Sunday, January 24, 2021

I'm still here.....a few pics from the last several months.

 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.





Well, so much for uploading a video. It looks like it's there....but doesn't seem to work. Whatever. New Blogger ain't easy for this old non techie.