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Well it looks like we have finally hit the triple digits days of this area.  Its hot. The low at night is 76. The heat index is over 100 easily. But the garden is alive.  I’ve got watermelon and cantaloupes growing.  The tomato plants are alive, but not doing anything, and that’s expected with this heat. The gardening guides say its time to plant the second crop of squash and green beans so I planted some seeds of both today.  The squash says 45-50 days to harvest so we’ll see if they grow.

Things to remember for next year:
   1.  When you plant tomatoes, put cages around the baby plants.  Don’t wait for them to grow up before putting cages on them.

  2.  Put trellises up for melon plants.  Otherwise they will take over the yard.  Also remember that melon plants will try to grab onto things – don’t plant near the asparagus plants.

  3.  The zinnias and petunias are fairing better then the marigolds in the heat.  Actually there is a zinnia plant growing in the middle of the ground, not in a pot, and its not getting watered.  Same for the petunia.

  4.  Plant less basil.  It grows really really well. Almost too well.  I put a few plants in the salad bowl area and they have taken it over.

  5.  The tomato plants are doing okay with shade cloth over the back part.  They get some daylight sun but not quite all day of sunlight.

  6.  YOU NEED TO WATER MORE!!  If we continue using the small soaker hose, have it water more frequently and longer time.  This year in this heat its running daily, but I’m giving additional hand watering 2-3 times a week.  The plants are doing well with the additional water.  Roses have been blooming, got some squash (had an ant problem), the carrots are growing (need the hand watering), the melons are growing well (mark the plants better and watch for aphids, and trellis the plants EARLY). 

  7.  Watch out for the squirrels.  They like the melons and green tomatoes.

Okay, its been a bit of a cool summer.  Not cool if we lived elsewhere, but for Austin, its cool.  We are almost to August and have not have a triple digit day yet.  I’m surprised by that.  I would think we would have, but we just have not done so yet.  We’ve gotten to the mid 90’s, but not triple digits.  The weather forecast says we may get them this week.  We’ll see.

But we lost all the corn, we didn’t get a lot of squash, and the melons (watermelon and cantaloupes) are growing but the squirrels are a problem for everything.  They eat the melons when they get ripe.  The squirrels steal the tomatoes, even the green ones.

The tomatoes – yes well, they ripen on a strange time table. We got a few at the regular time table. But right now the plants are full of green tomatoes that just have not ripened. Last year they ripened late, it was frost and we were still picking them.  I’m guessing this year may be the same.  We got a few squashes, not many, but now the plants are producing more flowers, and we have new baby squashes growing.  Go figure.

The basil is taking over the salad bowl.  I’m thinking on planting more lettuce and see what happens. Everything else bolted due to the heat.

YIPEE!! We got rain!  We’ve had about 1-1/2 inches of rain yesterday and about an inch of rain today. Though I admit we’ve also had a temperature drop.  The other day we were in the mid 70’s, almost 80 degrees, and today we barely made it to 64.  And the nights have dropped in temperature too. Last night we hit a low of 53, and at 8:30 PM we are already at 55.  I’m not sure how low we will drop tonight, but at least we got rain. Of this I am sure, we’re not likely to drop to freezing.

And come Thursday, we are back into the 80’s.  It is weird weather.  Flagstaff, AZ has a low of 33 tonight, and parts of Colorado may be getting snow. Kind of strange weather.

But the good news is my corn is getting tall, my squash plants have baby squashes, my salad patch has more salad then I can eat, and my tomato plants are growing up. My fig tree is growing, the grape plants have leaves, and one of my blackberry plants looks great. The other blackberry is still alive and okay, but its not thriving the same way. I’ve even moved one of the strawberry cuttings into a square planter to see if I can grow more strawberries.  So all in all, the garden is doing well.

I even managed to take some grapefruit seeds and start them in pots.  Cute little things, but they will take years before I could look at getting fruit from them. I’m just tickled they actually sprouted.

If I get the chance, I’ll take pictures and post them.  School has kept me busy and I just haven’t gotten my camera out there yet.

We were gone for a week and the garden took off.  Its like everything is coming up.  I have pea plants, bean plants, the corn is coming up, the stick of a fig tree (new) has a baby fig, the thyme is taking over the pot, and even the lemon trees are showing new growth.  I guess spring has actually sprung. 

Oh, and the fruit trees have leaves and some buds left.  But you do have to be careful outside.  Some areas are swarming with bees.  Yes I know, lucky us.  We have bees.

But we still haven’t had any rain. They keep teasing us and saying 30% chance.  But nothing has come of it.  We can hope.

The good news is we have warmish weather for the next 10 days. By warmish I mean mid 70’s maybe, high 60’s.  Not hot by Texas standards, but warm enough for seeds to sprout.  Right now the seeds I planted a while back are growing, at least most of them are.  I did plant new seeds earlier this week.  I planted corn, some squash, watermelon, tomato seeds (probably be better off with plants), and some more lettuce.  We’ll see how they do.

The fruit trees are doing well.  At this time, everyone has at least some flowers on the branches.  The Anna apple is the only one I’m a bit worried about.  Its the smallest of the trees and doesn’t look so happy after last week’s cool front.  I’m hoping with the warm weather it will begin getting happier.  But it does still have some flowers, just not too many.  The Dorsett has far more flowers, but it is a larger, taller tree.

Even the pear is starting to flower and the plum has lots of happy flowers.

I did go out this morning and pull some weeds in front.  I also threw out some annual flower seeds.  I’m not holding my breath on those, but you never know.  They are last year seeds. I did plant some flower seeds in the pots in the back.  I also added some plant food to those pots.  I figured they could probably use the help. Now to see what will grow.

Well, today we finally got some rain.  Not a lot mind you, so far only .13 inches.  But the weather has been nice.  We had one night that was supposed to get down to mid 30’s, but only made a low of 41.  So we haven’t had a cold spell for a couple of weeks. 

So the garden is growing pretty well.  I did lose the tomato plant, but that appears to be all. The lemon trees have lost their leaves, and I’ve had to cut them back, but the branches look healthy so I’m hoping it will come back. 

The peas are growing well, the strawberry plant has flowers and baby strawberries growing, and the fruit trees are blooming.  Well, the apple trees are blooming and the plum tree is just getting a few blossoms.  The pear is getting buds, but no flowers yet.  The fig tree even looks like its coming back after the freeze.

Since its rained today I will do some more seed planting tomorrow.  The next 10 day forecast show no cold weather so I think seeds should be good to plant now.

What a lovely cold front.  We hit a low of 21 last night.  They had forecast a low of 26, but we hit that around 4-5 PM yesterday.  But this morning is lovely, and we’ve warmed up to all of 31degrees by 11:30 AM.  Tonight they are saying a low of 31 degrees with a 50% chance of rain/freezing rain.  And we’re supposed to hit a high of 47 today.  So it will be a roller coaster weather the next few days.

And again, no gardening for me.  Glad the plants are covered.

Just a side note, I’ve already had a few irises blooming, purple irises.

We had a lovely mid-70’s degree day yesterday.  Today it has dropped from 69 to 48 in about an hour, this morning.  And now we have rain.  Tonight it due for a cold low of about 29 degrees.  We had 80 degree weather just the other day.  The other day when we had the cold come thru I had covered the plants out back.  I had not uncovered them.  Now I’m glad I left them covered.

Weird weather.

I guess no gardening for me today.

Update:  Its 12:30 and it has dropped to 38 outside.  And we’ve now had 0.35 inches of rain.  Like I said, weird weather.

2nd update:  its 4pm and we have gotten down to 32.  Now they are saying a low of 26 for tonight.  Cold evening here tonight.

So much for our lovely warm weather.  The other day we woke to foggy weather.  Today we woke up to cold drizzly weather.  Cold has been 35 to 37 since 6 AM and its now 4 PM.  Drizzly, we’ve had enough rain to measure on the weather gauge, but we’ve only had .16 inches and its taken 4 hours to get that.  Its just been a damp cold web day.  But tonight we might get just below freezing, we may hit 31 tonight.

So this morning we jumped up and covered plants we could cover.  Did not do anything with the fruit trees.  For those, I’m just hoping for the best.  Tomorrow we should hit 61 and on Friday we should hit 76.  So its just one of those things – a short cold spell.  Don’t know if its the last one of the season or not.

Oh, and I have carrots, lettuce, radishes, and some pea plants popping out of the ground already.  That’s why we had to jump up this morning and cover them.  Don’t want to lose them.

We’ve had nice consistent weather lately.  Had some fog in the morning, just a day or so ago.  But it burned off by afternoon to nice mid 70 degree weather.  Today its 3:30 PM and a nice 75 degrees outside.  The 10 day forecast shows night low not lower than 41, with most nights between 45 and 54 so the nights are not so cold I have to cover anything.

We bought some more large pots for the garden.  They are large plastic half barrel pots.  I have transplanted two berry plants into two of them, put a fig tree (Celeste) in one, and put yukon gold potatoes in the fourth pot.  I have planted 10 more strawberry Sequoia plants in the square planter I used last year.  I did put more potting soil in it.  I also put in 3 asparagus plants (Jersey Giant) in a bed.

The radishes appear to be coming up already, they have leaves.  Some of the lettuce and the mesclun also are popping out of the ground with leaves too.  All in all, I’m hopeful for the coming year.

I’m going to wait until we hit March 1 to plant any more seeds.  By then we’re more likely to be past any frost, the soil will definitely have warmed and I can grid out one more planter.

I’m getting excited.