We're painting the roses red...and pink!!!

Everything is going splendidly! Seeds have come up and the roses are starting to bloom. This is my favorite time of year.

 These climbing roses are covered in blooms this year (at least, I think they're climbing roses. The send out long canes, so I just stick them in the trellis)

 My Cucumber/Summer Squash bed. Everything's growing great! I'm going to try and baby these this year and see if I actually get some good cucumbers this season.

 You can see my bottle reservoirs-LIFE SAVERS!!! especially in a Texas drought! They  help a lot during water restrictions too.

My melon patch! I know, it's a little crowded, but these past two years i've had a hard time getting them to survive even to a flowering stage. I'll just see which ones grow the strongest then thin them out.

 My FAILED corn patch. I could count the ones that actually sprouted on my hands. I planted when there wasn't rain in the weather forecast, and guess what happened? No rain! *facepalm* kicking myself for not being patient enough. I tried watering, but to water such a big patch by hand well takes more time than I have. :P

 New dwarf pomegranate tree!!! Excited! such beautiful flowers and delicious fruit. I don't know exactly if it's bad for there to already be fruit and flowers on the plant (like on a tomato plant before transplanting), but it seems to be doing okay. It's already planted, I'll post pictures later.

 My cilantro patch! Or now I should say, My flowerbed. The past several years that I tried to plant cilantro It never came up. Last year I got lucky and got one scraggly plant that went to seed quickly in the drought then sizzled. I was too lazy to pull it up and just left it there and this year, with all of the rain, I have TONS of cilantro growing EVERYWHERE!!! A very welcome weed :) In our house we use this in everything from salsa, to tacos and soup. We always have a bundle of cilantro in our fridge-up until now, that is.

 Cool shot that I got on a cloudy morning. Apparently, God had something important to say to one of the crows in the field :)

 I love Dandelions! Sooo pretty! You just have to take the time to look at them. Lots of people hate these weeds in their yard. I say, free landscaping!!! :) :P

 Pretty Pink Evening Primrose! Another under-appreciated, gorgeous wildflower.

 My sunflower border (needs thinning, I just didn't know how good the germination rate would be-2011 "Mammoth" saved seed)

 Butternut squash

 Peas on the tomato trellis (kind of late in Texas, especially since we've had an early, warm spring, but there's always hope of a few pods)

 The tomato trellis (you'll notice the small patches of darker brown around some of the plants in this blog post- I'm running out of mulch :P I'm just putting it where I really need it for now)

 Jalapeno plant-pruned off of those little tiny flower buds today to hopefully make them get a little bushier and stockier.

 I planted two of the tomato beds with carrots and forgot (somehow), planted them with other stuff, watered and had lots of little carrot plants come up :) Pleasant surprise, they should grow well with the tomatoes and onions planted there (supposedly good companion plants).

 Onions- doing well since I transplanted

My fiery roses (I don't know what breed they are, I just know that they're hybrids. I didn't even know that was an important thing to know when I planted them my first spring gardening :\ )

 Lots of lovely roses! I don't know what breed these are either, but they seem well suited to growing as climbing roses. They bloom like climbing roses- on growing tips. I figured that out last year when I only had a few blooms at the very ends of the canes and pruned accordingly.This year, I pruned off the tips to encourage side-shooting and now they're covered in blooms! I need to take some more pictures now that more have bloomed (I meant to write this blog post with these pictures last week- oops! :\ )

 Pretty Cilantro flowers! The look beautiful in a vase with roses!

 Our fig tree is growing like crazy! We might actually get some figs this year :)

 My ever-faithful rosemary bush! I planted this along with thyme, sage, mint, and lavender three years ago. The thyme and mint gave out their first year during a short drought, the sage succumbed to the frost the next year, and the lavender was killed in last year's bad drought. The rosemary has done beautifully in our dry Texas weather. Whenever I work outside I love how the wind blows the smell around :)

 I was just taking pictures of the cilantro flowers and found this little guy. Soo cute!

 Very helpful too! I read somewhere that they eat like 1,000 aphids a day! I've been finding their babies everywhere this spring. Keep 'em coming!

 Soo pretty

 A birds nest I found in our mulberry tree. It's right above the rope swing, though. I'll just have to tell the kids to be careful until I'm sure there aren't any eggs up there.

 More Roses!

 Well, If the pepper plants failed, at least the pots aren't going to waste. The lettuce is thriving in these even with all of this heat. We've had weather in the 80's for the past month and the lettuce below hasn't even shown signs of bolting!

My biggest tomato plant. Only 3'' tall. The picture makes it look a

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...