The Thunder Moon

Once again, the Thunder Moon is a good name for this month's full moon (which was about a week ago - oops), since we got a bit more rain. The Cenizo in the front is in full bloom with its beautiful lavender flowers. My husband has built a nice xeric garden around it with some agaves and prickly pear cactus.

In the back, the Tatume squash is doing very well. Usually C. pepo varieties are very susceptible to borers, but I haven't done anything to protect it from squash vine borers, and it's still producing some fruit. The borers have gotten some of the vines, but it has plenty more.

I have some fruits at various stages on the vines. Here's a little baby one with the flower still attached.

When they get bigger they turn a dark green, similar to a big round zucchini.

And here's one that's fully ripe. Even though Tatume is supposed to be a summer squash, I'm letting some ripen to collect seeds. I'm just excited to have found a summer squash that doesn't get killed by squash vine borers!

The Moon and Stars Watermelon had one little melon on it, but it ended up shriveling up and dying. Now it's just growing vines. I hope I get some melons from it eventually.

The okra are growing among the watermelon vines. I planted them a bit late, so no fruit yet, but the plants themselves are doing OK.

The peppers I planted in the back aren't doing too great. For some reason, they aren't making a lot of fruits, and the ones they have made either got sunburned or pecked by birds.

Some of the sweet potatoes are doing well, and some aren't. This variety, an orange one called Diane, is doing the best so far, making some long vines.

The Calico lima beans are growing into lush vines, but with hardly any bean pods. I've harvested maybe seven beans so far. I'm starting to wonder if they need bean inoculant. I've never used it before, but ever since I've been growing beans at this location, they just don't yield well, and the beans I do get are puny.

The Dr. Carolyn tomatoes are the last tomatoes I have still producing. Their flavor wasn't that impressive at first, but as it's gotten later in the year, they seem to be getting sweeter. Maybe the heat concentrates the flavor.

The rest of the tomatoes look like this. Still a few green leaves, but no more fruits.

The eggplant is still the only thing in the front garden the deer haven't munched, which is interesting. That's not what I expected.

The peppers in the front, which are the ones that survived last winter, are finally growing back after we put chicken wire around them to protect them from the chickens and deer.

I've got only two Waltham butternut plants left that might now get a chance to grow since we put chicken wire around them.

The Rattlesnake pole beans are still getting eaten like crazy by the deer. Well, now I know not to plant beans in the front without a lot of protection.

 

We actually aren't have too bad of a summer this year. We actually got a couple of good rainstorms, once of which dumped 4 inches of rain on us. The deer and chickens are causing a much bigger problem than the weather this year.

 

 



The Firefly Moon and Summer Solstice

The summer solstice was last weekend, so the days are getting shorter again. However, we're still just starting the hottest time of the year, and temperatures have been going over 100 for the last several days.

In the back garden, the Tatume squash is sending out long vines, but Squash Vine Borers are getting some of them. It hasn't set any fruit yet. I'm not giving it any special help to see if it really is resistant to SVB's. It would sure be nice to find a variety of C. pepo that can produce a good crop despite SVB's.

The Moon and Stars watermelon is sending out vines too. To be fair, I did plant the cucurbits late. I'm not sure if they're going to have enough time to make a good crop.

The Christmas Lima beans are getting very lush. No sign of any beans yet though, but the vines sure are impressive.

The Corno di Toro and Chapeau de Frade peppers I have in the back are starting to make little fruits.

The French Red Shallots are still very green, even though it looks like it's time to dig up the potatoes and garlic. I'm not sure how dead-looking the tops of shallots are supposed to be before you dig them, but probably more than this.

In the front garden, my husband has been building wire cages around the tomatoes to protect them from the deer, which keep eating the fruits and new leaves. It's helping to protect what tomatoes are left, but a lot of damage was done already. Looks like I'm going to have to go to the trouble of building a fence around the whole garden eventually.

The contrast between the Rattlesnake beans in the front and the lima beans in the back shows the kind of damage the deer can do. They've had all their leaves eaten right at deer-level.

The peppers in the front were being eaten badly too. They weren't eating enough of the plants to kill them, but were making it hard for them to grow a good crop of fruits by stunting their growth. Now that Daniel has cages around them I hope that they can catch up.

The butternut squash I planted in the front are also getting badly eaten. I'm kind of surprised deer even like squash plants, because they have those irritating hairs. I don't like touching them myself.



Weirdly, they still don't like eggplants. I'm getting a good crop of eggplants except for the occassional one pecked by the neighbor's chickens (but apparently the chickens don't actually like them either because they just peck them a time or two and then stop). No sign of any eggplant leaves being eaten by deer.

Finally, I did get a good crop of tomatillos, which I've been accumulating in the fridge to make roasted tomatillo sauce, but the tomatillo plants seem to be dying off. They were the first nightshades to be planted, but I'm surprised they're tiring out before the tomatoes.

I have decided to take cuttings from the tomatillos and tomatoes, and root them in water to try planting for a fall crop. If you'll remember, last year I tried to grow a fall crop of tomatoes from seed, but they didn't get to ripen in time. It may end up being another waste of time, but I wonder if cuttings will go faster. I have room in the back garden (where the deer don't go!), so I think it's worth a try.

Eggplant Harvest

I just harvested a bunch of Fengyuan Purple eggplants. I've never seen an eggplant this long and skinny before.

The lighting for the picture wasn't that great, but you get the idea. I stuck my hand in there for scale. The longest ones are over a foot long.

The deer haven't really been bothering the plants, but several of the eggplants have marks like these in them. Looks like marks from chicken beaks to me! The neighbor's chickens strike again. So much for that idea that chickens are good for the garden. They're almost as destructive as deer! I think most of the eggplants are salvageable. I can cut the pecked part off and eat the rest, but I also found some more tomatoes that had been pecked and earwigs were eating the rest.

I'm looking forward to making some delicious curries and stir-fries with these!

Greening Moon - belated full moon update

I'm back! Last week we went on vacation to the Big Bend area, and before that I was really busy with final exams and getting final grades in, so May's full moon post is about two weeks late.

May is supposed to be our wettest month, and we did get around 3 inches of rain, which isn't actually that much, but better than we have been getting.

Lots of things have been happening in the garden that probably deserve their own post. First the neighbor's chickens were causing a lot of damage digging up things in the front garden, then while we were on vacation the deer found it! I also got my sweet potato plants from Duck Creek Farms and planted them. I've been harvesting a few paste tomatoes, but I think the deer are eating a lot of them too. That makes comparing yields from the different varieties I planted difficult. I might have to leave out that bit of data this time around and just compare things like plant vigor and heat tolerance.

I knew I was risking things by planting my Rattlesnake beans in the front, and sure enough, the deer have been eating the leaves off of them. The funny thing is it looks like my deer are lazy, and are only eating the leaves in the middle of the vine, not bothering to bend down to eat the ones near the ground, or stand up to reach the higher ones.

The chickens dug up a lot of the beans, so in their place I planted the rest of my Waltham Butternut squash seeds. There were from Seed Savers Exchange in 2009, and I guess they were getting old because I was having trouble getting them to germinate. I went ahead and planted all the rest of my seeds in the ground before we left, and when we came back some of them were sprouting.

The deer are also eating the ends of the shoots on the tomatoes and peppers. I guess the new growth is more tender. Some of my peppers are getting fruit anyway, but I'm sure the deer have eaten a lot of the blossoms.

Weirdly, they don't seem to like the eggplants. The remaining eggplants I have that didn't get dug up by the chickens are making fruits now. This variety is Fengyuan Purple, and the eggplants growing on it are really long and skinny! The biggest one I have so far looks like it's over a foot long. Guess I need to make some more Thai Green Curry paste to make these into curry with.

The tomatillos aren't looking so good. I've harvested a lot of them, but now it looks like they're starting to die down. I don't know if it's because they aren't getting enough water or something else. The deer haven't bothered them either, even the ones outside the wire cage my husband made for them.

I should be harvesting lots of tomatoes now, but the deer have been mostly beating me to them. When I got back from vacation there were hardly any ripe ones to be found, except for a few that look like this. This is a nice big Red Brandywine with a big chomp out of it. Another annoying this is it appears deer don't know the difference between a ripe and an unripe tomato. Maybe because they're colorblind? I found lots of green tomatoes, including a really nice Opalka that was the size of a Poblano pepper with bites out of them.

The only thing I have left to plant is my okra. Some of them took a really long time to come up, which isn't that unusual with okra. I got three varieties from Native Seeds/SEARCH, all from Texas: Beck's Gardenville, Eagle Pass, and Hill Country Red. I know I'm a bit late on okra planting, but okra can really take the heat, so I think they'll be OK.

Taking a quick look at the herb garden, the Esperanza is starting to overwhelm things again, like I knew it would. The other plants aren't doing too bad though. Herbs really like being in the ground much more than in pots. Once I planted all my herbs in the ground, ones that had been in pots on my apartment balcony for years, they really took off. In the background here is the Mexican oregano flowering like crazy. To the gnome's right is marjoram, while to his left is thyme. Elsewhere in the herb garden I've got Greek oregano, rosemary, peppermint, orange mint, catmint, catnip, lemon balm, yarrow, skullcap, horehound, parsley, and now a few different kinds of basil.

I'm still waiting on the potatoes to die down. It's taking longer than I thought it would. I also haven't harvested the garlic or shallots yet. The garlic still doesn't look good, but the shallots are still pretty green.

This is Tatume squash, a Mexican heirloom that is in the C. pepo species but is supposed to be more resistant to squash vine borers. I planted five, and it looks like the borers already got one, but the others are doing pretty well, so we'll see.

The Moon and Stars watermelon plants are also doing well. I planted four of them. I also just planted three Melon de Castilla plants, a cantaloupe from Native Seeds/SEARCH. 

The Christmas Lima beans are in the back, so the deer aren't eating them, and they're doing great. They're just starting to get blossoms.

Here are my sweet potatoes I just planted right before we went on vacation. They probably deserve a post of their own. They've just gotten settled after transplanting and are starting to grow.

The fava beans just aren't doing too great though. It started getting hot just as they were making pods, so I think they just didn't have enough time. This fall I'll have to plant them much sooner.

OK, that's my update. By now I should be getting my summer crops in if it wasn't for the darn deer.

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!