- Howdy!

I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," let's have a toast.

To salute our 30th season, we're digging into our archives to bring you a special libation celebration so that you can learn how to grow your own grapes, craft quality cocktails, and throw a great garden party all in one place.

So let's get growing right here, right now.

- [Narrator] Central Texas Gardener's 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden, supporting a love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Narrator] Want to know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, H-E-B has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking and Field & Future by H-E-B trash bags.

You can learn more at ourtexasourfuture.com.

(bright music) - No celebration is complete without a few choice beverages.

So as we continue to celebrate our 30th season here at CTG, it only seems fitting that we take a look back at some of the more intoxicating gardens we've come across over the years.

Starting with Joel and Nerinda Pennington's Westlake Winery.

- [Narrator] The Penningtons don't have to hit the road to visit a vineyard.

In fact, all they have to do is step out the back door to watch grapes ripen into their signature wine, Slow Turtle.

It all started in 2012 when they bought a house that came with a neglected micro vineyard.

- When we came here there was a six-foot cyclone fence surrounding the vineyard, and deer would kind of jump in and get a little confused and bounce around.

- We didn't realize how much work actually it was going to take to get it to where it is, but we're certainly excited we didn't pull them out because this space has kind of become like the heart of the home.

- [Narrator] To learn more about making wine and viticulture, he enrolled in Texas Tech's online and hands-on Texas wine making certificate program.

But first, they overhauled the landscaping and built stylish deerproofing that lets in light and promotes airflow.

- [Joel] We wanted to make the vineyard visible from the rest of the property to be able to see in and not have it be a closed wall.

So we use the four-inch bull wire fence, which, you know, has pretty good visibility, but it keeps some of the critters out.

- [Narrator] His grapes are Champanel, a hybrid that's resistant to Pierce's disease.

- [Joel] When we moved over to this new trellis system, which is called VSP, vertical shoot positioning, the notion there is to be able to let the shoots grow up, straight up, and then they'll go ahead and wrap down the top of the rows.

You can see on the cordons, which are the arms of the vines, that they have a single wire that they're affixed to.

So that's called the cordon wire.

And the other wires that we have in pairs going up are called fruiting wires.

And I have to do a couple prunings per year because these, these vines are pretty vigorous.

I'll actually come out here a couple times a year and do what is called leaf pulling.

So I'll pull some leaves in the fruiting zone just so that the grapes can get, you know, good exposure to light and air as well.

- [Narrator] All those leaves head to the compost pile.

Later, Joel mines it for free natural fertilizer.

- We get the children involved (laughs) because there's a lot of cleaning up, especially in fall when the leaves are falling.

This is covered in leaves, and it's a lot of work.

It's not simply just getting one person to rake up the leaves.

So all four of us get involved and make a pile out the back of the vineyard and the children enjoy throwing them around and jumping in them.

- [Narrator] Despite good ventilation, rain bombs are more destructive than drought.

- We have a drip line in place.

I guess in a typical year, we'd go ahead and water about twice a week through probably harvest, and then we would drop that down to once a week, just so that the vines and the cordons had a chance to harden a little bit.

This year, I haven't watered at all.

I haven't needed to.

In fact, I have more water than I can use, and that's indicative with some of the grapes splitting and you see some rot as well.

It also helps to come out here on a regular basis and pick the grapes that are splitting so that they don't mold as well.

And that's where I can get the girls involved and they can come out here and, you know, lead the pack and- - [Nerinda] We've got some good helpers.

- [Joel] Yeah, we got some good helpers.

- [Narrator] Caterpillars can be a problem at bud swell in spring.

Bacillus thuringiensis takes care of any chompers that sneak past hand squishing.

Birds are the biggest threat as grapes ripen in late summer.

- When you see the birds start to hang out next to your fruit- - That's when it's time to net.

That's a job that we don't necessarily look forward to because it is a little bit challenging netting, just two people.

- With this new trellis system, I think the nice thing is, is that it's so high up and it's kind of tall on the top that we might be able to get like a V shape where it keeps the net further away from the grapes and they're not able to just hang onto the netting and get their beak in there.

- [Narrator] Grapes are produced on last year's wood, so major pruning waits until winter.

- And I'll cut all of the old shoots so that I'm leaving two buds for the spring.

So for example, here's our trunk.

These are our cordons.

So you can see here that this is last year's wood.

You can tell from the color.

And so I left one bud here, one bud here, and you can see you have a shoot here and a shoot here.

And so everything that you see in terms of all these shoots and all the canopy, that's all from this year.

So at the end of last spring, all you would see would be this cordon and it kinda looks like deer antlers.

- [Narrator] Nerinda twirled some of the leftovers into outdoor lighting with a twist.

- [Narrator] We got a big PVC tube and sort of just wrapped the vines around and very gently pulled it out.

With that, we were able to put it out in the children's play area so we could kind of marry a little bit about what's going on here in the vineyard, out into the children's area.

And so they've got some great fabulous lighting for when they play out there at nighttime now.

- [Narrator] Usually, the grapes ripen in early August.

- Early July, you'll start to see them gradually turn like a purplish black color.

And in terms of when they're ready, I'll start taking samples of grapes in mid-July and I'll go ahead and take a look at what their sugar levels are and their acidity.

But if I left these on the vine, for example, until late August, I'd still have a lot of sugar.

The sugar doesn't go anywhere.

But my acidity level would drop off and it'd be very flat.

So there's kind of this optimum time of where sugar and acidity levels are at, you know, the right combination.

What we'll do is we'll just go ahead and cut each of the clusters and we'll put the clusters in a few trays.

And then we'll take the trays up and start to pick the most suitable grapes off and discard the rest.

And then what we'll do is we'll go ahead and crush the grapes.

So since our yield isn't high by commercial standards, we'll have the girls go ahead and, you know, clean their feet, then get in there and start breaking the skins.

And then once all the skins are broken, then we'll go ahead and add some yeast and perhaps some yeast nutrients as well.

We'll put them in the winery and get the temperature in the kind of mid 70s.

That's an ideal temperature for fermentation.

And over the course of a week, the yeast will start to interact with the sugars in the grape.

Fermentation is yeast interacting with sugar, giving you carbon dioxide and alcohol.

- [Narrator] Typically, the process takes nine months, a month in a small oak barrel, and eight in stainless steel.

So what does the wine taste like?

- I'm from originally Melbourne, Australia, and my father introduced me to red wine.

And when I go home, we still enjoy a nice bottle of Australian wine.

It's usually a lot heavier, your Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon, for example.

So tasting this for the first time, it was certainly very different to anything I had tasted before in regards to a red wine.

It was a lot lighter.

I felt a lot fresher.

Something that you'd enjoy perhaps more on a summer's day than the heavier wine in winter.

- And the color is beautiful.

It's a nice garnet red color.

And I think it's probably good for the girls to be able to see something from start to finish and see, you know, people enjoy that.

So they're getting exposure to that from a pretty early age.

- Slow Turtle has since switched gears from red to white wine with Joel having recently replaced his Champanel vines with Caminante and Ambulo Blanc.

Two white varietals, specifically bred for their high resistance to Pierce's disease.

But don't expect to find Slow Turtle for sale at your local bottle shop these days as Joel has shifted his focus to Blackdot, a robotic tattoo company he founded in 2019.

CTG has been happy to host author and artist, Amy Stewart, several times over the years.

Here's a clip from 2014 when she dropped by to discuss her bestselling book, "The Drunken Botanist."

- Let's just dive in and start talking about some of these fascinating relationships between the plants and the drinks.

There are a lot of very common plants, agriculturally common plants like barley that are certainly used.

Another very common plant, the one that every American is familiar with, corn.

Right.

Has an interesting relationship to alcohol as well.

- Yeah.

- And an ancient one.

Right.

Well, so here's the thing with corn.

It's a new world plant.

And native people in South America have been making booze with it for thousands and thousands of years.

But not from the ears.

They were actually- - Not from the ears?

- Not from the ears.

From the sugar in the stalk.

So they were growing it like sugarcane, which is another big grass.

They're both grasses, right?

- Sure, right.

- And they were cultivating it for the sugar in the stalk.

And we know this because you can look at archeological sites and see the remnants of people chewing little bits of the stalk just to get a source of sugar.

And you can still find those little, they call them quids, little chewed up bits of stalk.

But they made wine.

They would press the sweet juice out of the stalk and make cornstalk wine.

- Ferment the cornstalk.

Fascinating.

- Even the colonists did a little cornstalk wine before they figured out, "Oh wait, we know a better way to do this.

We come from Scotland and Ireland.

We know what to do with this grain."

- And then they have since turned corn into something else altogether, right?

- Right.

Well, so, you know, the great- - Not wine.

- The great American spirit, bourbon, was born.

It has to be 51% corn if you're gonna call it bourbon.

That's the law.

So that's where our great American whiskey comes from.

- Right.

Well, the book is divided into thirds.

The first deals with the kind of subject we're talking about right now, which is the different things that go in that are turned into alcoholic beverages.

- Right.

- But the middle section deals with the things that are added to to add distinctive flavoring.

But many of these started as medicines, correct?

- Right.

The original reason we added plants to alcohol was to create medicine.

There were no pills.

So what you would do is you'd take plants and soak them in alcohol and extract the active ingredients, put it on the shelf, and give that to somebody when they were sick.

- Sure.

- So for instance, the bark of the cinchona tree is very high in quinine, which is a malaria treatment.

Very important.

Well, we also put it in tonic water.

So there's your gin and tonic.

And there's all kinds of bitter European herbal liqueurs that have a little bit of quinine in them.

So you start out soaking it in alcohol, and then you think to yourself, "You know, if I put a little sugar in this, my patients might actually drink it."

And then it's a very short step from that to putting a little of your medicine into a cocktail, putting it into your brandy.

- Grandpa's special medicine.

- Right.

Right.

So we're still drinking these very medicinal plants, but I have to warn you, do not let yourself think that your cocktail is a health drink.

- We do wanna just spend a little bit of time talking about the third part of the book, which has to do with plants we can use in our gardens.

- Right.

- And again, things that are used in the context of your book here of drinks.

- Yeah.

- Lavender.

I never, I'm trying to imagine a lavender drink.

- Oh, you should have been with us a couple days ago when I was making lavender cocktails for everybody.

- [Tom] Okay.

I should have been.

- You should have.

So I think that lavender and some of these other floral herbs, like the scented geraniums that maybe are like, smell like roses are great in cocktails.

You can do a simple syrup, just equal parts sugar and water and you heat it up till the sugar melts and throw a bunch of lavender in, let it steep for an hour or two.

That lavender flavor in gin, for instance, or in a vodka drink is really just bright and floral and interesting, and it tastes just like the plant smells, but in a really wonderful way, yes.

- [Tom] Well, again, our guest is Amy Stewart.

The book is "The Drunken Botanist."

- [Amy] Yes.

- [Tom] You're doing very well for a drunken botanist.

- [Amy] I'm remarkably sober, huh?

- You're remarkably sober.

- For you.

- Amy has continued to write prolifically since we last saw her here on Central Texas Gardener, even branching out into the realm of historical fiction with her popular Kopp Sisters series of novels.

If you have a party to plan, you'd do well to take a tip or two from Lucinda Hutson, a CTG favorite, and the author of books like "Viva Tequila: Cocktails, Cooking, and Other Agave Adventures."

Here's a clip from 2014 when we toured Lucinda's home garden, complete with a tequila cantina.

- [Lucinda] The cantina's built off the back of the garage, and I got horseshoes at the Mexican flea market this year, and trimmed the whole cantina with Mexican horseshoes.

- [Narrator] Of course, she had to include a blue agave, the official tequila succulent.

- My garden is so much a part of my life.

It's what I do instead of going on vacations.

Do you know what I mean?

Maintaining this garden is huge.

- Lucinda joins us now to share some tips on how you can pull from your plants to throw a great garden party.

Lucinda, welcome back.

- Thank you.

Good to be here again.

- Yes, well, you've been a regular on the show, so we're thrilled to have you to talk about a whole bunch of stuff today.

- For many years, yes.

- So you are an avid gardener.

You are a cookbook author, and you are a tequila aficionado, if I'm saying that correctly.

And so you know how to throw a party.

So today, we're gonna have a virtual party, so to speak, and talk about ways on how you can pull from your garden to really zhuzh up those drinks and whatnot, and have a wonderful experience with cocktails.

- Yes.

You know, the market's inundated with all these flavored lavender gin and vodka and blah, blah, blah, which to me, tastes like bubble bath.

So instead, I invite people over to my garden, and I make my own little flavored white spirits, vodka, tequila, or gin by putting aromatic herbs and flower petals and things.

So right there in the garden, we can make our own little flavored spirits.

All you need, fresh lime juice, ice cubes, and then you garnish the drink with a little sprig of the same herb.

And what's fun is guests can walk around the garden.

They can pinch pick and garnish their drink with that.

And if people aren't drinking alcohol, you could just, you know, kind of bruise the leaves, put them in a spritzer or a fun sparkly water or something like that with the lime.

And it's still a lovely way to get to know the garden.

- Oh, that's wonderful.

- Yes.

- So and I'd have to say, I mean, the way you have this set up, it looks really beautiful as well.

So it just adds to, you know, the aesthetic of the party.

You've also, I think have written about talking about where you can enhance your ice cubes.

Tell us about that.

- People love this so much.

Especially in the spring and winter, I freeze pansies, Johnny jump-ups in water.

But in the summer, you might have to do mint or lemon verbena, or a little piece of an orange peel or lime.

And you bring it out and it's like bringing a garden.

So that's lovely.

Especially in spritzers where you see, you know, the ice cubes in it.

- Yeah, that sounds glorious.

- That's fun.

- Well, let's talk about the mermaid grotto.

So what types of drinks do you like to serve in your mermaid grotto?

- Oh, I love the mermaid grotto.

Again, kind of a spritzer drink.

I made up one that I love.

It's a paloma rosita.

So it's like the traditional paloma.

Little bit of fresh pink, grapefruit juice, lot of tequila, squeeze of lime.

(laughs) And a little bit of grapefruit soda at the end.

But I call it rosita because I put pink rose petals in it.

- Oh, nice.

- Kind of a feminine drink.

And garnish it with lemon balm and serve it in fish glasses.

- Oh, well that's absolutely... - Or you could do a fun punch.

I think I'm pretty well known for the fiesta punches that I do.

And I borrowed the idea from Mexico where they serve those big agua fresca jars.

Do you know what I mean?

And I put fresh watermelon and pineapple and grapefruit and fruits and tequila and garnish the whole pitcher or the agua fresca jar and people serve themselves.

And you know, again, if people aren't drinking tequila, they could do one without or have a bottle of tequila on the side.

But these punches are just centerpieces because they're so beautiful to look at as well as filled with flavor.

And what makes it so good, once again, are the herbs that you steep in these punches overnight.

And you kind of wring the herb, use a lot.

You kind of wring the herbs and then put the liquid in there.

And then before you serve it, you put the fresh sprigs in.

And it just imparts such a lovely- The herbs I use in punches especially are mints, of course.

Lemon balm.

Lemon verbena with this just gorgeous lemon scent.

But they're so delicious and fresh.

And not all these fake sugary things that people are- Like my father said, "If you have to drink dessert, don't drink," you know?

And I think that's really true.

- Yeah.

So, well, what about your tequila cantina here?

It sounds like there's tequila involved, but how do you set that up?

- Well, it's so wonderful.

I guess I don't travel to Mexico that much anymore.

So I've created Mexico in my backyard.

In fact, my cantina is dedicated to Vicente Fernandez, the foremost mariachi of Mexico.

I even have an outside shower in my cantina, just in case the guests imbibe too much.

Throw them in the shower.

No, but it's just so beautiful.

I love it.

It just looks like a little cantina on a dirt road in Mexico.

- Oh, yes, that's so nice.

- Yeah, it's very, very special.

- I thought you were gonna say you have an outside shower so you could wash your various cuttings, but you're more concerned with your feisty guests.

- And my morning shower.

- Oh, okay.

- But it just looks like little Mexico.

And truly, without going south of the border, I have Mexico in my whole yard all around me.

I'm surrounded by a country that I love so much.

So I hope it'll encourage people to create their own little, you know, fiesta gardens.

- Wonderful.

Well, you are a CTG Hall of Famer.

Any reflections on looking back on the past 30 years?

- Oh my gosh.

So honored to be a part of this and people watch it all over.

And I just feel very blessed to be included in this show.

So should we drink some tequila to it?

- I think we should.

Let's do that.

Absolutely.

This may or may not be tequila?

- Right.

Now, sangrita is a non-alcoholic chaser.

If you go to Mexico, you get a shot of this.

No tomato in mine.

It's based on a 200-year-old recipe.

- [John Hart] Ooh.

- Orange, fresh orange juice, lime juice, pomegranate juice, and hot red Valentina chili sauce.

So, sweet, sour, salty, spicy.

And what you do is you say, salud.

- Salud.

Dinero y amor y bastante tiempo para gozarlos.

I'll let you say that.

- So we sip a little of the sangrita and a lot of the tequila.

- That's nice, and it has a kick.

- And I say thank you for including me in this show.

- Thank you so much, Lucinda.

We're gonna throw things over to Trisha Shirey who shared some favorite cocktail recipes of her own with us back in 2015.

- Salud.

- Salud.

- Salud.

(laughs) (bright music) - We all grow herbs, flowers, fruits, and vegetables to enhance our tables and enjoy while we're dining, but you can bring those into the cocktail hour as well.

And I'm gonna share with you some of my favorite recipes, and they'll be on our website so you can check there for all the ingredients.

One of my favorite things is to use fruits to flavor liquor.

Now, this is a peach bourbon, and I've chopped up peaches and let them sit in the bourbon for five to seven days.

And then after that, I strain the peaches out and freeze the bourbon.

It keeps it fresher because we don't have any preservatives in it.

So you'll want to make small batches and use it up quickly too, because these don't last forever.

You can also use pineapple and flavor vodka, rum, tequila.

What, brandy even.

Cherry, ginger roots, strawberries.

All kinds of fruits are wonderful in these alcohols.

And so to make a drink with my peach flavored bourbon, I'm going to add some of the bourbon to a muddler drink mixer.

I'm going to also add some ginger syrup.

So this is a simple syrup that I've flavored with some fresh ginger.

And you could add some fresh mint to this just to add a little more splash of flavor.

Lemon thyme is also really wonderful in this.

So give that a good shake.

And then I'd add some sparkling soda or this is a lime flavored sparkling soda.

And then pour that into a drink glass.

And I chopped up a little bit of fresh peach in there with it.

So you're getting a little bite of fresh peach in the mixer as you're consuming that.

And that's quite wonderful.

Now, another thing that I love for the summertime when I've got my fresh vegetables from the garden is a vegetable-based cocktail.

So I've got some cherry tomatoes already in the drink mixer container here.

I've also got some chopped cucumber.

I'm using Suyo Long cucumber that looks like this.

This is a Poona Kheera cucumber that I'm growing for the first time, and it's really wonderful.

I'm also gonna chop just a little bit of serrano pepper to give it a little bit of bite.

Now in that, I'm going to add some gin.

You could also use vodka in this drink.

And let's add a little bit of fresh lime juice.

And these are little Mexican limes which grow quite well here in containers and adds a little bit of freshness.

And then this muddler that I'm using is a stainless steel muddler with a silicone base.

It dishwashes very easily.

And we're going to really get in there and blend up those vegetables.

And then I'm going to add one of my favorite basils.

This is bell pepper basil, and I'm going to twist a little bit to release the essential oils and add that.

You could add any basil that you wanted.

Key lime basil is wonderful in here.

Lemon thyme is wonderful as well.

And then once that's all muddled, I'm going to add a little bit of a elderflower liqueur for sweetness, and then some tonic water.

And this is an elderflower tonic water.

You could also add sparkling water if you're not a tonic lover.

You could do this same drink with just the cucumbers if you didn't wanna add the tomatoes, and it's delicious and makes a really beautiful and wonderful cocktail that I think your friends will just adore.

For Backyard Basics, I'm Trisha Shirey.

Thanks for watching.

- Be sure to check out centraltexasgardener.org for tips, resources, and to watch online.

Until next time, adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Central Texas Gardener's 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden, supporting a love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Narrator] Want to know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, H-E-B has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking and Field and Future by H-E-B trash bags.

You can learn more at ourtexasourfuture.com.

(playful music)