Hot Texas Garden

Sam Marzano tomato seeds from Seeds From Italy

102. Yes, that's the predicted temperature for this afternoon. It's been a hot, dry, windy June, and it's not even summer yet. We have been watering a lot, and even so the eggplant and peppers look wilted in the middle of the afternoon. Today I planted seeds for San Marzano Redorta, an Italian plum tomato that is great for sauce as well as for fresh eating. It is a big, wild, sprawling plant that should do great in the hot weather and give us a jungle of tomatoes all over the garden into late fall.

One of our few grape clusters, but a really big one

This is a grapevine growing in our side yard. I'm pretty sure the variety is Flame. I don't know how vineyards go out and harvest all of one variety of grapes in the field at one time. We picked our first cluster of grapes over a week ago, a couple more have ripened just now.

And speaking of vineyards, this was one of our stops last Saturday during our Dr Pepper 120th birthday trip.

Looking from the deck of the Bluff Dale Winery
across the vineyard, near Granbury

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.

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.