Spring is HERE!!!

More or less it seems. Yesterday it hit 80 degrees, the grass is greening, as you know the peach tree is blooming, no more frosts in the immediate future (crosses fingers). I guess this means winter is winding down. So here is the scoop from the garden.



The peach tree is now in full bloom and feeding the bees. Last night we had some hail and there doesn't appear to be much damage to the blooms, so i think we are good for maybe setting some fruit. Of course, this hinges on not having any more frosts; possible, but still not a sure thing. We have decided to prune it to make more of a yard piece than a fruit bearing tree. This means rather than a squat, easy to pick from tree that is more of a bush, we will have something akin to a smallish Bradford Pear. It will still bear fruit, but it will just look better. We are doing this in anticipation of selling the house later this year.



So far this year we have harvested almost 7 pounds of broccoli from about a dozen plants. I absolutely love broccoli. Raw, steamed, boiled, dried and used in soups, it is all wonderful. We had staggered the set in for the broccoli plants and have harvested regularly since December. The greatest thing about broccoli is the continued floret production after the main harvest. These little guys will shoot up for weeks after you take the main stalk and they are the perfect, no fuss, size for use. NO PREP!!!!



Lettuce is the Shiznit! 4ft by 4ft of garden space dedicated to lettuce and sundry greens will feed two people well all winter in the south. We have not been weighing our lettuce but we eat several salads a week from it without worry. No matter how much we cut from it the patch seems to fill back in quickly. Here is a shot of the patch:



Several different kinds of cut and come again are in there, some spinach, and boc choi, of course. You'll notice the front of the patch is co-planted with onions. I wish I could say this was a well thought out plan for quick succession planting from crop to crop to let the lettuce and turnips mature while the onions didn't need much space, but in reality this was done because we overbought onion starts and ran out of room to put them all in.

I need to do a post just on boc choi. I am so enamored with this green. When we got back from Europe in mid January we found our boc chois blooming and the bees working it hard. We left them there for the bees during the day and would harvest greens from the plant during the evenings. No bitterness from the age or warmer weather. It is the dream plant. If only we could grow it during a 105 degree summer.



The onions are on their way, but still need some weeks before we can start to harvest them. Here is hoping the weather does not warm up too quickly and leave us with a bunch of small onions for harvest. This happened to us last year with an early January set in time. So this season we set in mid december to get a head start on the spring time heat. That will be the last crop from the winter garden.

We haven't gotten going with spring planting yet, but should in the coming weeks. Planning for spring in Texas is such an iffy proposition. For one, you don't know how long the frosts will keep coming. This can delay your planting time in the spring directly or may keep your space tied up with lingering winter plants. Two, you don't know how quickly things will heat up. This can cause a crash in an onion crop or early bolting, or whatever. Third, you don't know how these first two issues will cooperate with each other. It is not uncommon to have a frosty morning end with t-shirt weather by the end of the day here. Just the same your "starting to feel the heat" 80's February day can turn into an ice storm in a matter of hours. Fun stuff I tell ya. Plants get confused during this time, very confused.