The program is fairly influential in the area, in part because they are so good about airing episodes at the right time for people to immediately use the information. It's pretty exclusively organic gardening, but at least twice in the last year they've had tours of gardens where the owners explained they were trying to use permaculture (not just the techniques, the actual word). I'm going to include a link to last week's episode where they tour guide explains how he used swales, buried wood, chop and drop, ect. as well as naming many other specific techniques. That lead to such a successful garden they started a farm stand over their fence, in the middle of the city of Austin. They've since bought a larger property in the country where they're expanding in a larger farm. http://www.klru.org/ctg/episode/ready-set-prune/

Thank you Casie,
I'm not from Texas, but I live here now. We don't own a t.v. and I wasn't aware of this show. I went to the Central Texas Gardener homepage from your link, this is exactly the kind of resource I'm looking for to start my (home scale) gardening efforts in Texas to complement our farming efforts.

Please feel free to share any more resources like this, it is greatly appreciated.

-Josh

Welcome to Texas. One of the go to resources I recommend is The Natural Gardner. If you're not super close, it's still worth at least one trip (maybe even on trip per season) to tour their demonstration gardens. I'm giving you the link http://www.naturalgardeneraustin.com/what-to-do-in-january.html to their month by month to do list for the region. There are a lot of other great nurseries in the area. I'm on the Northwest side and off the top of my head can think of four good ones. All of them full of knowledgeable staff who can answer questions. Permies is still by far my favorite resource, though. There's a surprisingly large number of Texans here.

I don't know what kind of climate you come from, but Texas has three distinct gardening seasons with a mostly dormant period at the height of summer. We have enough growing days to grow two complete generations of many plants that only get one chance in the north. There's a spring season, which we're just weeks away from starting tomato transplants if you don't direct seed. Typically our rainiest time of year is in late May/early June and then there is a break where everyone coaxes through the few plants that can survive summer heat. Right about the hottest point of summer people start a second set of transplants, both warm season plants for the fall garden and cold season plants for winter, usually under shade cloth. When the summer heat starts to break (and hopefully some fall rains come) these go out in the garden to replace the last crop. Actually, as I type this I realize I'm repeating myself. I made this topic https://permies.com/t/53929/Successful-annual-vegetables-Central-Texas last year after speaking with my mother who has decades more experience gardening here.

I saw the episode. He basicaly  had a front yard farmers market, which was cool. At the end it said he bought acreage near temple to do it bigger than what could be accomplished in a residential area.