In years gone by...

Hey everyone! I'm just sitting here with spring fever on an unusually warm day yearning to be outside planting, but know I should wait until at least the LFD. I thought I'd put up some pictures of the past couple of years with my garden and tell you a little about them while I wait. They're what I've tried, what's succeeded, what's failed. Here they are...

This is my 2010 garden from a window on the second floor of the house. I think this was taken in early June

This is my garden in early April. I just wanted to show the layout. This was the year I went for the "french cottage garden" which emphasizes on beauty as well as productivity. - I just basically doodled some shapes I thought were pretty and molded my garden to them :)

The pretty side of my garden--the front. This doesn't show the right side of it though which had my pretty nasturtiums peeking in the corner.

And.....the failure side of the garden. Sort of. The squash on the left succumbed to the heat, the pepper and onions in the middle were wimps and got taken over by bermuda grass, but the green beans on the right were AWESOME and kept on giving late into the summer. -Taken in May

My garden after the corn got knocked out by a rainstorm and I had to pull it all out :( you can see that the sunflowers look a little floppy and everything else has gone wild with the rain. This was taken only a few days after the picture at the top. I was VERY disappointed.

My garden after a VERY RARE snow in February!

My garden Spring 2011, March to be exact. You can see those bottle reservoirs I was talking about. Best. Discovery. Ever! I use them every year. They also make fertilizing a whole lot easier.

Getting off to a good start-Early April

 My ever-faithful green beans :) and a towering sunflower-May

 The sunflowers continue to grow taller and taller-May

 Sunflowers full bloom! Aren't they beautiful? -June

 What goes up, must come down. My corn patch after the horrible drought and attack of the cucumber beetles. -Sept

My poor little fall cucumber patch. -September

My humongous tomato plant! one of the only survivors-Sept

I got rid of my compost bin this year. Not working out with so little rain.

 My pretty climbing roses. Actually, I didn't realize they were climbers until just a couple of years ago. (I didn't pay attention to names when I first started them). They started shooting canes everywhere and I finally realized what they were. That spring I dug them up gently and planted them closer to the trellis. They have recovered beautifully and sent out more roses last spring than ever before.

 My Asiatic Lily that is faithful in coming up year after year (so far). It wasn't able to bloom last year because of the drought. This picture is of two years ago.

 This leaf grew like crazy. It grew to almost triple the size of all the other leaves as you can see below.

 I don't have very big hands, but this leaf got up to almost 8 inches long!

 Fuzzy, my constant companion in the garden. The sweetest cat that you could ever meet. Sadly, she disappeared a couple of months ago and hasn't come back :'( .

 My poor little sunflower house that struggled through the drought (you can see the hose snaking through there).

 Me next to my beautiful sunflowers

 Such nasty weeds, but such pretty colors, I had to take a picture.

 A fig leaf scorched by drought, beautiful.

 Crepe myrtles <3

 The pretty, subtle lilac color in these tiny flowers didn't show up as much as I wanted it to against the Mexican petunias.

 Interesting shot of a bunch of oregano seeds.

 These roses have such a fiery color. I love them!

 Not the nicest insect to have in the garden after its eggs hatch, but I still think it's pretty.

My third generation zinnia that has bred true year after year.

 Gorgeous mahogany sunflowers from my fall mix (second generation).

 Mammoth sunflower at 11' (it kept growing though) also from saved seed

 Beautiful sweet peas.

Lilac, one of my favorite colors

Beautiful sunflowers

A day's picking. These are Burpee's "Tenderpick". It doesn't say so on the packet or anything, but they have great heat resistance out here where I live and it gets into the 100's sometimes in mid-June!

36 pictures! Wow I've got it BAD. Well, that's it (for now at least). Thanks for bearing with me as I try and resist going out planting. I'll probably be back here soon :)
        ~Mara

The Journey Begins...

The Journey begins, again, as another year starts for my little Central Texas Garden and I start a new blog. Let me introduce myself. I'm Mara, a self-taught (that means try some, fail some, learn alot) gardener. I have been gardening for four years and boy, have I come a long way. My first attempt at gardening in the first year was in an already existing flowerbed abundantly planted with weeds and not much else. I bought a few packets of flower and vegetable seeds, did my best to clear out the beds and plopped a few seeds here and there, praying they would come up. My family was a little skeptical as throughout that first year I researched and tried method after method of planting and caring for my little seedlings. For a first-timer I think I did okay. I didn't completely fail or anything, but my garden was definitely NOT what I had imagined. Instead of lush plants overflowing with produce, I had a couple of little cucumber plants that produced maybe 4 cucumbers, a crazy mess of zucchini plants that soon succumbed to what I would soon come to know and love as the dreadful vine borers. The anticipated herb garden full never came up. The only plant that truly succeeded, and became a quick favorite of mine was the zinnia. I still have seeds that I have saved year after year that came from those first flowers. The first sign of hope and encouragement for me to keep on trying. Over the years I have continued the cycle of trial, then failure and a lesson learned, then re-trial and, hopefully, success. The next year, I moved out of my cramped little flowerbed into a new from-scratch garden dug out of the dense clay that is my backyard. Hard-packed soil that even the tiller I rented couldn't dent (fifty bucks down the drain, sadly : \ ). In the end I dug it by hand. All 32x12 ft of it! Talk about hard work! But it was all worth it! Through that year, my love for growing things bloomed. I continued to research and try new things, and the more I kept at it, the more progress and success I began to see. My second year (1st year in the new garden), I tried raised rows. 5 beds each about 3 ft. wide and 12 ft long. It went okay, I actually got a few more vegetables. We had a little bit of a drought that year, nothing major, but I had to water at least once a week. The raised rows seemed to both drain too quickly, and any rain or watering quickly eroded the soil (this was before I even thought about mulching). I did get several zucchini that year since they absolutely adored the intense heat and relatively even watering that year. I got one little cantaloupe out of the several plants I planted. They made it through most of the summer with a trick I learned that I think is pretty cool and have used ever since. Sinking soda bottles into the ground with little pinpricks all over them and filling those once every now and then to water the plants deeply. Sadly, the poor plants succumbed to the heat and fried to death. The little 4" melon was actually very good. Being so small, It had a very concentrated, rich, sweet flavor. I didn't get a single tomato out of my 6 tomato plants! I mean, they produced okay, but every time I made it outside to check if the were ripe yet, I would find a slightly pink tomato all torn up by the! Very disappointing, since tomatoes are one of my favorite vegetables. The cucumber plants made a couple of little, very bitter cucumbers (I didn't know yet that all of that heat and not enough water would do that to them). Also, very disappointing. The next year, I tried a different approach. French gardening. Gardening for appearance as well as productivity. Still no mulching, but well dug beds that I forbade anyone step on unless they turn my clay soil back into the brick I worked so hard to make a garden. That year was WAY better. We had more rain and that made a BIG difference. In the spring I had so much lettuce from a little 2.5' corner bed, that I had to give bags of it away! My carrots were beautiful (the deep digging really paid off!). They were sweet and crisp and perfect! I was sad, when they were all gone (didn't know about succession planting yet). My corn patch was lush and green and beautiful. Sadly, it was destroyed by a late thunderstorm that flattened it out and kept it from ever standing upright again. Any little breeze flopped it all over. I got 7 perfect ears of corn before pulling it all out. My cucumbers-growing in the shade of the beautiful corn- produced beautiful, sweet, crisp cucumbers. I got bowlfuls of cherry tomatoes every other day. Less, but still plentiful 4 oz. tomatoes also. My melon patch, bordered by beautiful nasturtiums made a couple of tiny but sweet watermelons and one good sized sweet smelling cantaloupe. I got an almost-overly-abundant green bean patch. That spring I'm pretty sure I ate green beans in every way possible almost every day. My garlic patch made 16 beautiful heads of garlic, sadly, none of them were good enough for storage (they were an experiment of mine using grocery store cloves) but were perfect for fresh kitchen use. My pepper and onion patch was the only thing that completely FAILED! By mid-summer the bed was smothered in bermuda grass. I just did my best to keep it from spreading to everything else. My sunflowers grew past 10' tall (both the mammoth variety and the "autumn blend" whose avg. height was supposed to be 4'!).  Sadly, the mammoth sunflowers were knocked down in that same thunderstorm that all but obliterated my corn patch and never recovered only making 1' heads. I gathered all of the seed from both varieties and saved them for the next year. This past year, my garden was covered in gorgeous sunflowers. Both wild (from the cornfield that marks the end of our backyard), mammoth, and the absolutely beautiful "autumn blend" that I saved seeds from and replanted. You couldn't turn in any direction from any part of the yard without seeing at least one sunflower. Wild sunflowers growing against the left fence, sunflowers speckling the cornfield, sunflowers in my garden, and a sunflower house on the right side of the yard. The sunflower house never made it, but it was a nice idea that I may try again this year. That year was a bad drought. And I mean BAD. No rain from February to December! Well, maybe one or two little showers lasting no longer than a minute here and there, but hardly anything. Regardless, I made an okay garden that year. My pepper plants were robust and healthy, because of heavy mulching, but didn't have enough time to start producing (I overwintered them indoors this year, details later). I had only 2 tomato plants right next to each other, which I pampered like my life depended on it and despite the drought, had little 2-3 oz. tomatoes all summer and fall on plants 6' tall and about 4' in diameter! Early Girl Burpee Hybrid. I finally lost them in December after fighting against the frost with lots of sheets and clothespins. I had only one ity-bity melon that was 2" in diameter. You couldn't even eat it. Because of the drought, my corn produced several ears that were like checkerboards with a couple of kernels here and there. I dried them and saved the seed for this year. A whole bagful! The green beans produced okay, but slowed and eventually stopped producing in early summer. I let it all dry out and saved the seed from that too. Everything else was just pitiful and not worth mentioning. All but my sunflowers, which were towering giants. The mammoths outdid themselves at 13 ft tall with 1 1/2 foot heads. Gorgeous! When it hit early August, everything went berzerk with pestilence. All except for my tomatoes and my peppers for a little while (they eventually recovered) was literally covered in either cucumber beetles or squash beetles. When I tried in the fall for a second crop of corn, It was entirely decimated in two days by them. I almost cried when I saw them. I decided that was a good point to end the season. I could never get anything to grow with all of those bugs flying around. I just came out every now and then to water the peppers and harvest and water the tomatoes. It took all I had to keep my hopes up with everything either dried up from the drought or covered in sap-sucking bugs. This year, we've had a TON of rain. As I write, It is pouring outside with flash flood warnings, a moat in front of my house, and more rain in the forecast. It can be a little annoying, but after last year I don't DARE even think of wanting the rain to go away. I'm hoping for a great year full of learning and growing. The journey begins...