My T-shirt is wet as I sit and write this, because I was on the front porch a minute ago holding my coffee cup out to catch the stream of rain running off the roof, pouring the results on the window box plants since they’re never favored with actual rainwater, just that salty equivalent the city provides.
Actual rain. It’s been coming down for 20 minutes. Not a gully whomper, but steady, enough to fill the rain barrels, with the promise of more over the next couple of hours. Almost no lightening and thunder, just one big storm mass moving from west Texas across San Antonio and Austin and us and Houston and points north and east, hopefully putting the damper on the wildfires up around Navasota, hopefully headed for Corpus, too, moving slow and steady like God’s Giant Garden Hose, giving us the cool drink we’ve been praying for.
Thanks, Big Guy! Stop again soon.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi. Congrats on the rain. I’m sure you plants will put it to good use.
I’d like to talk about gardens. I live about 10 miles south of Lake Erie so my situation is quite different from yours.
Question: In your location, can you carry your garden all the way through from spring to summer to fall? Or do you have to have two gardens, one in the spring and one in the fall? When do you plant?
Just curious, that’s all.
I and my urban garden [in containers] send greetings to everyone there.
Linda
Yes, as one who grew up in Northeast Ohio, I can attest to how different our gardening situations are!
I’ve tried to get the garden to last through the steam heat of our summers, but it’s mostly futile – with the exception of certain hot chile peppers, which seem to make it through the hot just fine most years.
Otherwise, by mid July if not before, it’s a good time to clean up the old, diseased tomato stalks and let the gardens go fallow until September. This year I’m probably going to start my fall tomatoes inside under plant lights, just like the spring tomatoes but for the exact opposite weather reasons.
The young plants do better once we receive what’s usually a mid-September cool-down back toward the 80s. Then you hope that there aren’t any November frosts. Some years I’ve had tomatoes ripening through November, December and on into January.
October is a good time to plant spinach and beets, peas, greens and other over-wintering crops. I haven’t done that enough in the past but intend to make up for it this time. We occasionally have a cold snap down in the 20s, but very few, and many days that get up into the 60s and 70s.
Warm weather plants or transplants usually do fine hear by mid-March. The old-timers watch for the first leaf buds on the pecan trees, figuring you’re safe from frost by then.
Good luck up there below the lake! I’ve heard it’s been unusually cool and rainy this year. Wish I could trade you a day now and then.