The 200th Post

This blog now has 200 posts! I thought I'd do a bit of an overview of how things have been going since I first started this blog.

Most significantly, when I first started this blog, I was unemployed and living in a rented house with my boyfriend. Since then I've found a job, we've gotten married, and bought a house. I don't post nearly as often as I did when I was unemployed and had a lot of time on my hands, but I still try to at least do my garden updates every full moon.

Since we moved into our house, we've done a lot of work on it, but there are still a lot of projects on our to-do list.

Here is the garden in the front. This used to be a patch of mostly dead-looking Bermuda grass that the previous inhabitants parked cars on. Now it has four 4'x20' raised beds made of cedar on it. In the future I'd like to make pathways between them with landscape fabric and cedar bark mulch, and put a small fence around it to keep out the deer and chickens. Right now I have cylinders of wire around a lot of the plants to protect them from getting dug up and eaten, but I'd like a more permanent solution. Still, I think this is a big improvement over what this patch used to look like.

This is mostly my husband's project. In addition to our personal vehicles, he has a work truck, so he built an extension to our driveway with crushed granite, and in between he made this xeric garden. The cenizo was already there, so he built the garden around it with more crushed granite and lined with limestone. Right now it has two prickly pears, an agave, and some Indian blanket. We'd like to add more wildflowers and some type of round or cylindrical cactus, and maybe some kind of yuccas. Except there might not be enough room for that, so now we're looking at the other side of the front yard.

This flowerbed on the other side of the driveway came with the house, but it's not in very good shape. It goes from the driveway all around to the side of the house, and it's made of landscape timbers that are pretty rotten. A lot of the soil is washed out of it, and it's full of weeds. I planted the irises and cannas my mother-in-law gave me here, and there is a dwarf yaupon and boxwood that were there when we moved in. There are also several lantanas, but everything else in there are undesirable weeds. What we've decided to do is make this match the xeric garden on the other side of the driveway. We'll remove the rotten timbers are replace them with more limestone rocks. My husband actually wants to expand it a bit so it comes out further from the house, and that's good because it will reduce how much lawn we have even more. The main difference between this area and the xeric garden along the driveway is this side is much shadier from the big oak trees, so we'll have to put in more shade-tolerant plants. That might be a good thing, though. Limestone and crushed granite can make it match the garden on the other side of the driveway, but having it transition into different species of plants will make it more interesting.

We also discovered something nice when we put the crushed granite in on the other side. The color of crushed granite matches the color of the bricks of our house, so that looks even better than we thought it would.

My husband wanted to plant a hedge along the front of the front yard to provide more privacy. The big oak trees make a nice canopy near the house, but there wasn't really any understory. He planted a few native shrubs right under the oak trees, like yaupon and evergreen sumac, but out here which is not directly under the oak trees, I wanted fruit trees. In the foreground of the above picture is a fig, then after that is a loquat.

Then beyond the loquat we have a kumquat, Satsuma, Myer lemon, and pomegranate.

Right now they look very unnatural, with cages around them to protect them from deer, and lined up so regularly. I hope that once they grow bigger they start to look more interesting. All these different species get to different sizes and shapes, with the fig and loquat getting pretty large (which is why we put them on the end) and the citruses staying short and shrubby. Eventually we'll take the cages off when they're bigger and not as vulnerable to deer munching on them or rubbing their bark off.

We used to have a key lime out here too, but last winter really hurt it bad, even though we covered all the citrus with frost blankets. Most of its branches got killed, and we thought it was a goner, until it sprouted back from the stump. So we dug it up and put it back in a pot, and replaced it with the kumquat. I guess key limes are not quite cold hardy enough to plant in the ground here.

Here is one of the rain barrels we had at our previous residence (with the potted key lime to the right). Another thing on our to-do list is getting some big water tanks. This little rain barrels are nice but just not enough. In a heavy downpour they overflow in only minutes, and in the middle of summer when it's really dry, we use them up quickly. Now we have room for a couple of really big tanks that hold hundreds of gallons. We'd need to first put rain gutters on our roof (weirdly, our house didn't already have them), and then we think we have room for one tank on each side of the house. We can keep the rain barrels and attach them to our garden shed or something like that.

I think it would be great to hook up the soaker hoses for the vegetable gardens up to the big rainwater tanks. I wonder if I might be able to do all the watering for the vegetables from the rainwater tanks once they are full. That would sure be nice.

After that, I also want to set up some kind of greywater system. My husband says it wouldn't be too hard to divert the washing machine and shower drains outside to water plants.

 

 

Along the side of our house we have a patio that cuts into the hillside a little bit, and is lined with bricks to form a bit of a ledge. When we first moved in, there was nothing growing there except for two esparanzas and two rose bushes. I thought this was a perfect place for an herb garden, so that the patio would be lined with fragrant herbs. Plus it's right by the back door which opens straight into the kitchen.

 

 

The right side is a little shady, so here I planted things like mint, catnip, and lemon balm. My husband planted some yarrow, and has been decorating it with interesting rocks and fossils he's collected over the years.

 

The left side is sunnier, so here's where I have things like rosemary, oregano, thyme, marjoram, sage, etc. Also right now I have basil flourishing in the heat, and parsley going to seed. 

 

Then right along the house I planted some of the more tender herbs so they can be better protected: bay, lemongrass, and pineapple sage. I really should have put the lemon verbena and Mexican mint marigold here too, so I might move them over. My husband put some extra crushed granite here, but I think that actually makes them too hot. My plan is to mulch the herbs with cedar bark eventually, and I think I'll put some bark over here too. When the afternoon sun is hitting this area directly, the pineapple sage gets badly wilted.

Speaking of my husband, this is a project he's been working on. This big hole will eventually be a water garden. It's directly behind the house, and used to be just an open grassy area. Since then my husband has been digging away at it, by hand. He used a shovel for about a foot down until he hit bedrock, and from then on has been using a rock bar. This weekend he finally rented a jackhammer to finish it up. It will eventually have a waterfall, and water plants in it. We thought about putting fish in, but after we read up on it more, it sounds like a lot of trouble. Now we're leaning towards just letting frogs and toads colonize it. We're also looking into powering the waterfall's pump with a solar panel to make it more eco-friendly.

Here is the compost pile in the back that needs some work. Right now it's built of cinderblocks we already had in the yard, and those got full so I had to start piling new stuff beside it. I planted my extra sweet potato plants in it as an experiment. I'd like to make it more permanent and expand it so it has at least two sections, since one is turning out not to be enough.

And finally in the very back corner of the back yard is the other vegetable garden. It's looking a bit messy and neglected, but it does have pole beans, squash, cucumbers, and melons planted in it. I've been putting more effort getting the garden in the front looking nice. The back garden is right next to the old garden shed (which I should have included in the photo, now that I think of it) that came with the house. We'd like to replace it some day, because it's rotting and falling apart. After that I'll probably redo this back garden to make it neater and tidier, maybe putting in some permanent beds and pathways like the front garden is going to have. Removing the old shed will also give us more room. It's taking up some of the sunny area back here, so we're going to put our new shed in the shade, to leave us more room in the sun to plant edibles.

So that's the work we've done so far in the two years we've been living in this house, and what we still have on our to-do list. But we're both very happy to have a big yard like this we can do so many things with. I always wanted a really big vegetable garden and fruit trees, and my husband always wanted a garden pond, so now we can have them.

May Rain

I said earlier that May is supposed to be our rainiest month. Well, it looks like this year won't be an exception after all! We've had lots and lots of rain in the last couple of weeks, and the month is still young!

We're leaving for our honeymoon tomorrow, and it looks like I won't need my cat-watchers to water the garden as well. It's getting a good soak!

The rain barrels are overflowing even though our new house doesn't have rain gutters (that's on the long to-do list we have for this house). One of these days we're getting some of those big water tanks that hold like a thousand gallons to collect rainwater. Weather like this could probably fill it up.

We're still under official drought conditions, but this weather is certainly helping.

Rain, Rain, and More Rain!

This is called a "puddle". It's what happens when it rains enough that water actually accumulates on the surface of the soil, rather than soaking into the soil immediately. To the right you see some of the fall plants I haven't been able to plant out in the garden yet because it's too muddy.

San Marcos has this Christmas carnival every year along the river called The Sights and Sounds of Christmas. I've lived here for five years now, but have never gotten around to going. This year I was determined to go... and it got rained out! It got rained out in the year of the worst drought in history!

Surely the weather gods have a sense of irony. Oh well, I'll go next year. Of all the reasons to miss it this year, rain is probably the best. It's been raining almost nonstop since Friday. I've been saying "rain is the new snow." Snow is not unheard of in Central Texas, but it's rare enough that when it does snow, people all freak out. Businesses are closed, the roads are hazardous because people don't know how to drive on ice, and Facebook is littered with "Wow! Look at the snow!" posts (I admit I'm guilty of that myself). Well, now that rain has gone scarce, people are acting almost exactly the same now.

My rain barrels have been overflowing since Friday. When we get our own place, I really want to get some much bigger rain containers. These pickle barrels fill up much too quickly. Think of all the rain I could have been saving in the last few days! Oh well, at least the aquifer and lakes are being refilled. My area has been upgraded from the worst possible category of drought to only the second-worst, and our county burn ban has been lifted. I wonder how long it would have to keep raining like this to completely undo the drought. Months, perhaps? That would be interesting to know.

More Autumn Weather and Another New Bird

Yesterday I caught a quick glimpse at another bird I haven't yet seen around here before. Two of them were grabbing snack from my next door neighbor's feeder before they disappeared. I was only able to snap one quick photo.

That is a Western Scrub Jay. It's got to be because there are only so many blue colored birds around here, and it's too big to be an Indigo Bunting or Eastern Bluebird, and they didn't have crests like Blue Jays.

I tried to crop the photo to see it up close, but it came out blurry. Birds are really hard to photograph. They don't stay in one place for long, and don't let you get very close.

The Texas Hill Country is on the very eastern edge of this bird's geographic range. As you go east, they get replaced by blue jays. I see blue jays pretty much every day in my neighborhood, but never any other kind of jay, until now. I seem to remember hearing that scrub jays don't do as well as blue jays in more urban environments.

One thing I have been wondering during this drought is if Climate Change is going to make Texas drier, as well as warmer, and if so, will western species expand their ranges eastward. Scientists have already been observing southern species, such as Green Jays, much farther north than their previous ranges, and are attributing that to average temperatures becoming warmer, allowing these species to tolerate more northern latitudes.

Except Texas doesn't just have a temperature gradient going North to South, but also a moisture gradient going from East to West. East Texas is swamp and pine forest, while West Texas is grassland and desert. I'm in the middle of Texas, so there's an overlap here of a lot of typically eastern species (like Blue Jays) with a lot of typically western species (like Scrub Jays). I wonder if that's going to shift, and maybe some day Central Texas will end up looking like El Paso or something.

Well, after the Scrub Jays left, those dark clouds that had been teasing us all day finally gave us some rain! It will take a LOT of rain to undo this drought, but yesterday we did get an inch of rain, which ain't bad. It filled up the rain barrels and really cooled things down, and today we still have a 50% chance of getting more. Every little bit helps. I'm really itching to start planting my fall crops now that it's so nice and cool and wet out there.

The Thunder Moon

The Phoenix Moon Grove named this moon the Crepe Myrtle Moon, which is my least favorite of their moon names. Yes, I admit it, I'm a bit of a native plant snob. To me, native plants are like local mom and pop shops and restaurants, while non-native plants that people plant all over the place are like the McDonald's and Wal-Marts of landscaping. The common crepe myrtle is native to China, and while it's not nearly as invasive as some other non-native landscape plants such as Nandina, Privet, Chinese tallow, and Chinaberry, it seems wrong to me to come up with a Texas-specific full moon naming scheme with one of your moons named after a non-native plant.

Until I can think of a better name for this moon, I'm going with one of the traditional moon names for right now. Especially since Sunday we had a little thunderstorm! Too bad it didn't last long, so it didn't get a chance to really soak the ground, but it did fill up the rain barrels.

We're still in exceptional drought and Stage 3 water restrictions, so I can only water once a week with a soaker hose. I don't have enough hose to cover the whole garden, so I had to make some hard decisions on which plants to keep alive and which to let go.

Here's a picture to show you just how BROWN my whole yard is. One thing that annoys me is whenever they have a story on the local news about the water restrictions, they have someone on there reassuring us that it's fine to let your grass go brown, and as soon as it rains again it will come back. Yeah, who says that I'm worried about the grass? I never water my grass!

One of the crops I'm trying to carry through the summer are the California Wonder bell pepper plants I got from my CSA farmer. I don't expect to get any fruit until it starts to cool down in fall, but so far the plants themselves are healthy and might survive that long with their once-a-week watering.

The tomatillos are in the same situation. No fruit, but maybe I can get some later if I keep them alive.

I've got one Malabar spinach plant still alive, even though it's still very small.

One luffa gourd vine is left, starting to grow up the fence among some wild vine (not sure if it's a Balsam gourd or cow-itch vine) that's been growing there the whole time I've lived here. The luffa is being optimistic here, putting out a male flower.

I'm surprised this one White Wonder cucumber plant is still alive.

The regular pole beans are almost all dead. This is one of the Blue Coco beans that's still trying to hang on.

Some of the yardlong beans are still hanging in there, but aren't growing much. You can see the sunburn on the one on the left of the picture here.

My Thai basil isn't doing too bad. It's in full flower and actually looks kinda pretty. I picked a bunch of it one time to make some Thai food, and Daniel came home and asked me, "Where did you get those flowers?" He was surprised that they were basil and not something ornamental.

I also went ahead and planted the rest of my Ms. Burns Lemon basil next to the Thai basil. It's still small, but hanging in there. This is supposed to be an especially drought tolerant variety of basil.

I also planted the Asian Red Amaranth I had in pots, but I'm afraid they might have been in pots too long, and have gotten stunted. They're already bolting even though they're not very big. The flower clusters look cool, though.

The black eyed peas and cowpeas and lima beans aren't doing too bad. Still no pods, but at least the plants themselves look good.

Now the sad part. I decided to quit watering the tomatoes, and this is what I got. I got a decent spring tomato crop, and tomatoes have trouble setting fruit in this heat anyway, so the tomatoes were one of the things I decided to sacrifice.

This is where my sweet potatoes used to be. It was mostly grass with just a few sweet potato plants under there getting smothered, so I decided to give up on them and mow the whole thing down. I did the same with the watermelons. Maybe next year.

Really, that's about it for the garden. Everything else not shown here is dead. Here's a picture of my hope for fall. The fall tomatoes and eggplants have been put in separate pots, while the peppers are still in communal pots. I hope I didn't start the peppers too late, but I had a bunch of seeds that were getting old, so I thought I might as well experiment with them.

The little bit of rain we had made my mystery flowers happy. I'm not sure what kind of flowers these are, but they have been growing in my yard the whole time we've lived here. They have narrow leaves and tuber-like roots (which I discovered by digging up the ones coming up in the garden). The yellow flowers only open in the evening. I'm assuming they're some kind of wildflower, but I have no idea what they are. Pretty though.

Finally, I just thought I'd share a cute picture of our old lady cat, K.K., enjoying her Kitty Pool on the front porch. It's the tray from a large plastic plant pot that I filled with water and put outside to supplement the bird bath for wild animals to drink out of. K.K. is one of those odd cats who likes to play in water, and she found a better use for it. She had just been dipping her paws in it, but she finally went ahead and got all the way in, so I just had to get a picture. Doing this on the porch is much less messy than when she splashes around in her drinking water in the kitchen.

Rain for the Summer Solstice!

Tuesday was the Summer Solstice, and that night, the shortest night of the year, a great big Texas thunderstorm came rolling through and dumped 2.63 inches of rain on us. It was glorious!

There's one of my rain barrels filling up after being dry for a month. This is going to help with those water restrictions since it doesn't apply to rain barrel water.



My plants were so wilted it took a while for any of them to perk up, but they did end up getting a good. It got really humid after the rain, and the rain lasted long enough to soak in good and deep, so the moisture is lasting a long time in the soil.

It may have come too late for some of my plants. Here are my brown and crispy Bloody Butcher tomatoes getting rained on. Don't know if they'll be able to come back. However, the tomatillos, bell peppers, and watermelons perked right back up after that rain and are still looking good.

Rain at Last!

The thunderstorm was gone by afternoon, but it stuck around long enough to give my garden a good watering and fill up my rain barrels. I'm grateful.

Full Worm Moon

March's Full Moon is called the Worm Moon, which is a bit better fit here than the snow moon last month. It's got a nice garden theme, named after the earthworms that should be active in the warming soil by this time. I have seen some, so I decided that's a good moon name.


I think from now on I'm going to do a general garden update each full moon. That will give me a nice, easy to remember, regular interval to keep track of my garden's progress. I haven't done a general overview of my garden since early February, and by now a lot has changed. The days are getting noticeably warmer, for one thing. It's 83 degrees F right now. I'm really looking forward to the summer produce like tomatoes and squash. Not so much the summer heat.



Speaking of tomatoes, I've now got all of them planted except the Yellow Pears, which will be planted soon. I'm planting them in the two foot border around the garden. I like the idea of looking out the bedroom window to a wall of tomatoes. I'm going to end up with about 30 tomato plants. I hope that's enough! It seems like ages since I've tasted a home-grown tomato, and I plan on preserving lots of salsa, pasta sauce, dried tomatoes, and maybe try something new like ketchup. Considering all the tomato products I eat, I figure it's not possible to grow too many tomatoes.

Two sides of my garden are against the chain link fence, so I am planting vining crops along it. These are scarlet runner beans I got in a seed swap on Garden Web this past winter. I've never grown scarlet runner beans before, but they're supposed to be pretty amazing. They're in the same genus but a different species (Phaseolus coccineus) than the bean most people around here think of when they think of beans (Phaseolus vulgaris). The seeds were large, the size of lima beans, and strikingly colored, black with purple markings. They're supposed to grow long vines with beautiful scarlet flowers and the beans are edible in both the green and shelled stage just like common beans. One problem is they supposedly don't like excessive heat, which may be bad news for me. I'm hoping I'll at least get a decent crop before it really heats up, and maybe if I can keep the vines alive through the summer, I'll get another crop when it cools down in the fall. To cover my bases, I'm also going to grow the other members of the genus Phaseolus, the common bean (I've got several varieties both pole and bush), lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus), and the tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius). Lima beans and tepary beans are supposed to be more heat tolerant than either common beans or runner beans.

What can I say? I like growing beans. They're an instant gratification crop, as far as gardening goes (if you can call anything in gardening "instant gratification"). The seeds are large and easy to sprout, the plants grow quickly, and they come in an endless variety.

In the above picture, you can also see that the Bermuda grass has come out of dormancy and is trying to grow from the next door neighbor's yard into the garden here. Have I mentioned Bermuda grass is evil? I sense a big problem coming in a month or two, even though I'm doing my best to pull this stuff up and zap it with my vinegar and orange oil organic weedkiller stuff. I'm really tempted to resort to Round-Up.

I've got some more seeds planted that haven't sprouted yet (probably because it hasn't rained since I planted them). The plot in the foreground has Bowling Red Okra. Behind that, along the fence, the lima beans are planted. The lima beans are a pole variety, King of the Garden, left over from when I last had a garden years ago. I'm not sure if the seeds are still good, but I'm giving them a chance.

I'm trying a strategy with my seeds where I don't water them when I first plant and leave Nature to do that. It's hard for me to keep newly planted seeds well-watered artificially in dry weather (guess I'm not patient enough to water them enough to keep them evenly moist), so I'm trying just letting the seeds sit and wait in the soil until it rains and gives them a really good soaking. The worst thing that can happen to a new planting is to have the seeds just start to sprout, and then dry out before they've gotten a deep enough root. Dry seeds are durable, and mature plants have some water reserves, it's the little newborn sprouts that are the most delicate. I'm trying to get used to watering as little as possible in anticipation of another drought year, trying not to "pamper" my plants too much. The soonest rain forecast is this Friday. The seeds should be able to hold out until then. I have been watering the newly planted tomatoes and other young plants that look like they need it with water from the rain barrel. So far I haven't used any city water for irrigation, but I don't know how long we can hold out.

To the right on this plot we have my lettuce, which is much bigger since the last picture I took of them. Aren't they beautiful? Good enough for a flower bed. They've completely filled in the space between them, which is what I wanted. I try to plant things closely so they form a complete canopy over the soil, which shades it and conserves water (this principle is used in square-foot gardening and other intensive planting methods). I've been hand picking lettuce, but even this small patch is too much for me to eat, and Daniel is not much into lettuce, or other vegetables for that matter. Actually, I'm not that much into lettuce either. Salads have never been my favorite vegetable serving option, though having something more interesting than the iceberg lettuce, carrot, and thousand island dressing salad of my childhood does help. I've also been putting lettuce on any sandwiches I make, but my lettuce patch is still getting by relatively un-grazed. Maybe I should start giving it away to people.

To the left in this plot you can see little red plants. Those are Bull's Blood Beets. I hope they do all right. Like most root crops, beets are cool weather plants, so I hope I haven't planted them too late. Years ago I got a summer job at the Austin Farmer's Market, and I was able to take home a bunch of extra produce. One week it was a CRATE of beets! I made enough pickled beets to last me a couple of years and also discovered that beets are really good roasted. Bull's Blood is a variety of beet that has red tops instead of green like most beets. You can supposedly dye Easter eggs pink by boiling them with these red beet tops (and probably dye other things as well, like fabrics), but I don't think my beets will be big enough for that in time.

WHEN is my garlic going to be ready?! I got the garlic sampler from Seed Saver's Exchange last fall. It came with 10 varieties of heirloom garlics. They seem to be growing great. This variety here, Chet's Italian Red, is HUGE. I've noticed that the softnecks are a bit bigger than the hardnecks (at least above ground where I can see). I have heard that softnecks do better in warmer climates than hardnecks, but the variety pack came with both, and who knows what they look like underground right now. I'm getting impatient because the garlic at the grocery store SUCKS. I have to pick though it carefully to find any heads that don't have black mold or soft (and therefore, rotten) spots, and even then sometimes I get home and open up a head of garlic to find mushy, rotten cloves inside.

I eat a lot of garlic, so I can't wait until I can harvest my own. I'm also very curious to find out which of my 10 varieties do the best in my climate and make the cut to be grown next year. I read that I'm supposed to wait until the leaves are 75% dead. If you pull it too early (like my CSA farmer does often), the cloves haven't fully developed yet and you'll get a solid bulb more like an onion (which is still usable but doesn't store well once you open it up). If you leave it in too late, the cloves will fall apart getting ready to grow into separate plants (I guess this is how garlic reproduces "in the wild"). You want to pick it so the bulb has individual cloves, but they're still held tightly together.

So I've got to wait, because my garlic leaves hardly look dead at all, maybe the two at the bottom are a little on the yellow side, but that's about it. Patience!

My spring planted peas are still small, and my fall planted peas are flowering, but no pea pods found yet. I'm also getting impatient with these, because peas don't like hot weather, so I need a crop before then. The variety is Tall Telephone. I've never grown this variety before, so maybe it's just not a good one for my area. The pea variety I've grown before was Dwarf Grey Sugar, a type of "snow pea" (flat, edible podded peas you see in Chinese food), and they always did great. Definitely have them on the list to plant next year. Tall Telephone still has a chance to impress me, but I keep thinking if I had planted DGS, I would have had pods by now.

I'm disappointed in my carrots so far. In fall I planted a variety called Tonda di Parigi from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I can't remember why I got that variety, besides it being a round carrot, which is better for heavy soil than long, skinny carrots. Anyway, I planted them in fall and ended up getting two or three decent carrots, and a lot more split, rotten, or partially chewed up carrots. At least, they looked chewed up. Not sure what critter eats carrots underground. I really like carrots, and would love to be able to grow them, but I've never been very successful at it.

I got a few more varieties of carrots in the winter seed exchange, and these pictured are some Chantenay carrots I planted earlier this year. They aren't round, but are still supposed to be short and stubby. I hope I get some before it gets too hot.

I also planted some Harris Model Parsnips with the carrots. That was another pack of seeds I got from the seed exchange, but I wasn't sent very many seeds, and a lot of them didn't germinate, so I ended up with only four or five plants. In the picture the carrots are the ones with the feathery leaves, and the parsnips are the ones with the broader leaves. If these parsnips do make it up to a decent size, I might just save them for seed instead of eating them, so I'll have a good supply of fresh seed to plant this fall. Besides, they're best when grown in cold weather, so these may end up bitter anyway. I think parsnips are an under appreciated vegetable in this country. They're a sweet root vegetable (at least when grown in cold weather) that can be cooked in similar ways to carrots or sweet potatoes, though they don't taste exactly like either of those. I think they're really good roasted. Maybe by next winter I'll be able to harvest some to eat. No more collard greens for me, because they're bolting. Good, because I'm sick of winter greens. I've been getting collard greens, lettuce, and chard from my garden, plus more collards, chard, mustard greens, kale, lettuce, spinach, and arugula from my CSA. Yes, greens are good for you, but every stir fry I've had for months has had mustard greens in it, I just used up all that Italian green and bean soup I made and froze, and I've been making side dishes of Southern style braised collards or Italian style sauteed garlicky greens (depending on what would go with the meal) every chance I get. Oh, and last night for dinner we had chard, mushroom, and artichoke heart lasagna for dinner. I made two and froze one.

Greens just grow so well here all through the winter, you could eat them for every meal and still have extra. By late winter and early spring I'm sick of them, and would really like to have some eggplant or zucchini or bell peppers instead. Oh well, this is what eating seasonally is like.

I'm letting the collards go to seed and then I'll collect the seed to plant next time, since I'm out of seed now. One day I'd like to save most of my own seed for all my vegetables.

The potatoes are still doing well. They got frostbitten by an unusual late March freeze, but are growing back new leaves now so you can hardly tell. These are the Purple Vikings. It's probably about time to bury them in mulch again.

The onions are getting bigger, but I'm still worried they're too small for them to get to a decent size before hot weather. I'm also getting a lot of mortality of newly planted seedlings. I side-dressed them with some bat guano to give them a boost. I don't use much fertilizer (besides compost, if that counts), but I got the bat guano at a local garden center, and the bag said proceeds go to Bat Conservation International, which is a great organization. The bat guano was harvested from Bracken Cave, the largest bat colony in the world, which is found just outside San Antonio, about an hour's drive from here.

In the herb garden in the front yard, the cilantro is bolting, like it does. Cilantro is notorious for bolting early in the year, as soon as it starts to warm up. This is supposed to be the slow-bolting variety too. The annoying thing is that I need cilantro to make salsa, but the other ingredients, tomatoes and peppers, aren't ready until summer. This year I tried freezing a bunch of cilantro before it bolted to get around this problem. I hope it's still tasty by salsa making time. I know I could buy big bunches of cilantro at the grocery store for about a dollar all year round, but it would be neat to use the cilantro I grow myself.

I might as well let them go ahead and do their bolting thing and harvest the corriander seed when they're done.
Also in the front, my potted Meyer lemon tree is flowering. It's got a lot of flower buds on it that are just starting to open. They smell WONDERFUL, and alone would make buying this tree worth it. It gets two crops of lemons a year, and the last winter crop was five large lemons. Not too bad for such a small tree (it's about two or three feet tall). I also have a potted key lime tree, but I don't like it as much. So far I've only gotten one tiny lime off it, and the tree itself has some nasty thorns. I do use its leaves in Thai food as a substitute for Kaffir lime leaves. I have no idea if that's kosher, but I have a key lime, not a kaffir lime, so I use it.

I guess that's all the stuff that's happening in the garden. As you can see, I still have a lot of plants waiting on the porch to go in, including peppers, eggplants, fenugreek, those Yellow Pear tomatoes I mentioned, and I just started some pumpkin seeds in pots. I don't really need to start pumpkins in pots, but I haven't yet decided where I want my pumpkins, and I only got 8 seeds of this variety from the seed exchange, so I'm being extra careful. They're Lady Godiva pumpkins, which are a hulless-seeded variety. I plan on making them into Jack-o-Lanterns in addition to eating the seeds.

I also tried to start some basil seeds, but they were some really old seeds from years ago, so I'm afraid they might not be good anymore. I still have more squash, melon, bean, cowpea, and cucumber seeds to start as well. March through April is a busy gardening time!

I'm proud to announce that I'm almost done digging up my whole garden and laying out the beds and paths! I've only got this one corner left to go. It will still be a while before I've got all the paths covered in black landscape fabric, lined with rocks, and covered with mulch, but at least now anyone can just glance at the backyard and see what's garden and what's lawn. This is certainly the biggest garden I've ever had, so I really hope I can manage to keep up with it.



Lastly, we got ourselves a second rain barrel. It's another pickled jalapeno barrel, and this one needs to be cleaned out because a lot of the pickle juice was left in, with the barrel sitting around in the sun for months, and it smells kind of nasty. We've got a nice spot for it here on the other side of our porch opposite our first barrel. I'd like to have as many rain barrels as possible, but I'm not sure where we can put any more.