Creativity

The time has come to get creative with my bamboo trellis, the wild texas cherry has out grown it. I walked out in the backyard just to see how everything looked before I went out to meet a friend for brunch on Thursday...this is what I found:

FYI It used to look beautiful and glorious, like this:

I was already dressed in my cute going to brunch clothes but I couldn't bring myself to leave the poor tomato vine like that, specially after all the work I put into having it grown vertically. I grabbed some twin and strung it across the falling down portion to form a kind of support that would hold until I was able to come up with something better.

I decided that I would just hang up some of the extra mesh trellis around the tomato vine to give it some extra support, so on Friday when I got home from work I got out in the yard and started working. I measured and cut the trellis, I started the hanging process, and then I got stung by a wasp FOR THE THIRD TIME THIS WEEK. The twine was still doing its job, so I threw in the towel for the day.  I have no idea why this keeps happening, there are not an abundance of wasps, just one or two that I can tell and their nest is not even in our back yard. I have searched everywhere to find where they are living/hiding from me, but I haven't had any luck.

Anyway, I got home early from work today and decided to give it another try...this is what I came up with. I don't know if it is a permanent fix but it will do for now:

In other news, Kody and I went to the Bayou Bend Gardens on Wednesday afternoon after work. The whole place is covered in azalea plants, so I can only Imagine how impressive it looks in the early spring...however the azaleas were all done blooming so there was not a whole lot of color. We did find this dreamy Magnolia though:

So, it is still kind of a tomato jungle...but just not as intense as last year, and a little more functional. The tomato that we planted in the pot has a ton of tomatoes on it already because it is a hybrid and is generally faster in giving off fruit. All of our heirlooms are growing upwards and are wonderful growers, but take a little more time to produce, the only one that has any tomatoes on it is the Wild Texas Cherry.

As you can see, everything looks wonderfully green and happy, but the lack of other colors is boring. So, on Saturday I made a trip to the nursery to pick up some flowers to bring some color to the back yard. I went to the native plant nursery where Kody works and was trying to get in and out before he noticed I was buying flowers. He is more of a vegetable garden guy....the idea of spending money on flowers, that you can't eat, doesn't compute. I guess I could have just gone to another plant nursery but that one is the closest and the added excitement of being sneaky didn't hurt.

Zahara White Zinnia, Star Flower (Laurentia), Strawberry Fields (Gomphrena)

Jumbo Yellow Dreamtime (Bracteanta) & Star Flower (Laurentia)

Needless to say, he discovered my plan and tried to thwart it. I did manage to get a few plants we could both agree on (kind of, haha) and I think it will make the back yard a little less monochromatic. They are all heat resistant, love the sun, and require little to medium water. We will see if they make it through the summer...

Before

After

Growing Up

real simple. real easy. real yummy.

My Grandma Thelma gives everyone a calendar for Christmas every year, this year she gave me one about organic backyard gardening. I found this simple little recipe in it and had to try it out, specially since all the ingredients could be found in our garden...aside from the yogurt and almond butter, but those were found easily enough in our fridge as they are staples in our kitchen.

Growing a Feast

This blog is just to document my mishaps in backyard gardening. A a little under a year and a half ago, Kody and I moved into a little duplex with a little back yard. A REALLY little back yard. We both were lucky to have grown up with parents that had a love for growing things, so naturally this was a tradition we wanted to carry on in our home.

Kody grew up on a ranch about 90 miles northwest of where we live now where as I grew up about a mile and half northwest of our little duplex. So our gardening styles and knowledge were more than a little different....Kody is accustomed to a big space were you can grow a lot of food, in rows. I am used to backyard gardening that is functional for growing edibles but at the same time "landscaped" for lack of a better term. We are constantly trying to find balance between these two styles, so you will probably hear a lot about our humorous garden battles.

Before

After

Since moving to Houston, Kody has been working at a plant nursery and has absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge and has been a wonderful teacher to me. He also has an incredible work ethic and motivated and dedicated enough to keep our backyard garden experiment going.  Without him our garden would be a over grown jungle that I would assuredly get lost in.

 To me it looked like a mini secret garden, but to Kody it represented complete chaos. To be honest, I would have been perfectly happy in the chaos, I liked the hodgepodge of colorful flowers-but let's be honest, it wouldn't have worked as a vegetable garden and it needed to go. Thank you Kody, for doing what I couldn't and wouldn't.

After he (I can't say we, because it was really all him..I was to busy mourning the loss of the overgrown flowers to think about how yummy our home grown food would be) had cleared out the beds we started planting. Somethings we grew from seed and other things we bought ready to be planted.