Category Archives: Varieties

Fall is here.

Fall has started early this year here in Central Texas. Last year we didn’t see temperatures stay below 100 until October. We didn’t see rain until November. This year, the rain has already come. Today’s rain is a steady drizzle soaking the earth, enabling the oaks to soak up their thousands of gallons, the summer stresses to be washed from the shrubs, and the winter growth to start off strong. The rain earlier in the week came light and quick – just enough to wet the streets, muddy the gutters, and dust off the heat.

Fall in Texas is different from the Pacific Northwest of my childhood in many ways. One of the ways that I still am not used to, is the behavior of the trees.

Depending on variety, some trees behave as expected. They have bud break in spring, turn itchy green before summer, find their golden hues in the fall, and drop leaves to the floor with the frost. Others, behave as above with a second bud break. This tree already had its leaves, most of which were lost in the heat of the summer, but it is still driven by the need to put forth its progeny. This bud will break into a few itchy-green leaves, and one bunch of powdery seeds.

Speaking of fall, does anyone know of the best way and time to prune an overgrown sage?

This is a hybrid variety that is growing in maybe six inches of soil depth, with neglectful watering, and still managed to take over the sidewalk in its entirety. I had its twin in the front bed, pruned it back months ago, and it has since died for my efforts.

Also noted in this photo: the strawberries survived and I’m overdue on edging the lawn.

This earlier arrival of fall has helped make up my mind on sowing some cooler weather varieties. Earlier this week I made it into the backyard bed to sow some peas – Golden Sweet and Sugar Ann. The Golden Sweet claims to grow 6′ tall and have purple flowers. I’m looking forward to the little paintbrushes of color in the future. Sugar Ann claims to not need any structure, and I’m going to believe it. It took a few days longer to sprout than the Golden Sweet. Both were up within the week. Now to use the giant bamboo pole DH brought home for me to construct a climbing structure for the Golden Sweet…

Sown yesterday:

  • Garlic – Cheyenn Purple, Silver white, and California Select
  • Onions – Austrialian Brown and Violet de Gamme
  • Cucumbers – third year saved Marketmore 76
  • Beets – Detroit
  • Broccoli – Early Green Heirloom (I’m not sure this is the actual name…) both sown and transplanted
  • Kale – Lark’s tongue
  • Chard – Perpetual
  • Collards – Even’ Star Land Race
  • Lettuce – transplanted a few mysteries. They could be any of about eight varieties.

I was set to also transplant some Amazing Cauliflower…until I started working their bed and dug straight down into a giant fire ant nest. Escaping with a single bite (and no sting) I called it done for the day.

Peppers!

The peppers haven’t minded the heat, or the cool front, and are churning out their fruit like the good little food-producers they are.

What I learned about peppers recently:

  • Anaheim peppers will turn brownish, and then bright red. They are less bitter the longer they ripen.
  • They don’t need tomato cages like I thought. They do fall over when they get laden with fruit, but that’s ok with me.
  • Planting them at 15″ instead of 18″-24″ will let their canopies shade the ground so they don’t get so hot and dry so quickly (even when I forget to mulch for the third time come July…)
  • Bell peppers that start out purple just might turn orange on you.
  • Fish peppers are the most interesting looking peppers I’ve ever seen, and grow on the prettiest of plants. It’ll be a walk-way lining plant next year instead.

Think there are enough Anaheim peppers on this branch?

Fish pepper plant looking lovely…

And the peppers themselves just get cooler looking!

I call these “button bells” – they don’t really get much bigger than this. I’m guessing it’s my water restrictions.

As for the cayenne…they just won’t quit! I have a Ristra, and a bowlful, and am about to try my hand at drying them for grinding.

August harvests

In my little speck of earth, there aren’t many harvests in August. Some of my gardening neighbors down at the Gardens have given up, cleared out, and are waiting for fall.

Others have given up, and are waiting to clear up until later – leaving any possible harvest to the birds and bugs.

But I’m a little too stubborn for that.

Peppers are still going. The bell peppers are thirsty ladies, and have slowed down, but the hotter, smaller, and drier the pepper, the happier they seem to be.

This cayenne, for example, had out done itself – literally. It made so many peppers it fell over.

That one plant  just gave us a heaping double handful.

I actually planted two this year. I’ve learned that a household really only needs one cayenne plant.

One of the prettiest peppers I’ve ever grown has made a comeback. Don’t these just make you think of the Christmas lights from the 50s?

And how about this? I grew a melon! I still feel like it should be bigger, but I’ll taste it all the same. It’s also possible I’m mis-remembering the qualities of the variety and really does only get this big. I have only had melons set fruit this year (third year trying) so perhaps next year I’ll have learned just that extra bit that helps them grow larger.

Some surprises from the backyard garden as well!

A walkabout the neighborhood…

We walk our dog every evening. (DH also walks him each morning.) I often wish I had my camera handy on our walks, but most often I don’t (and quite often, it’s dark by the time we go on the prowl.)

Not tonight! After feeding the ducks the snails and caterpillar, we wandered down the greenbelt that follows the creek. It had rained yesterday and again last night, and the pond had again swelled to its tippy toes and started the creek up again.

When it’s still raining, runoff flows down the left branch as well.

We were quickly losing the light, and the glow through the thickets were magical.

The flood a few weeks back made some changes to the landscape around the pond and creek, one of the smaller of which was relocating many a’ horse apple to a new location.

(If you’re saying, “umm…what’s a horse apple?” I didn’t know either until we first encountered them in this neighborhood and went a’Googling. They have quite a neat history in the USA.)

They’re really interesting to look at by themselves, and they grow like pull-a-part rolls!

Oh! Remember that bridge I showed you during the flash flood that I was worried would float away? Here’s how small that creek is supposed to be (with the bridge still in tact.)

We left the greenbelt at this point, and wandered up the neighborhood toward home. A few strides up the hill and suddenly DH exclaimed, “Watch out!”

I froze.

“What?”

He pointed.

How adorable is that? He even had a “big” brother.

Up the hill a little further are some of the happiest looking (and healthiest looking) agave I’ve seen in a neighborhood.

With the light fading, I’ll leave you with the pink blossoms ablaze in the setting rays…

Brrr…

At 10:30 this morning, I decided to head to the Gardens and do some loooooong overdue clean-up on my tomatoes.

  • Floppy hat: Check.
  • Old socks and play shoes: Check.
  • Green bag for possible harvest: Check.
  • Camera: Check.
  • Molasses, clippers, and gloves? In the garage…

I opened the front door. Fully expecting the wash of moist heat to crash against my skin…nothing. I took a few steps off the front porch toward the garage. I stopped.

I thought, “What day is it?” (August 19th) and then “Am I awake?”

I went back inside.

Me: Hey! It’s almost chilly out!

DH: *laughs* It’s not exactly chilly out.

Me: It is! I almost need a jacket. And my phone says it’s only…

DH: 85?

Me: 74!

In a race to beat the cloud cover’s inevitable break (which would let the heat come pouring in) I threw together the rest of my accoutrements, called the dog, and headed to the Gardens.

I was met with a lot of pruning. Little leaflets that mostly drop in your hand with a light grasp…

To entire plants that are ready to come out…

You can even see that it’s cloudy.

Two hours passed quickly, and while I nearly filled a garbage bin, the visual proof of progress was less impressive.

I did make a few discoveries during my work.

  • What you don’t prune in the spring, you will prune before fall.
  • If at first grasp the brown tomato “twigs” don’t fall off, don’t pull. The healthy vines will suffer. Let go, snake the pruners into the shadows, and snip the elbow.
  • Always follow a vine all the way up to the tip, and all the way back to a joint, before making a decision. You don’t want to accidentally lop off your best chances at a fall harvest, nor do you want to end up making four cuts when you only needed to make one back at the joint.
  • If your staking is preventing a vine from coming loose, then do cut it four times into manageable pieces.

I learned last year that fall fruit only comes from new growth. Once fruit has set and dropped, that vein won’t fruit again. As with most pruning, tomato pruning encourages the plant to redirect energy to the new growth. So as slow as this process is, it works for me. I’ve seen others who demolish all of their tomatoes except for about 12″ of the trunk, mound up the mulch, and wait until fall. I’ve seen yet others cut an 18″ length of new growth from the top of a plant, bury it 12″ under, water, mulch, and wait until fall. I’ve never attempted either of those methods, but last year pruning all of the spent vines off the living branches resulted in more tomatoes than a salad could hold for weeks before the first frost took them all.

Keep in mind! Not all varieties will like this method. (Also good to always keep in mind – not all varieties will like you.) Cherry Chadwicks love this method. Black Princes will give one more round with this method. You may get a Zapotec or an Oxheart.

What won’t you get?

Well, I won’t get any of these:

Or these:

As much as the Purple Calabash grew into a vigorous plant, and as much as the Green Zebra hardly grew at all, neither gave up a single fruit this year. (They were also the only two tomatoes in the plot that I didn’t sow myself.)

Next year, I may really make the time to stake and prune the tomatoes like I’d like to. (I always make this vow. I’ve yet to keep it!) But why? Why worry about staking and pruning when this year’s harvest was epic, and the pruning can happen now?

It has to do with air.

The jungle that grew this year didn’t let air circulate. This is part of why there were bunches upon bunches of brown “twigs” throughout the tomatoes. When the air doesn’t circulate, the soil doesn’t dry out. This can be a good thing, in that the soil stays cooler even when the mercury passes 105. Like with most things, a balance is important. This year, my soil was a little more damp than ideal. How do I know?

These guys. They like the moist. They like the dark. They like the rotting. They’re not “bad bugs” when they’re just here and there. When they reach these levels? They can take out a small transplant in a night. With the area cleared up a bit, pruned a lot, and re-trellised a smidge, they’ll be moving along to some place less airy and full of light (and more damp and dark) …like the rest of my tomato patch is still.

Guess who else I found hiding under the lush vegetation?

I don’t squick easily. I like most bugs. This thing…well, I thought it was dead. It didn’t mind the potato bugs crawling on it. It didn’t mind the spiders scampering across it. I couldn’t quite tell what it was, and decided to poke it with a “stick” (really, a length of tomato trunk.)

Lordy did that thing move! I managed to catch it. There was one other gardener working a plot this morning, and I walked over to her side of the allotments. She jumped back when she peered into the tub.

And that’s when I saw the horn.

This one made the one on the pecan look like a miniature caterpillar. I couldn’t squish it, it was too big and that would be actually disgusting to me. I found myself wondering if I knew anyone with a large pet bird or reptile. Instead, I left it in the tub on the porch until it was time to go snail hunting.

And the tub came along on our evening walk, which tonight had a detour to the pond.

I do so enjoy how gardening challenges me. It challenges me to let things go, it challenges me to let things be “good enough” when they’re not perfect, and it challenges me to allow for (and occasionally enable) the natural state my dad tried to explain to me as a child when I was sad about a lamb lost to a coyote: “They have stomachs, too.”

I didn’t stay to see whether or not the ducks (or the geese they ended up chasing around a tree, amusingly) found the snails and the caterpillar, or whether they’ll all just make their way into the bacterial stomachs on the pond floor.

Some people find their practice in yoga, or running, or painting, or baking. Something where the purpose isn’t achievement. The purpose is practice. Mine, for now, comes from the soil.

 

The landscape these days.

The Thai basil from the front bed that froze to the ground last December and showed no signs of returning?

Yeah. It hasn’t returned.

It has finally had some self-seeded sprouts reach maturity though! The bees around here must love licorice, because they cannot get enough of the blossoms on these ones.

Speaking of self-seeding herbs, it took me two years of trying to get my Texas Hummingbird Sage seeds to sow, another year after that to get them to put on their first real leaves before kicking the pot, and finally last year, in my fourth year, with the last of the seeds in the packet, four seedlings reached transplant strength…only to lose three their first night out in the world. You had better believe that that fourth transplant last year received some serious babysitting and careful attention!

Lessons learned?

  • Don’t try and start herb seeds indoors like veggie seeds.
  • If you do, double your efforts. They are much less forgiving.
  • Get them into pots before they look like plants. Once those first real leaves appear, I think it’s a matter of days before it needs a pot or keels over. (This could just be me!)
  • Don’t over nourish the soil with compost or seaweed.
  • Put them outside in their pots. I think they hate AC.

All of that effort finally paid off when it survived the summer, flowered, and went to seed. Then came the next test – would I have to order another seed packet? Or would it really prove it was “Texas” Hummingbird Sage and successfully self-sow?

We don’t eat this herb (yet.) It has a curious flavor profile to DH, and I downright don’t like it. What I do like? Those beautiful scarlet blossoms that emerge from the Japanese-Temple-style buds.

July around here was lovely. We stopped with the triple digits for a few weeks. It rained (yay!) multiple times. It was actually a summer I could call “lovely” by Texas standards and was such a mental relief to so many local residents after the built up anxiety of having another year like last year.

That loveliness translated into a resurgence of growth in my Heat Bed! Totally unexpected, and such a pleasant surprise.

This little gentleman tried to die in his pot on the porch. Then he nearly died his first week in the ground. Again he looked like a thicket of dead twigs nearing the end of June. He’s even happier now than he looks here.

And this one has managed to bloom and re-bloom, grow and grow some more, and barely blinks when it hits 100. (Shh…it secretly gets to hide in the late afternoon shade of the Fragrant Mimosa.)

The story of the Oxalis.

This is not the whole story. The majority of the story is shrouded in mystery and intrigue. This is only the latest chapter.

My mother has an Oxalis. It lives in a pot. If memory serves, the pot lives atop a stereo in the storm corner of the House on a Hill. The stereo plays its stories for the House on the Hill. Ballads and rocky stories. Long sad songs, dancing in the kitchen songs, and teenage acoustic love songs. The Oxalis soaks it all in, root to clover-leaf-tip. It turns up its leaves in protest at times. Turning a sea of dark cheeks to the House. Other days, the sun shines, the wood warms, the rainbows dance along the dust motes and the Oxalis unfurls a blossom. Then two. Then seven. This dance has been going on for decades now. Decades. Plural.

I vaguely recall the Oxalis before the House on the Hill. It resides in a foggy recollection of an indoor passage between dark wood and historic plaster. Although that may have been where the spider plant nested. For all of the spit-shined memories of that life, the Oxalis resides in the recesses. Years before that life, this life, my life, the Oxalis was. It was with my mother for decades prior. Now years ago, not a decade yet, she carefully, lovingly, removed a few of its tubers. A few pockets of life. A few layers of story. She packaged them up. Each in its own small vessel. A twine-handled gift bag, from a birthday or a shower, one carried on in my hand through the air to Texas. The other found its way to a quaint urban kitchen.

My chapter found its home on a mini-fridge in the living room. It inhaled, exhaled, and swelled within its confines. I went on the prowl. A hermit crab for a new shell – not for me, but for this. This life. This story. I found one. Just right. I brought it home only to discover it couldn’t breathe. Carefully. Ever so delicately, as delicately as you can with power tools, I drilled through the shell. It held. I drilled again. Still it held. A third and fourth time. The shell remained whole. The Oxalis moved in. It moved back to the mini-fridge. I waited.

Not once did it flash its upset blush, but neither did it share a blossoming beam of joy with the sun. Again it moved, and again. To a kitchen window sill, to a bathroom’s frosty light, to a guest bed’s bright view of the world it stayed green, but I wasn’t sure it knew how to dance. I wasn’t sure it cared what music was playing, which storms were coming, or knew that wood could warm in the rays.

And then it was too late. They’d found it. They moved in like an army. Soft, white as snow, and innocent as the Ice Queen. I tried to fight them off. I marched into battle each morning, but each night they would emerge with renewed forces. I coaxed the Oxalis to find its strength. It fought valiantly. It drank the elixirs. It sacrificed stalk after stalk in an attempt to save the rest. It withstood painful downpours and finally chemically burns until it could take no more. With a heavy heart weighted with loss and defeat, I set the scarred, empty soil, still in its shell, outside. I couldn’t stand to bury it just yet.

Spring came and went. Summer landed with an earth-vibrating heat, and the empty shell baked in the outdoor oven. It was the least of my worries. I scurried here and there, begging my seedlings to hang on. I arranged shelter for them in the garden. I collected empty pots full of lost causes on the front porch waiting for an afternoon to re-sow. To re-plant. To try again.

It was months later before the heat broke and I’d thought I’d found such an afternoon. I soaked the empty pots gathered on the porch in preparation. I gathered my seeds. I gathered my notes. I gathered myself. And I was called away. I was needed over here. That bed needed me there. Work needed me out of town. And again. And again.

And there it was. A little bent hiccup. A little elbow of green. I gasped. I showed DH. He grinned at me and nodded. The Oxalis was returning. Marching slowly, steadily, it was returning and this time, it knew just what to do.

 

An Anaheim Tower.

Speaking of plants that can withstand  the heat but are admitting their guilty pleasures (6″ inches of rain in 30 minutes) – the Anaheim has gone bonkers!

I picked all the Anaheims last Sunday, and this Sunday – these aren’t even all of them. DH already had the grill fired up for some hot sauce brown sugar chicken, so they found their way over the flames and into our bellies less than an hour from harvest.

The rest of the peppers aren’t to be outdone!

We have three little poblanos that were left to redden-up on the vine, a purple bell that decided to go a little green?, and an orange bell that’s looking more red to me. Oh, and a pile o’ jalapenos, fish peppers, and cayenne. As you can see, the tomatoes have slowed down. The Cherry Chadwicks are still going, the yellow pears are making an effort, and a previously unproductive red cherry variety (whose name I lost track of) has just started up. I lost a few multi-pound Black Princes, Zapotecs, and others to the birds and the bugs during my neglect, but that’s ok. They’re thirsty, or hungry, and my freezer has plenty of tomatoes in it already. (Unless the hungry bugs are squash bug nymphs. Then it is most definitely not ok and they find their way under the sole of my boot in no time.)

Ever planning ahead as I look behind, I can’t forget to show my appreciation for the prolific output of this plant by saving its genes again for next year.

For anyone who hasn’t saved pepper seeds before, it really is that easy. Scoop them out, lay them on a paper towel (label your paper towel!), and let them alone until everything’s dry and crunchy. Fold up the paper towel, wrap a rubber band around it, and store it with any other seeds you sow at the same time.