GROUP CLASSES · AUSTIN & THE HILL COUNTRY

I’ll teach your whole group to stop killing their houseplants.

Hands-on plant classes for HOAs, neighborhood groups, and friends who keep texting each other photos of dying pothos. I bring everything and come to you — your clubhouse or somebody’s kitchen table — and we repot, propagate, and figure out why Austin water keeps wrecking everyone’s plants.

Get a quote for your group See the three classes ↓

Back when I lived out in Headwaters, in Dripping Springs, my neighbors figured out pretty quick what I did for a living. It started with one person asking me to look at a sad fiddle leaf fig. Then it was three people standing in a driveway holding pots. Eventually we dragged a folding table into somebody’s garage and I showed eight neighbors how to repot — the right way, for our water — in one afternoon.

That afternoon taught me something I already half-knew: people don’t learn plants from a video. They learn it with their hands in the soil while somebody who’s done it ten thousand times tells them they’re not actually drowning the thing — the water here is just wrong for it.

So now I do it on purpose. If you’ve got a group — a neighborhood, an office, a book club that’s gone rogue into houseplants — I’ll come run a class. Here’s how it works and what we cover.

Why a class beats another YouTube rabbit hole

Almost every plant tutorial online was filmed somewhere with soft water and damp air. Out here it’s the opposite, and it’s the single biggest reason good plants die in Central Texas homes. If your group is in Dripping Springs, Wimberley, or the southwest Hill Country, your tap water comes out of the Trinity Aquifer — some of the hardest groundwater in the region, packed with dissolved limestone that leaves a white crust on the soil and slowly chokes roots. Inside Austin proper it’s Highland Lakes surface water: softer, but treated with chloramine that doesn’t just gas off overnight the way old-fashioned chlorine does.

Stack everything else on top of that — limestone under every yard, AC that runs eight months a year and pulls the humidity down to desert levels, hundred-degree summers, and the odd Uri-style freeze that wipes out a porch full of plants overnight — and you’ve got a set of conditions no generic care guide accounts for.

That’s the whole point of doing this in person. I’m not teaching your group the textbook version. I’m teaching the Austin version: which plants actually survive a Hill Country windowsill, how to flush built-up salt out of a pot on our water, and what to do the night a hard freeze is coming.

The three classes I run

Pick one, or mix them — most groups want a little of each. Everything is hands-on. Nobody leaves having only watched.

CLASS 01

Repotting Basics

Most houseplants don’t die of neglect — they die in the wrong pot, in the wrong soil, drinking our water. We cover how to pick a pot and a mix that actually drains, when a plant truly needs repotting versus when you’re just fussing, how to free a root-bound plant without killing it, and the thing I get asked about most: that chalky white crust our hard water leaves on the soil, and how to flush it. Everyone repots a plant before they leave — bring a struggling one from home, or I’ll supply plants and pots.

CLASS 02

Propagation

Turning one plant into a dozen — and turning a group into a swap. We go through water versus soil propagation, where to actually cut, which plants root easily for beginners (pothos, monstera, philodendron, snake plant) and which ones will test your patience, plus why our bone-dry AC air makes rooting trickier here than the internet lets on. Everyone takes a cutting with their own hands and goes home with something that’ll grow. Groups love trading cuttings at the end, so people leave with more than they came with.

CLASS 03

Plant Care & Styling 101

The everything-else class, and the one that saves the most plants. How to read the light in an actual Austin room, how to water on our water without rotting roots or building up salts, how to keep something alive when the AC has turned your living room into a desert, which plants are genuinely hard to kill here, and — the fun part — how to style them so a room looks intentional instead of like a garden center exploded. This is the foundation everyone wishes they’d had before they bought their first ten plants.

How a class actually runs

I come to you. That’s usually one of two settings: your neighborhood’s amenity center or clubhouse — the kind of room HOAs in Headwaters, Belterra, Sweetwater, Circle C, or Steiner Ranch already have — or a host’s home, spread across a kitchen island, a patio, or a backyard. If it’s got a flat surface and a hose or sink nearby, we can work with it.

It works best as a small, hands-on group rather than a lecture hall — enough people to make it social, few enough that I can get to everyone’s hands and everyone’s questions. Plan on a couple of hours. I bring the tools, the soil, the pots, and the cuttings, so nobody has to shop for anything beforehand. Hosts often turn it into a little party — wine, snacks, music — and honestly that’s when these are at their best.

Topic mix is flexible. Plenty of groups want repotting and propagation back to back, with a little Care 101 woven through. We’ll sort out the right shape for your group when you reach out.

What it costs

Every group is different — how many people, which class, whether I’m supplying all the plants and pots or folks are bringing their own — so I quote each one individually rather than pretend a single price fits a six-person girls’ night and a forty-person HOA event. No packages to decode, no surprise add-ons. You’ll know the full number before I load the truck.

Tell me roughly how many people you’ve got, where you are, and which class you’re after, and I’ll send a straight quote back.

Want me to come teach your group?

Keep Austin Watered is just me — Will Burke. Book a class and you get the guy who’s spent 25 years keeping plants alive in this exact climate, not a rotating cast of contractors reading off a national script. Let’s get your group’s hands dirty.

Get a quote for your group

Group Plant Classes