This will be my first year going 
a friend recommended it with great praise and the warning “be prepared for granny elbow. The grannies can be vicious!”
I love how many varieties of basil they have. And the tent layouts are funny. I feel like I’m preparing for a battle.
I realized that i’ll be in Houston that saturday. Bummer but at least i know it’s there 
Yep, every spring right around the first weekend of march
Plant sale was madness! They were very well organized but hundreds of people. Apparently I needed to be there at 7:30 to be near the front of the line. We arrived at about 8:30 (opened at 9) and we’re at least 150 back in the line
But what beautiful plants!
We found most of what we wanted. The Brazilian Starfish peppers apparently went really quickly. My friend who was there at 7:30 didn’t even get one. Shiso was gone too. We got
African blue basil: the best basil! Not as sweet as a Genovese or other Italian, it’s a culinary workhorse. Great in sauces, mixed drinks, and on pizza. Good sub for Thai basil. Doesn’t change taste when the flowers bloom! So you can enjoy it for cooking while the bees go nuts for the flowers. We’ve had hundreds of bees at a time before. It grows in a pot out front with drip irrigation from spring to early December
Amethyst Improved Basil: this is a new one for us. It’ll go in a pot near the raised bed.
Parsley Giant of Italy
A chive nelly because it looked cute
Eva Purple Ball. Smallish tomato supposed to grow well here. A new one and second choice tomato. I really wanted the Bloody Butcher, but they didn’t survive the recent frost.
Tasmanian Black hybrid pepper. New one for us. Supposed to be hybrid between habanero and tasmanian black. Supposed to ripen to purple and have a sweet fruity flavor with 30k to 70k SHU. Mostly for my spouse- I’ll have issues with that heat
Shishito: these grew well for us and were delicious in everything from stir fry to fajitas. Great pickled
Ubatuba Cambuchi. A Brazilian sweet pepper. I wanted Mad Hatters but cannot find them (probably need to order seeds online). This one seems similar, sweet with a little heat. They should be just as cute as the Mad Hatter
Lesya pepper. Impulse buy since we couldn’t get the Brazilian Starfish. Ukrainian sweet pepper. New to us. Shaped like a heart
We plan on some string beans, carrots, a chocolate mint (in a pot!!), and just a few strawberries.
Sigh. Cat helped me post before I was ready.
Nonfood plants
Milkweed tropical (I cut down in September)
Milkweed Pleusry
Catnip (easily grown from seed but it was $3 and supports the garden)
do let us know how this one comes out! it sounds very interesting and one that i would really like to try.
i shall keep an eye out for that variety.
All the new friends are in their respective places. Fenced in the parsley and peppers. Maybe they will be too much trouble for the rabbits to bother with?
When we tested the drip irrigation to find all the lines the rabbits chewed over the winter, we discovered a pipe break in the middle of the yard. It’s only leaking when we run the irrigation system, which is good. But it leaks regardless of which valves we use. No drip in front or back untill we can get it fixed. Husband doesn’t feel competent to do it, there are wires along the pipe.
But turns out we know a guy! Husband of my sort-of cousin. I asked her if she knew someone and she was tickled I’d forgotten about her hubs. He is a very quiet and introverted guy, so I’ve always tried to respect that when we’ve been in proximity.
He’ll be by Tuesday to check it out. Based on our description he thinks it’ll be $125. Just need to make sure that is the actual price and not the my-wife-said-I-should-give-you-a-discount. She’s a fierce lady, but work deserves fair compensation.
Spent the afternoon getting garden stuff organized to start getting seeds started. I just got the lettuces started and called it a day. At least I got something done.
just cut these down:
that’s a whole buncha 'nanners.
wonder if i can trade for some eggs?
Soooo… Jealous…
I like to write down the plant placement and varieties for the raised bed. Silly that I have trouble keeping track of such a modest area 
I had to modify my map
A rabbit decided to make her nest in our raised bed. There are babies. I thought a clump of grass from a nearby pile had gotten caught on the edge of the bed but when I moved it:
I put it back as best I could. Added a bit more dead grass, it was a bit chilly, washed my hands very thoroughly, and then went to look up how long it takes before they leave. Probably 3 weeks. Checked today and the extra grass was gone and some more fur stuck out, so mom-bunny has probably been back.
I swear that damned thing wasn’t there Sunday but the baby buns do not look newborn. I planted the new parsley not 2 feet away (I moved it today, cage and all). We’ve been messing about in that bed since Thursday. I was poking holes to check for fire ants.
When they’ve gone, we will have to remove the dirt from that end of the bed and discard it or use it somewhere there won’t be food crops and it can be covered over. Wild buns can carry Tularemia. It can last 6 months in the soil. I’m fine with buns brushing by our stuff, but a nest seems like a lot.
I feel very guilty for disturbing the nest. Which is in my raised garden bed, 30 inches off the ground.
Don’t. You don’t have x-ray eyes.
And if you did, you would have fried them.
When I was gardening in the Texas droughts, I found that if I left bowls of water out for the chewing animals (rodents, rabbits, raccoons, opossums, et al.), I’d get less chewing on my irrigation lines.
It’s certainly less work for the animals to just drink out of a bowl.
I used metal (not plastic) and I tried to clean the bowls daily by dumping any remaining water out (on a plant) in the morning, letting the sun dry it out, heat it up, irradiate it, all day. Then fill the water bowl(s) near sundown, and leave them out all night. This way, I tried to keep disease vectors (from the shared water supply) to a minimum. That Texas sun sure is strong!
In other news, I found this article and definitely have found my own meager efforts raising food to be pretty exhausting…
I definitely do not miss this phenomenon in my current home area.
Snow multiple times this year, not loving the cold… but hey no fire ants.
We have ceramic bowls that get overfilled multiple times over by the drip irrigation every time it runs. We are not diligent about emptying them/cleaning them 
they tend tend to dry out and bake in the sun for about 8 hours before the next round of drip refills them
The overfill waters the plants near by and a reliable bit of mud a few times a week for the solitary bees.
I need to give the Rose that Might be a Kaiju another drip line. I moved that bowl. Keeping an eye on local bird flu. We’ll have to stop the water entirely.
The baby buns didn’t make it. We put out the little trail cam to try and see if Mom was coming by and she was. But a cat found them. Probably the local Houdini, Oreo. 
We haven’t told the kid. But if she asks, we’ll tell the truth and explain that nature is ruthless and also cats don’t belong outside. They aren’t part of the ecosystem.
I over-boiled my syrup. After canning it, a whole bunch of sugar fell out of solution. I now need to decide if I’m going to:
A) pour it all back into the boiler, add some water, and reintegrate the sugar
B) pour each jar over a coffee filter to remove the excess sugar from the jars and store it for other purposes
C) leave it as is and know that each jar comes with a bonus of between 1/2 and 1 cup of maple sugar in the bottom
If I were selling this batch, it would have to be A. But I didn’t draw enough sap to bother selling this year so I’ve got about a gallon total of syrup to distribute as gifts. I’ll maybe go for B and make some maple scones or something of that sort with the filtered sugar.
When you’re boiling do you eyeball the sugar content or measure the brix/gravity throughout the process? Just curious.
I’ve traditionally eyeballed it and had always erred on the side of too much water, making for a less viscous syrup. This is the first year I’ve used a hydrometer and the first time I’ve overshot like this. I think I focused too much on getting right to the correct reading and didn’t trust my own instincts.
ETA: I should also note this is the first year I used a professional evaporator pan, rather than my homemade cludge job. I may have been seeing some heat transfer differences compared to years past, and that could’ve contributed to something unexpected happening as well.
D) and only if this will work; I am not familiar with this kind of kitchen-chemistry:
