Texas Gardening: Round Dos

After a failed first attempt to put tomatoes in the ground this year (they froze in the ice storm we had), our garden looks like it's flourishing a bit.  We have a few newcomers this year and we'll see how everything goes.  We're doing a few "experiments" in our square foot garden.

One of the newcomers is our new pumpkin patch.  At least, I think it's a pumpkin patch.  I'm not exactly sure what's growing but it is a lovely green!  Either we'll have fat, orange pumpkins or a ton of yellow summer squash.  Sounds great both ways.

 

We have two grow boxes of tomatoes.  Yes, I said TWO!  We're hoping to put up a bunch of bottled tomatoes and even more homemade spaghetti sauce.  I found a recipe that everyone likes but it's going to require a few quarts of tomatoes!


And we added a fourth grow box to the group.  With the new soil, it's doing great  (see first picture above).  One of our grow boxes (to the left) is going to need a little extra help...but I think we also have older seeds trying to germinate in it.  So, we'll see how well the corn grows.  And yes, I said corn.  There are some who swear you can do corn in a square foot garden.  I'm also interested to see if the zucchini can be trellis/staked upward.  We're going to try acorn and cantelope on the large trellises.  So, it's going to be a summer full of adventure and fun!

And our last addition is Daddy's newest joy!  We got a blood orange tree!  At some point we'll have to put it in the ground, but we're hoping that comes after we find our dream home in Texas.  Until then, Jack is his buddy.  Check back this summer to see how the harvest goes.

While we enjoy a good flower garden the same as anyone else, we're going to see if we can do an edible flower garden in the front yard.  We put some carrots, beets, lettuce and other herbs mixed in with mums, petunias and we're hoping some marigolds pop up.  But who knows?  We didn't do as much to help this soil and Cedar Park soil isn't really soil.  More like glorified sandy dust from the limestone.  But we're working with it.

This is a purely flowering flower bed.  The girls begged to have some flowers up front.   So we put in some kind of flower seeds and then are filling in the rest with Allysum and Petunias behind the sliver of a rain barrel.  Yes, that's a 50 gallon rain barrel that we use to harvest the rain.  We've had two storms and it's already full to overflowing.  Yeah!  "Free" water!  This will come in handy during the hot, rainless summer months.  And I've been told this is going to be one long, hot summer.  Great!  So was last year.

The Only Flowering Bed