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Ah Texas, I had considered relocating down there but everybody I know says the same as you do about the darned heat. And then what happened with the freak ice storm a couple years ago...wow. I've only been down to Texas once, in 2021 I think it was, and the area we visited clearly was dry dry even though it was supposed to be the "Piney Woods" of NE Texas. Just the color of the shrubs and trees told me this area is hard on green growing things. As a gardener, I pretty much lost interest in relocating there, after seeing the landscape while driving the old highway from Tyler down to Corpus Christi. I'm sure it's not always that bad but now we had that kind of year, here! I just told some folks: We all went to Texas this year and Texas went to Hell!

I'm sure that fall planting is a big deal down your way. Up here, we need more garden centers to get that idea, too. Most all of them just stock whatever the major wholesale plant suppliers bring them, and don't offer any veggie starts this late in the year. A few local greenhouses, owned by Amish or Mennonite families, are the exception. I have to drive down 30 miles to shop at those places.

I'd like to start some more brassicas (especially cauliflower) and maybe more onions and things like that. Greens and Green beans. A great little green bean variety is "Slenderette." I planted a 6 foot row of them and even in this bad summer, we're getting enough to cook up for the 2 of us, every week or so, off of 6-7 plants! (I did drop in some compost in the clay ditch when I planted them after pre-soaking them to get germination on 2 year old seed!) They are not stringy and they can up very nicely.

Whatcha planting?

Oh lord, that ice storm was something else. It was the cold more than anything that really got us. We usually get a night or two every year of temps in the teens, but we hovered around zero for almost a week with the power coming on every few hours for about an hour. Thank goodness for our gas fireplace. It was nuts! Nothing here is built for the cold. We lost our St Augustine lawn and a couple of trees, and many people's pipes burst. I'm an insurance agent and I think that storm is part of what caused the industry to go absolutely nuts.

Tyler is a really pretty area. It's lovely in the spring when the roses are blooming. And we LOVE Corpus. Port Aransas is our beach town of choice on the Texas Riviera. lol

Looks like I caught it in time to start some beans, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, and cukes. Carrots were really fun to grow in class, and radishes, onions, and lettuce too, but those will have to wait a few months. I loved eating a salad that I had grown. That was really cool.

I've tried growing tomatoes in the past and have never had any luck. They're too finicky for me.

I've been incredibly lucky this year with my garden. I suspect it's because it's raised beds and has drip lines running through it.

This was my learning experience first year. The things that REALLY took off were cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers. I got some zucchini and basil, too.

I mean, I was giving away tomatoes and cucumbers. And this week I had so many I decided to follow my son-in-law's example and make 'sun'-dried tomatoes... in the oven. I probably had at least ten lbs. of tomatoes that I did this with. It took me four batches on baking sheets and many hours at a very low temperature. We are leaving town tomorrow, so I have to get them in the already sanitized jars, cover them with olive oil and get them in the refrigerator before we leave.

Something else I did this summer... about three weeks ago, my favorite peach supplier in Georgia brought their truck up our way on a tour of the Northeast. I pre-ordered 36 lbs. of peaches and froze them - blanched them to help remove the skin, sliced each one into six slices and froze them in quart freezer Ziploc bags. So I will have enough peaches to last me until next peach season, if I spread out the bags I unfreeze over the right time period.

My zucchini is done, so I can probably pull that out. Cucumbers are slowing down, but tomatoes are still coming in. I told my neighbor across the street to come help themselves to any produce that ripens while we're gone next week.

I am trying to figure out what I can pull out now to make room for fall veggies. Other than greens, what are considered 'fall' veggies? I guess I can go to my local garden center and they'll have some plants for sale.

Oh! I also finally purchased a counter-top composter. It works great, so we're saving up all of the composted material and I will work it all into the soil once I pull up my garden later in the Fall. When we lived in CA, they started a requirement (maybe this was just LA) that you had to put all of your food waste in the yard waste bags, so we had gotten used to always keeping our kitchen food waste separate, but we didn't have a composter and I kept thinking all this food waste would make good compost. Just can't compost dairy or meat products.

Hey y'all Fall Gardeners, I scored some Brussell Sprouts, Chinese Cabbage and Broccoli starts yesterday from one of those tucked-away in the foothills of Western Virginia Mennonite Greenhouses. I'm so excited! How we found it was just by happenstance. We went to the one where I bought my spring stuff, it was closed for the season as many do after Memorial Day here in Virginia. At a produce market, an older woman said she wondered if 'the greenhouse on ____ road was still open, perhaps' so I went right to the iPad in the truck, looked it up, got the number and called. Sure enough, they had the fertilizer I was looking for (granular 20-20-20 and other mixes) plus they of course had fall crop 6 packs.

I'm PSYCHED!!!! May go back to the area this week as many other small, mom and pop enterprises like that are in that general area. But the thing is, you have to sort of know where to go to find them. They don't really advertise on the major internet search engines.... :)

And oddly enough, we discovered this evening, while prepping the fall area of the veggie garden by chopping down crabgrass clumps, about a dozen big fat cucumbers that will make nice dill pickles and even almost a pint's worth more of "gherkins." So I guess the blackened vines I saw weren't the absolute END. Whooo HOOOO I love gardening!!!

Happy September! How many of us are shifting into food preservation mode, now?

I find I have a colander full of Slenderette Green Beans to do something with, whether I'm ready to deal with them or not. (We like them canned better than how they taste frozen, and it's way too many to cook up just now for 2). All came from 8 little bean plants, can you believe? A row less than 10 feet long, grown in concrete-like clay with a little potting soil put in the trench at planting time, and kept watered. I am impressed with their productivity.

I already posted about the Parisian Cornichon cucumbers that had been burnt up by the July-August heat and drought, despite us hauling water daily and sometimes twice daily to them and developed blackened stems and curled up leaves; looked like we lost all 8 even though they'd grown well up the garden fence. Well, seems that 4 of them have came back to life! I can't believe it. One was totally dead-looking and now has 2 little yellow flowers on the tip of a tiny green shoot. :)

My ONE Tomatillo plant - I knew not to go nuts with them! - has just produced 5 pints of Salsa Verde from 16 cups of little green tomatillos and we used 6 little white onions that also grew from sets.

The red onions, however, have all rotted in the row.

Making salsa today was sort of stressful for me as a poor cook and I've never done much canning, but found a good hot water bath recipe online and used bottled lemon juice with the tomatillos, chopped onions and serrano peppers. I may have overdone the serranos (bought them at a Tienda). Feels like we did something useful, at least.

The "Black Brandywine" tomatoes that only made 1.5 inch green and red fruits, all of which cracked open, we blanched, skinned and put into a liter container to make fresh salsa with. I will not try growing them again! They're rather unattractive and not particularly tasty. Whereas, the 2 German Johnson tomato plants that took forever to get going have just loaded my kitchen countertop with 5-6 inch fruits this week. The last time I bought one of these at a farm market, 5 years ago, I paid $3.00 for it. Probably $5.00 now?

Our blue potatoes were basically a bust...we harvested 12 little suckers. But the Russets seem to have come back to life after the cooler shift in weather, so the jury is still out of whether potatoes can revive this late in the season.

I've been hauling water up to the brassicas every day as it doesn't look like we're going to have much rain this fall, either. :(

[This message edited by Superesse at 10:23 PM, Saturday, September 7th]