Thursday, November 3, 2011

The Garden in November

Happy Autumn


I just wanted to talk about my garden today, as we get close to the end of the season here in north Texas. Or more specifically, my potager or kitchen garden.


The okra plants are six feet high, a couple a little taller, and have been producing like crazy lately, since the scorching temps and drought eased a bit. Ignore them for a few days and all of a sudden I have huge okra, too big and tough to eat.


Late last week as a cold front was blowing in, I ran out to harvest okra, just before the rain hit. My plants were covered in buds, blooms and tiny baby okra.


I'm pleased to say the temperature only dropped to about 40 and they fared well.


I'm still hoping for all my green bell peppers to turn red before I have to pick them.




Today I have to pick yellow (so called "summer" ;-) squash and more okra. And since it will get down to 32 tonight, bring in the basil that's in pots and cover my peppers. Not sure what to do about all the still small green tomatoes. The heirloom plants are almost too big and sprawling to cover, but as we got almost no tomatoes during the harsh summer, I really hate to lose them.

Tonight may mark the end of some of the garden veggies, but even so, I think Fall gardening in Texas is the best.



3 comments:

Tiffany said...

Wow! I hope to one day fairly soon be experiencing Texas gardening once again ;) My mom is in East Texas and now is the only time that she's gotten anything to grow because the summer was just SO hot and dry.

As for the orka....WOW. Could you cut it up and put it in gumbo or stew it? I mean it's not going to work for frying, but I would think that if you stew it a bit, it should do just fine. I LOVE okra and it's so hard to find here in Germany -- and a bit tricky for us to grow. ;-/

Glad you stopped by to link up for the Garden Life link up!

13moons said...

Tiffany, I really like East Texas; 3 of my grandparents grew up there.

Are you permitted to have seeds mailed into Germany? Maybe if you started the plants inside, you could get some okra. ?

Tiffany said...

We can get seeds mailed here -- which is really the only way at this point that I can get all of the things I'm accustomed to like okra. :) I definitely have to buy some more seeds because we used all of ours up a couple of years ago.

Early starting is an absolute must too. One of the really harsh things about the weather here is that each year it throws you a different curveball. So you never really know when the last frost will end up being. Sometimes it's March, other times May. ;)