Lesson learned – in Houston, plant your broccoli really early! Apparently it starts to flower quickly if forced to mature at temperatures above 80F (thank you Aggie Horticulture Website), and it’s been just over 80 during the days for the past week or so in Houston.
Here’s what the broccoli looks like now:
Next year I’ll have to plant it when it’s actually still chilly outside!
I’m having so much fun checking the garden every other day or so to see how much it’s grown! Here are some new pictures!
My roma tomato plant has a small flower, which means that I should have a tomato soon!
And, in case you’re wondering, everything I learned from gardening came from my dad, whose garden seriously puts mine to shame!
With all the basil I’m growing, I’ve been looking for some good recipes so that I can use it – we can only eat so much pesto chicken and pasta!
I love hummus, and I have a wonderful new food processor, so I decided to try some pesto hummus. I started off with this recipe from allrecipes.com, but it seemed to be missing something. So, I decided to start modifying it, tasting it after every addition until I was happy with the outcome.
I ended up adding extra basil (probably about a cup total), a lot of extra olive oil (didn’t measure, but keep adding until you have a smooth consistency), two extra cloves of garlic, about 1/8 cup of pine nuts and shaved parmesan, and probably 1/2 tsp of salt and lemon juice.
It’s been at least a week since all of my garden has been planted. I put the broccoli and lettuce in about 3 weeks ago, the broccoli is actually growing! This is what it looked like today:
I also planted the cucumber seeds about 2 weeks ago, and I discovered that I have seedlings! I was worried most about these, because I haven’t had good luck in the past growing herbs from seeds.
I can’t wait until I can actually eat something from the garden!
Historically, I have always had somewhat of a brown thumb. Plants and I have not gotten along well. However, my dad is wonderful at gardening, and I have grown up eating freshly grown vegetables. Now that we have a house and a yard, I really wanted to grow my own garden.
Over Christmas, Jake and my dad built me a nice little 4′x8′ raised garden. Now that it’s mostly warm in Houston, I got to planting. I decided this year to try broccoli, romaine lettuce, cucumbers, and a few varieties of peppers (bell and jalapeno) and tomatoes (better boy, roma, and grape or sweet 100, TBD). It seems that everybody else decided to plant gardens this weekend too, because the tomato options were limited. I found out that the Bonnie man delivers to Lowe’s on Thursday, so I’ll have to to go back then for my small tomato variety.
So, here’s what I’ve got so far:
If you click on the picture, you can see hover over the notes to see what I’ve planted. If you don’t want to, I’m going to explain it anyway.
The taller stuff is in the back row so that it doesn’t block the sun from the front row plants (I’m told this is important). On the left I’ve planted some cucumber seeds that will grow up each of the 3 vertical poles in the tomato cage (hopefully – I was too lazy/cheap to get a better system, and I couldn’t pull apart the bigger cages).
To the right of the cucumbers are my tomatoes – better boy, roma, and then small TBD.
In the front row are bell peppers and jalapeno peppers in the cages, then romaine lettuce and broccoli. I actually planted the lettuce and broccoli last weekend, and they’ll supposedly be finished harvesting pretty early, so maybe I can put something else in there later?
I’ll try to post updates as I hopefully keep these plants alive and grow some food. And if I am successful, I’m going to need some good salsa and pico de gallo recipes.
I’ve also got some herbs growing – in one planter I’ve got cilantro, rosemary, and parsley. In the other, 3 basil plants:
The basil was starting to get a little big, so I actually used this recipe and the food processor I got for Christmas to make some pesto.
Jake and I are living in a house for the first time on our own, and we’re learning a lot.
Just today, I learned that wind knocks down big heavy tree branches, and the garbage man will not pick those up:
I also learned that the hot and cold water can be reversed on the washing machine, so when you really want a cold rinse, you get hot, and vice versa. Have not quite tacked fixing that one, but am settling for warm.
Stay tuned…
