The October Garden and the White House Lawn

Raindrops on Canna leaf

I love this time of the year. Everything is crisp and refreshed and greening back up again with a little autumn rain. The walk to school with my daughter is wonderful; every morning seems like a new beginning. Here in Texas October is a new growing season, when the garden comes back to life after the hot dry summer. Last night's wonderful rain has made the colors lush and the plants revive.

We have about 20 dark green poblanos on our one pepper plant.

Arugula seedlings

The baby greens are coming up from seed, little bitty Swiss chard, a few romaine seedlings and the arugula. I still have to plant some spinach and some more arugula which I mean to plant every few weeks for a while, so we will continue to have the young tender greens for salads.

We are still getting a couple of okra every day, but they have really slowed down, and I'm sure will bow out to the cool weather soon.

Our globe eggplant plant which gave us only one eggplant this summer now has half a dozen tennis ball sized fruits and more tiny ones forming under calyxes. The slender Japanese eggplant has one fruit and lots of blooms, but I doubt those will have time to do anything before the cold weather gets it.



We have harvested a few San Marzano tomatoes this month and have dozens of green ones all over this one plant that is sprawling all over the garden now. There are more green tomatoes on some of the other varieties of tomatoes, all tangled together with and under the San Marzano...pushy Sicilian!

Tiny tomatoes grown from heirloom seed

The peppers on the jalapeno plant look like red and green Christmas bulbs. We have been picking these constantly, more than we use, all summer and fall.


Speaking of kitchen gardens, the people at Kitchen Gardens International have been running a campaign to have part of the wide expanse of the White House lawn replaced with an organic vegetable garden. Historically the White House grounds have included a garden; Thomas Jefferson had a vegetable garden and Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory garden. Produce would go to feed the people at the White House, First family and staff eating local homegrown organic food, the excess to be donated to a local food bank.

Author Michael Pollan wrote a very thorough article, Farmer in Chief, addressed to the president-elect, in the Sunday New York Times that champions this idea.

KGI's campaign to plant healthy, edible landscapes in high-impact, high-visibility places is called Eat the View.

Okra, Tomatoes and Nasty Orange Bugs

Okra is having its heyday in our garden. Every day we pick a couple of handfuls. Except when we skip a day, and then we get this:

Unfortunately, the giant okra is just too tough and fibrous, and the bottom half of these big guys end up in the compost bin.

I love the okra blossoms, that creamy yellow with the velvety burgundy center. You can see that we will continue to get okra for while...look at all those babies.

Okra plants in the garden
about 4 1/2 to 5 feet tall.

That's Spaz , world's most misnamed cat, trying to have a private moment in the shade.

Here are our two first San Marzano tomatoes, a Sicilian paste variety, along with some more reasonably sized okra. When you cut into these tomatoes, there is no juice and jelly like stuff around the seeds, and the walls of the tomato are very thick. They are supposed to be the best for spaghetti sauce, and I hope to get to try that out. Although we only have the one plant, it has 15 or more green tomatoes on it right now, several about to ripen.

San Marzano

The Early Girl bush tomato also has over a dozen tomatoes on it right now, after taking a brief break after it s first blush of prodution, and there are a few green ones on the Black, an heirloom tomato that is sprawling all over the corner of the garden and which I planted from seed. I am really excited; I have never had luck growing tomatoes from seed before.

And here are the nasty bugs that are trying to suck the life out of my tomatoes.

They are the immature, or nymph, form of the stink bug, or a similar variety, called the leaf-footed beetle...or something like that. Since I took this picture on Thursday or Friday, I managed to deal with a few of them by hand (ugh), and the rest morphed into the regular brown stink bugs.