Feb. 19, 2007

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TYLER – "The best one yet," said one of the nearly 350 attendees at the 2007 East Texas Spring Landscape and Garden Conference. The event was held Feb 10 in Tyler.

The challenge is to make the event relevant to the changing needs of professional landscaper and Master Gardeners, said Keith Hansen, Texas Cooperative Extension agent for horticulture in Smith County.

This year, many of the speakers spoke of how to deal with drought. For example, Billy Kniffen, Extension agent for agriculture and natural resources in Menard County, gave how-to talk on rainwater harvesting. But before he gave his "how-to," he gave a "why-for."

"You get a lot of rain here in East Texas but it doesn't come all at the time," Kniffen said. "You have periods of drought. You have some of the lakes that are low. Even Lake Palestine has gone dry, and so as you look at water during those times when there is drought and you use lots of water for irrigation. And so you look for ways to conserve water and keep water there for your use in home as well as outside, rainwater harvesting is one way to go."

Rainwater harvesting systems range from simple and cheap to expensive and complex, Kniffen said. The simplest structure collects rainwater from an existing roof's gutter system through a simple screen and into a large trash can. Such an inexpensive system can be used for small home gardens and select landscape plants.

Equally simple systems, use tanks from 1,000 to 10,000 gallons. These systems may use the roof of a large house to collect the water or have a "dedicated" metal roof built solely for collecting water, he said.

More complex systems may have a pump and a pressure tank, similar to those used on a home well, and can be used to supply sprinklers or drip-irrigation systems.

Adding more advanced filtrations systems and some sort of sanitation device, such as a chlorinator, allows the water to be used as drinking water for wildlife, pets or even people, Kniffen said.

All types of collection systems have been in use for some time in West Texas. However, as population and demand increase, it's only a matter of time before rainwater harvesting is not just an option but a requisite in East Texas, Kniffen said.

"Less groundwater is going to be available as there's more people ... drilling wells and using water," he said. " So as we look at that decrease in water supply and an increase in water demand ... there is going to be (water) shortages in the next 50 years."

Not all the program's topics were about drought. Mary Wilhite, co-owner of Blue Moon Gardens in Edom, gave a talk on creating butterfly gardens. Wilhite told participants that butterfly gardens, though personally rewarding, were not for the squeamish or those that didn't like to do a lot of hand tilling. The first practice they would have to change was their use of pesticides, as butterflies are highly susceptible to chemical controls.

"If you want to attract butterflies to your garden, you shouldn't be using pesticides because it's like inviting your neighbors over for dinner and then poisoning them," Wilhite said. "And if you don't like lots of kinds of wildlife you probably shouldn't try attracting butterflies. Because to have a good environment for butterflies, you need to have a lot of diversity of wildlife."

By wildlife, Wilhite meant everything from snakes to spiders and other things that crawl or slither.

More information on butterfly gardening could be found on the Internet and in books, she said.

As for books, Wilhite recommended "The Complete Guide to Butterfly Gardening, Identification, and Behavior" by Donald and Lillian Stokes.