Late-Summer Sorta-South Texas Garden Roundup
(Garden • Texas)
We’re about 35 miles southwest of Houston, and 70 miles west of the Gulf of Mexico. You couldn’t quite call our climate subtropical, but we’re definitely in a zone where you can plant a spring garden and a fall garden.
Except that almost half the time it seems August steamrolls over the ground, September comes in like a lamb roast in the oven, there’s no rain at all and not much fun in starting your fall garden in the baked dust.
After a serious June-July drought, I was certain this would be one of those not-much-fun fall gardening years.
Oh me of little faith.
Over the past 10 days we’ve had about 3.5 inches of rain – 2.5 of that in a full-on gale Friday evening during some of which I stood in a protected corner of the front porch soaked nonetheless by horizontal wind, peering into the chaos for any early sign of the twister that seemed possible considering the confluence of atmospheric events.
We’ve had almost as much rain in August as we were supposed to have in a typical June, typically one of our wettest months. As a quick result, grass grew, weeds catapulted skyward and a small herd of tree frogs apparently hatched and grew to adult size overnight, sticking themselves to the kitchen windows at night and trawwwling for froggy company in a swamp-sounding din.
So, game on. The back garden, formerly a mess of brown wilt where peppers and tomatoes once bloomed, became forlorn and then, after the monsoon, sunken in grassy weeds. Slowly I’m hacking out the grass and turning it into mulch as I reclaim the raised beds for another go-round.
Of my spring heirloom tomatoes, all but one (a Belgium Giant) succumbed to this season’s wilt du jour and had to be pulled up. What’s left of the lone survivor isn’t pretty, but I’ll try to coax it back into production. Also among the weeds, I discovered a couple of still-moving hot chilies, two Anaheim peppers and three or four eggplants.
Now its time to clear off and re-till the beds, and decide where to plant my fall tomatoes, yellow summer squash and maybe some green beans.
Because garden conditions often are less-optimal in the hot Texas fall than in spring, I won’t be planting heirlooms. Even though I saved seeds from some good-producing, wonderfully flavored Belgium Giant and German Johnson plants, their growing seasons are on the long side. And sometime the fall growing season is on the short side.
Thus I’m falling back on a couple of hybrids that have done well in the heat here before, and get going fairly quickly – Big Bite and Bella Rosa. Also, an early variety called Red Rocket, and one called Home Sweet described as a “stabilized” open-pollinated variety and apparently not to be confused with a hybrid called Homesweet. I’m trying the latter two, as I sometimes do, only because I found some old unopened seed packets from a past over-ambitious purchase.
I started my fall tomato plants in one-gallon containers, four to a container. Most have just two per container now, and I’ll divide them when they go into the ground in September when I’m convinced we’re finished with 100-degree days.
This year, I’ve put the potted tomato plants into the kids’ little old red wagon, in order to protect them from a wicked neighbor cat who’s been jumping the fence just for the purpose of knocking the pots over and pawing around in there. I’ve been pulling the wagon to various cat-proof locations in dappled sunlight under the canopy of our 70-foot pecan trees. The tomatoes grow quickly in the heat and bright partial shade, whereas they’d likely burn and stress in direct August sun. I want them to have big, healthy roots when they go into the ground, for a quick start.
Meanwhile, a little less daylight and the sun lower in the sky has begun triggering Hibiscus and other blooming things. On the fruit scene, several banana plants promise to deliver their treats soon, and heavy, drooping branches indicate the pecan trees will deliver another load later this fall, even though nature didn’t provide them with as much water as they like.
Now if I could just find a goat for rent, I could get past this weeding and on to the fun stuff.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 23, 2009, 09 16 am
I’ll pass on the monkeys, thank you.
It’s more than bad enough fighting mocking birds, cardinals, giant hornworms and Zea caterpillars for the right to pick a tomato.
I think the closest thing we have to Texas monkeys might be the neighbor kids on their All Terrain Vehicles.
— Bob Aug 25, 05:40 am #
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