Post Heat Wave Harvest

Oh no! I let some of my okra get too big! But it's pretty understandable considering that we just got our first 2 okra of the summer last week. Our poor plants manged to survive the 70 days of triple digit temperatures this summer, but not to produce fruit once the heat from Hades settled in. I'm just not used to checking for vegetables in the garden, only checking for dry soil.

There are two overgrown yellow squash lurking in there. We started harvesting squash about a week and a half ago.

Even the peppers had a hard time in the heat. I only had one smallish red bell pepper and a very few jalapenos, then one of our two jalapeno plants wilted and died. Now, the bell has blooms and little green peppers all over it.
The only things that kept on going through the summer were the chard, most of the herbs, and weirdly...

...the arugula.
Which we've really been enjoying in various salads, tossed on hot-from-the-oven pizza, and as an important part of our onionless tabbouleh.

Everything looks happier now, and we even got a good rain Friday evening. Now maybe we will actually get some tomatoes!

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