The placement of our vegetable garden was such because it had the widest area of open space but also because it let the most sunlight in below the canopy of the trees. This area just so happened to be at the very front of our yard near the street, not exactly the most ideal spot but it works out. While it has a lot of sun it also gets some shade which I think has benefited the garden during the heat of the summer. Full sun for plants during the height of Texas heat isn’t very good, so a dose of shade through some of the rougher parts of the…

I’ve been sitting on these images since April and have just now got around to working on them to get them posted here. I had several dill plants growing out on the side of my house. Dill is one of the a host plants to the black swallowtail butterfly in its larval stage. We had multiple caterpillars chowing down on the dill throughout their lifecycle and I even managed to catch one not long after it had emerged from its chrysalis when I came home from work at lunchtime. It was really fun to check on them daily to see which instar they had grown into, sometimes it seemed like…

Black from Tula Ceylon Red German Johnson French Breakfast radishes Schimmeig Striped Hollow Strawberry Popcorn Striped Togo Trifle Black from Tula & Striped Togo Trifle Monster squash The heat is killer now. Sometimes I am tempted to get up early in the mornings just to work outside but then I laugh at myself and realize just how crazy that is—me, get up? Nah! Although, I have been getting up early to rollerblade a few times a week—some weeks—when I manage to get up after Leo pokes me in the face with his paw a million times. But, it is hot. Now I try not to work outside until 7pm and…

For the last several weeks I’ve been noticing a very small, really tiny bug in our kitchen around our pantry. I’ve just swept them up or killed them if I saw them walking around, but I get bugs in the kitchen coming from the sink, up through the pipes from the septic tank, so I really just expected it was something along those lines. Finally as I was cleaning up last night for a visit with family coming to town I decided to Google the bug with a weird description. It had a long snout and a rotund abdomen and went from there. The initial results gave me the idea…

I’m thankful I only live about 7 minutes from my office so I get to spend the lunch hour at home if I want. It’s nice to see what the garden is doing in the middle of the day, too. The bees are busy, building out comb and storing honey for the winter. From talking with others growing tomatoes it seems this year is weird for tomatoes. Perhaps the cool spring and then hot summer immediately after is not going to let us have an abundant harvest. These are the first ripening tomatoes, labeled at Arkansas Traveler but I’m almost 100% sure this isn’t an Arkansas Traveler. I’m guessing we…

Last week Chris and I were in his truck and I had the strange thought…I really wished I had a gac vine. I know, strange thought there, but the peachy/yellowed colored blooms just came into my head and I began reminiscing about all of our plants in Florida then and there. So, I thought I’d do a short post on some plants I wish I still had but sold over three years ago before we moved. Some I probably won’t get back due to our less tropical growing zone, others I could probably swing once again. Gac! Gac intermingled with passiflora and thumbergia there on the fence. A little wild…

When I was at my parent’s house over Mother’s Day weekend I dug up a couple bulbs of multiplying onions that my mom had in her small raised bed. I believe she received them from my brother. There was a conversation a couple of years ago about the desire to find multiplying onions as someone in my family had grown them, probably my grandmother, once upon a time. They were difficult to find, but you can find them through that link above. I have a desire to add more perennial vegetables to my garden and multiplying onions sound like a perfect addition. Right now the plants I dug up are…