The Grackle Moon

Thursday was April's full moon, and I'd say that the warm-season crops are just about all planted. Finally time to relax a little bit after the frantic March and April planting season and watch things grow.

Here is the front garden. The only thing left to do is mulch that last bed, but I'm waiting until the pole beans get a bit bigger and start climbing the poles. Getting the front garden ready took up a lot of my time, so some of the planting was a little late this year.

I put sticks over the ground to keep the neighbor's chickens from digging up the sprouting beans. That seems to be working so far.

Most of the peppers that survived the winter are coming back nicely. I transplanted them to the front garden, but I'm afraid a few of them might not have survived the trip. Or maybe they're just taking their time.

The tomatillos already have lots of fruit on them. The husks grow first, and then the fruit grows into them (right now the fruits are about the size of marbles).  I got the seeds from an online trade, and they were supposed to be purple tomatillos, but they sure don't look like it to me.

In the back, the Tuscan kale is starting to bolt. I think I'll go ahead and let them and save seeds from them. I'm not going to plant anything in that spot anymore. It's too shady. Too close to an oak tree. The Elephant garlic is starting to make scapes, but it looks like the Romanian Red garlic is all dead now.

The potatoes are starting to turn a little yellow, and I can't tell if that means they're starting to finish up and get ready for harvest, or if they haven't been getting enough water.

The arugula seed pods are starting to dry and shatter. I've been going out there and clipping pods off to save seeds, but a lot of seed is ending up on the ground anyway. I guess I'll have lots of arugula volunteers.

I just planted some Calico lima beans around two bean tepees right next to this year's new pepper plants. I put these pepper plants in the back to isolate them from the peppers in the front for seed saving purposes.

I've started harvesting peas, but only enough to eat fresh right off the plant. The peas are turning out to be a disappointment this year. I think it's a combination of planting them late (after we moved here in March), a dry winter, and then the trellis I made for them keeps falling down and damaging the plants. I'll do better next time, when I will plant them in fall (like I usually do) so they can grow through the winter, and I'll be sure to build a much sturdier trellis for them.

The fava beans are starting to make pods. I'm not sure if I'll have enough to eat some, or if I should just let the seeds mature to increase my seed supply and plant more this fall.

The herb garden is doing great. The roses are finally starting to bloom, about a month later than they did last year. I trimmed back the esparanza and now it's coming back.

I planted watermelons, squash, cucumbers, cantelope, and okra seeds in pots to buy me a little more time to decide where I want to plant them, and to let some of my winter crops finish out before I plant them out. Also, some of the seeds were kind of old, so I wanted to make sure they were going to germinate. I also have basil plants in pots I need to plant out soon.

I've been getting lots of compliments from neighbors about my front yard vegetable garden. I'm really glad I did that. I think it might actually be a better spot than the one in the back (less shade, less rocky), and I'm feeling rebellious because a lot of neighborhoods don't allow front yard vegetable gardens at all. It's like I'm stickin' it to the Man!

The Bluebonnet Moon (and Easter)

Oops, I was so busy with Easter preparation that I forgot about the full moon last week! My family has gotten into the pattern of my parents-in-law hosting Christmas, my sister-in-law hosting Thanksgiving, and I host Easter, so I was busy last week getting that ready, in addition to it being Midterm time at work.

Of course, out in the garden, it's a busy time as well. March and April is when Texas switches from Not-Summer to Summer, and Not-Summer crops are being harvested while Summer crops are quickly being planted before it gets too hot.

Again this year there are a few bluebonnets growing in the front yard, and not as many as I'd prefer. I forgot to add more seeds last year, so maybe I can do that this year. Some of them are already getting pods on them, so we're being careful not to mow them down until the seeds are mature.

In the back garden, I'm still waiting for a lot of the cool-weather plants to finish up, though as I showed you in the last post, the beets and carrots are pretty much done. The fava beans are looking lush and have a lot of blooms. We got 0.1 in. of rain on Easter, and hopefully will be getting more this coming week.

The celery (on the right in the picture) is still small, and I think it's going to stay that way. I've been harvesting leaves and stems from it anyway, even though they're not much bigger than parsley. They still add celery flavor to dishes that call for finely chopped celery, even though they would not be suitable for anything that needs nice big crisp stalks. On the left you can see the shallots, which seem to be doing well.

The peas are about waist high now. They have about two months before it gets too hot for them. I hope I can get some peas by then. Nothing like homegrown green peas.

The arugula is covered with seed pods. I'm going to have plenty of arugula seeds to trade and give away.

The garlic and kale are still looking just so-so. I've been able to harvest a little bit of Tuscan kale, but I am really doubting I'll get a good garlic harvest. Next time I really need to plant them in a better spot than up under this tree.

The front garden is just about done! I ended up making four 20' x 4' beds, with 3' paths between. I've decided I like that better than the 5' wide beds and 2' wide paths I did in the back. That turned out be a bit crowded, especially when the plants were full grown. Eventually I'm going to redo the back garden and widen the paths.

The front garden has all my tomatoes, tomatillos, and eggplants in it already. Now I'm working on transplanting the peppers that survived the winter from the back to the front. Here are the Lemon Drops. All of them survived the winter. In the back I'm only going to plant the peppers I'm saving seeds from, to make them easier to isolate from the other peppers.

We've also been planting things in other areas of the yard. Over Easter weekend, my husband worked really hard on our hedge of fruit trees along the front by the street. Now we have (in order from lower left to upper right in the picture) Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and the fig (unknown variety) that my in-law's gave us. The citruses should start bearing fruit by this winter. I'm not sure how long the other trees will take, but I'm sure it will be worth the wait!

I've also been planting more herbs, including this catnip (left) and catmint (right) in the shady area of the herb garden. First we just put wire cages around them, but some cat figured out how to pull it up and wriggle underneath, managing to eat half the catnip plant. So now we have these rocks around the cages to make that harder. I don't mind giving the cats catnip, once the plants are big enough, but I learned my lesson about leaving catnip unprotected. The cats end up eating it up so quickly it can't grow back and eventually dies. The idea behind the cages is to protect the main part of the plant, while letting the cats eat the parts that eventually grow through the cage. The cats just need to be patient!

The Mockingbird Moon

Maybe I should call this the Mountain Laurel moon instead. The Texas mountain laurels have started blooming, filling the air with their sweet fragrance. That means it's officially spring!

I've still got tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants to plant out in the garden. I'm going to do that ASAP. I don't care if they say our last frost date is in March. I really don't think we're getting any more frosts.

In addition to the purple potato seedlings I talked about last time, I planted out my purple tomatillos at the end of the same bed where the potato seedlings are. I had just the right amount of room.

In the back, the potatoes grown from tubers are starting to sprout. It took them a long time, but they're finally starting to poke out.

The beets I planted back in fall still aren't doing that well. They just haven't gotten enough rain, so they're just sitting there hardly growing. I'm really starting to wonder if I'll get a decent harvest from them at all, let alone be able to tell which varieties are best.

The second batch of beets are also still tiny. They only have two or three months left before it starts to get too hot for them.

The celery is also growing very slowly. I've heard celery needs a lot of water, and these just aren't getting much. I guess I need to buy a lot more drip hoses.

The kale and garlic are not doing much either, but at least the cabbage worms are finally gone. I haven't harvested any kale, and I might not. I get kale from my CSA, and the kale I'm growing is doing so poorly I think I might just leave it alone. I planned to save seed from this kale, since I used up the seed I had for this variety. Maybe I'll just leave it alone and let it do that.

Speaking of seed saving, the arugula is starting to make seed pods. The bees really like the flowers too.

The shallots seem to be doing ok. I've never grown shallots before, so I hope they do well. Onions are hard to grow here, so I'm looking for alternatives. Plus shallots are so expensive at the grocery store! I don't think I've ever eaten shallots before.

The fava beans seem to be doing fine. That's another thing I've never eaten before, but they grow during the winter, which is a good time to grow things here.

Some of the overwintered peppers are starting to put out some little leaves, though some look like they have died. I think once I can tell for sure which lived and which didn't make it, I'm going to transplant them into the front yard bed I just made. Peppers are pretty plants and would make good front yard plants.

I went ahead and put up some bird netting over the bamboo tee-pees I put up for the peas. It's not to keep birds away, but to give the peas something to climb on, since they were having trouble clinging onto the bamboo.

Well, spring is certainly in the air! I'm going to plant the rest of my nightshade transplants as soon as I get the chance, and I need to start seeds for some warm-weather things like basil soon. It's starting to become one of the busiest times of year for gardening!

The Cedar Moon

It's the first full moon of 2013, and it's been very warm lately. We haven't gotten significant rain since that good storm we had around New Year's Day, but for the last couple of weeks or so highs have been in the high 70's and low 80's. I wonder if this is going to be one of those years where it's warm in January, and then in February we have an ice storm.

Friday I got my seed potatoes from www.potatogarden.com. I got three pounds each of Purple Viking and Red Pontiac, both varieties that are supposed to do well in the South. Purple Viking was the best potato I grew back in 2010, though it still wasn't that great (I planted 3 pounds and harvested 5 pounds). I haven't grown Red Pontiac before, but it's a Florida heirloom, which sounds good.

Here are the seed potatoes being cut up. The Purple Vikings are on the left, and the Red Pontiac are ready to be cut up next on the right. I cut them and let them dry out for a day, then planted them in the bed that I had a cover crop of Austrian Winter Peas growing in over the winter. I hope that adds enough nitrogen to help them make a better crop this year than the last time I tried growing potatoes.

Here the potatoes are in the bed getting watered. I have another bale of moldy hay I haven't used yet. I plan on mulching the potatoes with that after they sprout, since potatoes like a deep mulch. I hope that also adds more nutrients for them.

My "purple potato" seedlings are also doing really well. These are from the seeds I got in a trade as a surprise. Some of them are growing really vigorously! I tried planting some last year and they didn't do well at all, so I didn't really count on these doing well either. I now have about 50 seedlings. I'm not sure where I'm going to put them.

Here are all my seedlings, including tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. It's been so warm it's tempting to plant some of them out now, but instead they'll have to stay on their pots, soaking up some sun on the porch.

Out in the garden, the Arugula is bolting. It already started to bolt a little during our last warm spell, then it gold cold and it stopped in its tracks, and now it's picking up where it left off.

A lot of other plants look like they've hardly changed from last month. There just hasn't been enough rain for them to grow much. Here I have kale in the foreground, and garlic in the background. I haven't eaten any of my kale because it got eaten up by bugs so much, and hasn't been growing back new leaves very quickly.

The beet trial doesn't look much different either. I've been thinning them some more, and it looks like a few of them are just starting to form round roots. Some of them where the tops are poking out of the soil look about dime-sized.

I planted a second repeat of the beets in another patch, right around when we had our last rain, and they're just now starting to sprout.

I also planted some fava beans when it last rained, and they're just starting to sprout too.

The Tall Telephone peas are just starting to send out tendrils, and I'm trying a new type of support for them this time. I'm trying out bamboo teepees like I use with pole beans. I'm not sure if it will work with peas, since they climb in a different way than beans, but this variety gets so tall, I need something really tall to support them.

The shallots (left) and celery (right) also don't look like they've made much progress. I've heard that celery needs a lot of water, so they probably haven't been getting enough.

After the peppers got all mushy from freezes, I cut them all down to stumps to see if they might survive the winter and grow back in spring. So far it looks like they all have. They are all still green. If they do all survive, I'll have a lot of extra pepper plants since I've already started more seedlings. I'll have to find some people to adopt them out to.

This weekend is Groundhog Day. Down here in Texas it sure feels like it's already spring, and it's still January. I keep thinking of how lush my garden would be right now, if we would only get some rain to go with these warm temperatures.

The Gold Moon

Sorry this post is a couple of days late. The full moon was actually Sept. 30. I think traditionally this moon is called the Harvest Moon, the full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox. It's just not very gold out there right now, it's mostly very green. We got lots of rain in September, about 5 inches, so everything is looking very lush and green out there. The weather has cooled down so we're having highs in the low 80's and lows in the low 60's.

The garlic is starting to sprout, but so are a lot of rain lilies that are in the bed with them, so it's a little hard to tell what is what. I planted the garlic in the last bed on the end, which is very close to some oak trees, so I hope that wasn't a bad move. I think after I harvest the garlic next summer I'm going to abandon that bed. Hopefully by then I'll have the old shed taken down and that prime sunny area it's now taking up made into more garden space. (We plan on rebuilding a new shed in the shade.)

I also haven't gotten around to mulching the garlic yet. It's probably OK for now since we've gotten a lot of rain and it's not cold yet, but it's on my to-do list.

The Red Giant mustard is growing bigger, but it's still not very red. Does it need cold weather to get red? You can see some more rain lilies coming up there too. They're so pretty, I just don't have the heart to pull them out. They're hard to pull out anyway because of the bulb.

I've also planted some arugula, which you can see here with another wildflower, purple wood-sorrel  growing up among it. That's another "weed" I don't like to pull up. It gets pretty purple flowers on it and the leaves are edible. A whole bunch started coming up in the yard after the rain.

I also planted kale, chard, and dill plants which have also settled in nicely. Still left to plant are parsley, cilantro, and celery.

The beets are just starting to sprout as well. Don't see any carrot sprouts yet. This year I also planted leek and onion seeds directly in the ground instead of trying to transplant them like I've done before. No sprouts of them yet.

The fall tomatoes are doing OK but still pretty small. I don't know if they'll have time to set a crop of tomatoes before frost. Maybe fall tomatoes just aren't worth it.

The tomatoes that survived the summer aren't looking much better than the fall-planted ones. Still no fruit being set. Maybe in the future I should concentrate my efforts on getting a good tomato harvest in the spring and summer, and just accept that there will be no more fresh tomatoes after July or so.

The basil is doing great. I think I should plant basil earlier next year so I'll have some to harvest earlier in the year (like when I have tomatoes!), but no problem with getting a fall harvest of basil too. The only problem I'm having is pinching off the flowers on the varieties I'm not saving seed from this year fast enough to keep them from cross pollinating with the variety I am saving seed from this year.

Well, another problem is figuring out what to do with so much Cinnamon Basil. I've found a few recipes for it, but most of the time when I do a search for "cinnamon basil recipes", I get recipes that have both cinnamon and basil in them but not Cinnamon Basil.

The luffa gourds are another summer survivor that I'm not sure are going to do anything before frost. I wonder if they are in too much shade? They're on the extreme other end of the garden from the garlic. They have grown up into the Ashe juniper tree that shades them on that side, but even the part that's up there isn't setting any fruit.

The hot peppers are putting out a second crop, but disappointingly the bell peppers haven't. The plants look fine, but no peppers. I feel like I'm up to my eyeballs in hot peppers already, but it would be nice to have some more bells before frost.

The leeks I planted in spring are still there, and I still think that's weird. They still haven't bolted or made any bulbs. They've just sat there all through the summer. I was going to try either saving seeds or bulbs from them but they haven't made either. I think this week I'll try cooking with some and seeing if they're at least edible. I keep thinking they're probably tough or bad-tasting by now, but maybe not.

Lastly, the Austrian Winter Peas I planted as a cover crop in the bed I plan on planting potatoes in are growing nicely, with all the rain. The idea is for them to fix nitrogen in the bed before I plant nitrogen-loving potatoes in there in January or February.

Which reminds me, I still need to plant my edible peas and fava beans, but I've run out of room. This is why I'm a bit annoyed with my tomatoes, bell peppers, and luffa gourds right now. They're taking up valuable garden room, as it becomes increasingly doubtful I'm going to get anything more out of them this year. I wonder if I should go ahead and yank any of them up, or if I should wait until they freeze to death before I plant my peas. Except that might delay the pea harvest, and I'm really looking forward to some delicious, fresh homegrown peas. This winter I want to grow enough peas to freeze some for later.