Garden
Gardening in central Texas is a challenge. In the spring, one wants to get their plants in after the last frost, but soon enough to harvest before the hot summer temperatures. We like to start tomatoes, peppers and eggplants from seeds in our garage (see photo below). In previous years we've started this process in early January. This year we started on December 10th. It should have been a good plan. However, due to prolonged cold temperatures, the growth was slow. The temperature in our garage hovered in the 40's to low 50's. Our plants, even with an extra month were smaller in February than those of previous years. By late February, we purchased some plants from our local nursery We shall see if we can get a decent harvest before the stifling heat of summer.
Update August 14, 2018: What we thought was going to be bust of a garden year, turned out to be decent as can be seen in the following tomato and harvest photos:
Update August 14, 2018: What we thought was going to be bust of a garden year, turned out to be decent as can be seen in the following tomato and harvest photos:
Easily our best performing tomato plant was the 444. This plant was planted in late February and is still producing during our August heat. Above is the plant and one of its tomatoes.
Here is our harvest as of June 9th. It consists of several varieties of tomatoes, garlic, onions, etc.
Onions
Even though our seed project may be problematic, we are having success in other areas, especially onions. The onions were planted January 5th. As of May 2nd we had already enjoyed a couple of onions. There are plenty more to follow.
The photo on the far left was taken on planting day - January 5, 2018. The next two were taken on May 2, 2018. This is definitely our best year ever for onions.
Garlic
Our garlic was planted in December. It seems to be progressing nicely. Below are images from January, March and May.
The plants in the pots in the above photo are turnips (a project that didn't turnout too well.
Herbs
Our herbs are shown here. From left to right are parsley, rosemary and mint. Not quite the lyrics for a song, but good for flavoring culinary delights.
Tomatoes
Our super sweet cherry tomatoes, seen below in the first two photos, are starting to mature. The photo on the right is of our yellow pear tomatoes. This is our first year for this variety. Not pictured are celebrity, 444, big beef and early girl. These last four are from our seed project and are just starting to have tomatoes. Hopefully, they will mature before it gets too hot.
Other plants
Other plants in our garden are from left to right fennel, swiss chard and cucumber.
The swiss chard has already given us one stuffed chard meal, so the photo at left is the second growth.