Sunday's Child

I love the smell of wet newspaper in the morning

(not really.) 

Today is "Ready, Set, Go!" day for the Fall garden.  I got up and put on my work clothes, and drove down to the corner of 6 and W. Little York and bought a Sunday Chronicle.  (What ever happened to the Saturday Chronicle?  If they sell the Sunday one on Saturday morning, when do they sell the Saturday one?)

If you're wondering about "garden + newspaper," here's the connection - I have the little strip behind the garden boxes where weeds like to grow.  One Sunday Chronicle wadded up, plus one bag of pea gravel = weed control.  Hopefully.

After that, I spent two hours with the claw tool, a bag of peat humus and a bag of cow compost re-mixing the Mel's Mix.  All that effort, and it looks exactly the same as you remember it:

No, I'm not growing numbers.  Here's the plan for this season:
1 and 2: onion sets, once I get them from Conroe
3 and 4: vacant for now
5 and 6: one broccoli in each square
7 and 8: vacant for now
9 and 10: vacant for now, possibly salad mix rotation later
11 and 12: salad mix (1 little gem, 1 mignonette bronze, 1 tango and 1 radicchio in each square)
13 and 14: carrot rotation, vacant now
15: first square of carrots (planted today)
16: will be carrots, plant in one month

So there will be four squares of carrots, planted a month apart.  They take three months to grow.  So starting three months from now, I'll have a continuous supply of carrots.

There are also four squares set aside for salad mix.

What I learned in the Spring about broccoli is that it takes a huge plant to make one head of broccoli, so you can't put four broccoli in one square.  It also makes big shady leaves.  I left an easement of squares around the broccoli this time and just planted one in each square.  We'll see how it goes.  There aren't that many fall veggies I'm interested in, so I have squares to spare for the moment.

Garden Update

The tomato plants are still happy - in fact, the cherry tomato is laying all over the top of everything.  I need to put some more nails in the fence so I'll have more places to tie it up.

The onion tops started looking crispy, so I pulled them.  I'm mystified.  I thought they were supposed to be big onions, like you find at the grocery store, but the biggest of mine is the size of a golf ball.  I used a few of them when I made chicken taco soup this weekend, and they're great - just small.

I don't even know where to start on the garlic.  The tops started to wither, so I thought it was time to pull it.  What came up certainly smells like garlic.  The garlic smell permeated the whole house and started seeping out to the garage before I finally couldn't stand it anymore and had to wrap the bulbs in aluminum foil.  This just doesn't look like garlic.  I sliced one open, and it's sort of like a cross between an onion and a celery heart.  I'm stumped.  Next year, I'm sticking with regular size garlic, instead of elephant.

I'm starting to feel like my lawn is owning me, instead of the other way around.  We need some rain!  In the past ten days I have broken one sprinkler (but not so badly that I can't still use it) and figured out a trick I didn't know the other one was capable of.  Every evening I make a decision about which grass to sacrifice because there's just no way to get all of it watered.  I figure I have to keep all of the main front yard alive - plus, I'm NOT replacing the plants in that front bed again.  With the rest of the grass, I'll be happy if 65% of it survives the summer.  I figure if that much lives, it can spread and take over the dead spots next year, right?

In unrelated news, I'm very excited to report that either the city or the county finally came out and gave us a stop light at the front of the neighborhood.  There was much drama getting it installed - they had to rip up sections of pavement and ALL the curbs in the area, and even re-pour the apron for the school across the street, but finally we have a working light.  Ordinarily I would not be thrilled about another stop light, but this one definitely works in my favor.  The traffic on West Little York moves at 45mph and it was getting really hard to find an opening to turn out in the mornings.  I'll be interested to see how things go once school is back in session, but for now, the light is making a huge difference.

 

Potatoes o'Plenty

Andie and I took a little trip up to Conroe today, and my Mom gave me potatoes from their garden.  Look at all those potatoes!  Their garden is much larger than mine, but still!  I'm in the market for potato recipes now.

They're plotting...

An update on the bird saga.  The tomato is still firmly attached to its stem.

But the birds clearly made an attempt today.

I figure it's one of two things:  Either they tried to get to the tomato and were stopped by the net, OR that feather is their calling card.  That's the signal that they're watching, and they are off somewhere forming a plan that involves scissors and tiny acetylene torches.

Broccoli for Breakfast

I went out this morning to scrutinize the garden, like I do every morning, and decided I'd better look on the internet for information on how to tell when your broccoli is ready.  I found one site that said, "I know it's ready when I go out to the garden with a bottle of ranch dressing, and the broccoli giggles."  Cute, but not very helpful.  The consensus on other sites is that broccoli is ready to harvest when the florets start to swell, but before they flower.  Well how the heck am I supposed to know what that looks like?  I found a few tiny yellow flowers on mine (which I picked off) so I think I'm a day or two too late, but I ate a little piece, and it's pretty darn tasty.  So, here we have broccoli and carrots, harvested today.

I cut the broccoli off and left the plant, which will continue to produce side-shoots for a few more weeks.  Pretty nifty!

Exciting things in my back yard today

My goodness, so many things to report from the garden!  The tomato plants have set their first fruit:

 

There's even a tiny bell pepper:

The broccoli plant I was sure was going to grow into a tree and shade the whole garden has finally started making broccoli instead of just leaves:

Sneaky snake is guarding the strawberries, and there's one that will be ripe tomorrow:

The herb garden is going gangbusters:

The grill made me lovely salmon, and the Meyer Lemon tree, which has gotten zero blog time because it sat in its pot for a year and did nothing, is about to make me fifty lemons at once.  May have to thin that a little...

My New Employee

After a brief hiatus spent recovering from shooting over 1,000 images in a week, packaging and mailing souvenirs, and swapping out photo editing software on my main computer, I'm back to blogging.  Check out my souvenir from San Diego - he is my new garden security detail.  When the strawberry plants put on their first fruit crop, one of the berries was nabbed by a bird.  A friend at work suggested that I get a fake snake to scare the birds away.

I looked at three places here in Houston, and couldn't find a single toy snake!  There was a place for them on the shelf at Target, next to a full bin of lizards and a full bin of frogs.  (Snakes are the coolest so they were sold out, duh!)  I could have had this for $14:

But it took me a long time to build the relationship with my current lawn service, and I don't want to scare them off.  When I saw the toy snakes in one of the shops at the San Diego Zoo, I thought it was a perfect souvenir of my trip.

My tiny angelic grandmother laughed at me when I told her about my new garden security plan.  She says the birds are going to hop right over the snake to get to the berries.  Hmph.

Strawberries

The first two strawberries from the garden are ready!  You'll notice that they still have a little white around the caps, indicating that they could have ripened a little more.  There's a reason I went ahead and picked them early.  Last night, when I went out to check on them, I found two ants under the biggest one, and I swear one was saying to the other, "Look man, just put your back into it and I'm sure we can do this!  On the count of three..."

The verdict?  Oh yes, I've already eaten both of these, and they were magnificent.  So juicy.  So sweet.  These are from the Sequoia plants.  The other variety has barely put on leaves, much less fruit.  Unless a miracle occurs, the other variety (Chandler) is fired, and next year I'm ripping them out and planting more Sequoias.

APB

This is an APB - All Plants Bulletin

I spent Saturday morning working on the flower beds in the front yard.  I have one bed out by the street where nothing will grow.  This is my fourth attempt to have something there.  I added a bag of compost and a bag of Miracle Grow potting soil before I put the plants in.  The plants around the border are dwarf Mexican Petunias - they will bloom purple flowers.  The clump in the middle is Mona Lavender.  I've been watching the Mexican Petunias in the medians through The Colonies, and they seem to thrive in our summer heat.  We'll see.  If this doesn't work, I'm installing a rock garden.

Along the front walk, I had two Ixora that I think were damaged by the hurricane and haven't recovered, so I replaced them.

I also put in two new starts of Lantana in the bed by the front window, but they weren't feeling photogenic today.  In the garden, the tomato plants are in the ground and starting to perk up again after a little transplant shock.

The bell pepper plant is looking great - the transplant didn't slow it down at all.  That's a broccoli on the left.

And most exciting of all, I have strawberries:

And one of them is blushing!

First Carrot Harvest

Today, I looked at my garden records and at the calendar, and decided it was time for the first square of carrots to be done.  It's been exactly 120 days.  So I went out and started pulling.  It was like digging for treasure in my own yard!  Check out my pretty carrots!  Atomic red on the left, Danvers half-long on the right.

I ate one of the orange ones, since I hadn't tried them yet.  They're very good - not rich and earthy tasting like the red ones, but also not sickly sweet like the carrots you get at the grocery store.  They're sweet in a bright, clean way.  These will go into vegetable soup for lunches for next week, and the tops will go to a friend at work that has rabbits.