New to Geo pandas.

I have a geopanda frame that has county name and geometry.

Trying to plot these counties on a map where area and name of the boundary is annotated at centroid of each county.

I got it working in a very hacky way by creating a Geo panda frame for each information that needs to be plotted, like area or centroid coordinates.
Is there a better method of plotting

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 12))

# Plot counties
counties.plot(ax=ax , color='steelblue', edgecolor='#6a6a6a', linewidth=2 , alpha =0.5 , kind="geo")

# Draw centroids with red circle 

## Method 1: works but need a new gdf created for centroids 
county_centroids.plot(ax=ax , color='red', marker='o', markersize=5 )


## Method 2: NOT WORKING.  Attempt to calculate centroid and plot on the fly  
counties.plot(ax=ax,  color ="red",  marker="o", markersize=6 , x=counties.geometry.x , y =counties.geometry.y , kind = "scatter")

I was wondering if there is some way where one can keep on adding layer over layer like a mosaic and plot it at the end.

Thanks