Last spring I terminated the indoor growing and started a couple of outdoor, raised bed garden plots. Many bags of compost, peat moss, vermiculite, and gardening soil later... I had some decent soil made. I tried to use rain water from my two rain barrels as much as I could. In spite of mosquitoes arriving in late spring, about the same time the rains dwindled away in north TX. Switched to garden hose water, but our water source has a heavy dose of Chloramine. I can readily smell it when I run the tap water in the kitchen. We filter all our water for consumption in the house, and chloramine ain't great for plants either IMHO. So I bought a filter and attached it to the hose for watering.
I thought I had a bunch more pics of the garden progress, but they're all on my phone...and I'm not able to easily move them to this tablet....but I did get a good amount of tomatoes, squash, zucchini, and banana peppers until mid-summer when the heat shut down most fruiting, and the grasshoppers did the rest. Many tomato sandwiches, a few batches of home-made hot sauce (I've always called it "hot sauce" , but now folks call it "salsa"). And a few zucchini and squash casseroles.
My cukes hardly did anything, they dries up and faded pretty early. But they weren't underneath the partial shade cloth that I suspended across both garden boxes. You can keep the tomatoes going a little longer with some shade filtering, but eventually the TX heat gets them. We hit 111 here on one afternoon for a couple hours (in the shade!)
Made a trip out west for Spring Break. Both my kids and their children made the trip. We hauled the golf cart down for easy nearby transportation fun.
I can never get enough of these sunrise and sunset pics from the far West Texas Desert Region. Not EVERYDAY do these occur, but at least half the time they do.
