Texas Fall Garden and Thanksgiving Food

Thanksgiving harvest

Here it is, the day before Thanksgiving, a little windy, a little balmy, and 81 degrees. I am harvesting more veggies from my garden. I love fall gardening in Texas! In the picture above, the rectangular platter is full of what I picked from my garden this afternoon, 15 tomatoes, a dozen peppers and some okra. In the bowl, are tomatoes and okra from the last few days. I am picking a few tomatoes a little early, because, in the mercurial nature of Texas weather, we are going to go from Indian summer to 28 degrees tomorrow night. I have so many more green tomatoes and peppers to pick or cover up before the cold front.

Most of the green tomatoes can be cut off on the branches and hung up in a dark closet, where they will ripen slowly, and give us ripe tomatoes for Christmas.

Fall flowers, pansies and chrysanthemums

In the spirit of the season, that is...FOOD...here is one of the dishes I will be bringing to my mother's for Thanksgiving tomorrow, Wild rice mix with butternut squash and green apples.

Unfortunately, I won't be using the butternut squash from my garden, my biggest squash is the size of a squat zucchini. I guess I'll be covering it during the cold snap and hoping for the best.

More Paintings and Mutant Peppers

I haven't yet titled this painting I did a couple of weeks ago, but I'm thinking about giving it the name of an imaginary city from a series of books. I wonder if that would be okay?

The painting is 8x10, small enough that I could lay it on the scanner and not have to deal with the issues of lighting, digital photography settings and learning the new camera. Unfortunately, I can't do that with every painting, and I think I am going be experimenting with taking pictures of a larger diptych later today.



Two posts ago, there was a picture of my jalapeno plant with little red and green peppers. The little peppers are shorter, smaller, more rounded than the usual jalapeno. That's because the plant is one of the hybrids developed by Texas A&M University that is supposed to have the same taste but half the heat of the traditional jalapeno. I planted one of these and one regular jalapeno, in large pots about 8 feet apart. Which was evidently too close. Both plants have little rounded hot peppers. The other day I came in from the yard and put these 2 peppers in Edward's hand. He came down the hall a few hours later with watering eyes to report on the heat of the "mild" pepper he had just taken a bite out of.

In the garden on Friday, I planted a row of mixed "Gourmet blend" beets, the picture on the seed packet is very pretty, and some more arugula. I noticed that several almost thread thin fennel seedlings had cropped up. I'm hoping the cats don't stroll across them until they are a bit sturdier.

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.