Fruits and Landscaping

I guess going on five months its about time for another entry, so here goes.

As I indicated in a prior post, I planned to put in some berry bushes in the front bed- last week I did that, planting the two original blueberry bushes in the bed, along with four smaller bushes of the same type (rabbiteye climax) that I bought from a guy at the farmer's market for a really good price. I ended up filling the bed with a modified Mel's mix, very heavy on the peat moss and oak leaves to acidify the soil, and covered with landscape fabric and mulch.

I think it looks really good and should look even better as the plants come in and fill out. The satsuma has also been pretty interesting story. You can see the progression from about a month ago:

To now:
Its almost ready to pick. In addition, I got about 6 very tasty and juicy lemons off the lemon tree and some small limes from the key lime tree. These have all been outside continuously and are still doing fine, although the winter has been pretty mild. Finally, on the citrus front, a few months ago I also bought a little Kaffir Lime and its currently chilling in a pot on the back stoop.

I am going to try to do a new post in a few days on some vegetables and raised beds.

mid-summer update

Due to some serious commitments in my other life, I've been unable to post about the goings-on in the garden. I did some work in the yard today, including taking out the brick walkway because it looked like shit. contractors. When we get around to doing some more serious landscaping for the front yard I've got some plans for a path. I also dug out the front bed to about 10 inches and lined it with weed cloth. I plan to enrich and acidify the soil then fill the bed with blueberry, blackberry, and strawberry plants. I'll do that over the winter though:

The citrus trees are doing well. There's a few small limes, the lemons are growing pretty well, and the Satsuma has one large fruit on it:

We also have grapes (wild) growing across the back fence. Based on the taste and look, I think they're concord but they aren't as sweet as supermarket grapes.

These sweet banana peppers (in the pots) have been producing ok and the melons in the box (watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew) are growing well and putting out runners. They'll probably start to fruit in a few weeks. The pumpkins were a disaster- they started off amazingly well and were the fastest growing plants in the garden by far. Then their stalks started to die and hollow out. I don't know if it was bugs or disease or what, but after a few weeks the main trunk of the plant was detached from the root. I tore them out. The fourth square is lima beans, which are also truckin.

The cucumbers (these are the pickling cukes) have taken off and basically gone up the cage for the cherry tomato plant:

I picked the biggest one a few days ago but I have to take a look at how to pickle things, although I need alot more cucumbers to run a pickling operation:

The peppers have been pretty disappointing. I've gotten some good banana peppers, but only one Santa Fe Grande and a Jalapeno is growing now. No action from the bell peppers, cherry bomb, anaheim, or habanero, and no action from the sweet pickler either after getting a few of them a couple of weeks ago. The exception is the Cayanne peppers, which are growing like mad (I'm drying them for spice):

Specifically on the tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes are producing really well, still. I've gotten about 50 tomatoes off of the plant so far and it is still setting fruit, but now its only fruiting at about 4 feet off the ground (you can see the plant has exploded out of the top of the cage).

The Porter's Dark Cherry have been great and I'll add a bunch more of these plants next season. They grow fast, have a good taste, are prolific and heat tolerant, and are a nice size.

The Roma's have also come in and, despite the weak start, they've been putting out some pretty good fruit also. They aren't as prolific as the dark cherry (nor are they as pretty, they're kind of mottled red and yellow). Because I have alot of Romas and Dark Cherry I've been making tomato sauce and freezing it until I'll have enough to cook it down and make a sauce proper. I get this many tomatoes about every week and a half:

The Black Krim tomatoes were coming along beautifully and were about the size of baseballs, but now they have all cracked (there are about 6 on the plant). Its been because of the weather here- we'll go for a week or so of 100+ temps and no rain, then we'll have a torrential downpour or three in a few day period. The plants take up water faster than the tomatoes grow, so the skin splits. Some of the splits are are only cosmetic (they look like cork), but others have split wide open, like this one:

One thing I've learned is that its necessary to have a bunch of plants going to get a good amount of fruit. Excepting the Cayanne, I'll need multiple plants of each variety and, based on what I've seen so far I think I will focus on the Dark Cherry, Cherry, and Roma tomatoes (and maybe a crack-resistant variety). For the peppers, I'll probably try to grow more banana peppers and maybe another type of jalapeno. I've been happy with the cucumbers also, but I need to add more if I want to have enough to make some pickles (I also plan on pickling the banana peppers).

trimming trees and eating peas

I have quite a few other things I should be doing right now but I would rather do this post. This past week we had two big trees in our yard trimmed. The first tree is the giant elm which dominates our backyard (the tree guy estimated it was about 70 years old). Its obviously on the backside of its life but, since we bought the house when everything was dormant, we weren't sure of the actual condition of the tree. It turns out there is quite a bit of foliage on the branches, but there were alot of dead branches, and most of those dead branches were overhanging the house. I have also been picking up branches from that tree out of the yard since we bought the place.

Secondly, there was a big, totally dead tree between our house and our neighbor's and, if this one came down, it would hit one of our houses. You can see the stump on the left side of the picture. This also gives me a ton more light on my garden during the morning hours:

If you click on the picture and enlarge it, you can also see the huge piles of firewood in the background, by the fence.

The plants have all been growing well, especially the tomatoes. As you can see from the pictures below, I picked up some tomato cages and staked out the Roma and Black Krim (which are growing next to each other) and the cherry tomato, which is growing by itself. The cherry tomato in particular is really big with a ton of branches and needs the extra support.



You can also see in the bottom left hand corner some new plants, where there used to be spinach, mesclun, and buttercrunch lettuce. In fact, a few days after my previous post I went out and saw that the mesclun and spinach had bolted and were unusable. I dug them out and added them to the compost heap. I also ate the rest of the buttercrunch (and gave a head (shoot?) to some friends). Instead of letting the squares lay fallow, I decided to try and plant some other crops in them. I picked up a Porter's dark cherry tomato (where the spinach was), a Santa Fe Grand pepper (where the buttercrunch was) and a Cayenne pepper (where the mesclun was). I turned over and heavily enriched the soil with some of my own compost and, in the case of the tomato, used some organic tomato fertilizer I have been feeding to my other tomatoes. I don't know if the plants will set fruit or develop, but it will be neat to see the results of growing two crops following closely on one another.

Since St. Patrick's day I have been eating some of my crops, namely the cold weather greens (lettuce, mesclun, and spinach) and some green onion. But recently some new crops have been coming in, particularly the snow peas. I picked some of them earlier today (along with an onion) and am planning on making a snow pea/ szechuan pork stir fry for dinner tonight.


I picked the large and medium sized pods, but there are still many small and baby pods left, particularly towards the top of the plant.

In the front yard, the pomegranate has sprouted and is doing well. I do plan on cutting back some of the overhanging hackberry tree branches to help it get a little more light, but that will probably have to wait until school is out.

You can see in the background, and here more closely, that the giant cactus is budding:


This is exciting because these put up a bunch of prickly pears. At the very end of the season last year, right after we moved in, I picked about a dozen of the pears and made some syrup, which is now in the freezer. This summer/fall, I hope to get more, and fresher, pears to make better syrup.

A few days ago we went to Austin Natural Gardener and I bought a dwarf key lime tree. I have been searching all over for a key lime, but due to some stupid restrictions on shipping fruit I could not get one. This guy was kinda expensive, but I was happy to finally find one:

For the time being I'm keeping my citrus (the key lime and meyer lemon) on the front porch:

The Mexican Plum tree is on the right, in the black nursery pot. We are going to plant it when we xeriscape the front yard in May. And speaking of xeriscaping, at Austin Natural Gardener we also bought an Arbequina olive tree, which will be an excellent fit in the front yard, opposite the pomegranate tree (we'll plant it at the same time as the Mexican plum).

Stay tuned for a first cut at a reassessment of this year's crops and preview of next season's plans...