Cat's Garden in Austin, TX

I made it out to the yard today. Its been gloomy, wet, with patches of blue sky, and no rain. So here is how the garden is doing. We have little apples.       We have artichokes growing, but no nothing to harvest yet   Meet the swiss chard. The peach tree has blossoms. The meyer lemon has flowers. The potato plants are in cages. Thought that might be safest. A little green friend with the grape plant. The blueberries are growing. I hope they ripen. And some of the cutting from the trees are taking root. Don't ask me how, but its happening. We may end up with more trees. And yes, I put tags on them so I know what is what. Hopefully those tags stay put.

The good news - we've had a slow light rain for almost two days. We have had times of no rain, but its been wet and gloomy out there. We have barely made it to 60 degrees. Hopefully if it lets up I will go out and take some pictures of the trees and plants. But they are saying more rain for the next day or so. We'll see. But we can use the moisture. No argument there.

I've decided to begin making some changes to the site. Nothing to major, but you will notice some links on the right hand side. I don't make money off this site and I don't intend to. So if you click a link, I don't make anything off it. Those links are to sites I use (the gardening links) and sites I visit (fashion sites). More sites will be added eventually.

The garden is starting to come together nicely. I recently signed up for The Old Farmer's Almanac Garden Planner. They send out emails with Your Personalized Planting Reminders telling you when to plant seed or sow indoors. I figured I would give it a try and see if I have better luck with my garden. Its nice because they seem to send out emails only weekly or every two weeks. So you don't get a lot of emails, but they are very time sensitive. So when you get them, they are do now kind of information. So we'll see how it goes. Following TOFAGP Pat and I have put in a lot of seed. We've already got tomatoes in the ground, peas, beans, more asparagus, more strawberries, collard greens, swiss chard, and we even got corn in already.  We'll see how they do. Another thing that has happened is the apple trees have fruit. We have lots of little apples on the trees. We transplanted the stupid plum (it needs a new name - maybe survivor?) to the area with the other fruit t...

A lot has happened. Jan 12th my dear significant other had a quadruple bypass. This was totally unexpected. Nobody may expect the Spanish inquisition (thank you Monty Python), and we didn't expect this. So far he is doing well. Surgery went well, he's been home healing, we were able to get a friend to come help (well worth the money) and he's even in cardiac rehab. Such a relief. But he's still healing, still can't lift over 5 lbs, and sometimes get exhausted easily. But he's doing better and that's what matters. Consequently, the yard has taken a bit of a back seat. But fear not we have not forsaken the garden. We did get a new walk path put in. To give you an idea how unexpected SO surgery was we had planned for the walk path to be started the day he landed in surgery. But we had a landscaper do the work and it came out great. I have high praise for Abey and his group (Austin Creative Landscaping). They've been working in this yard since we bou...

We got hail.  Not sure where it came from, but it came.   Its actually still sitting in mounds in the dark. Kind of strange weather we're having.

Okay, it got cold again. As in yesterday it was in the 70's. Today mid afternoon, after 4 and it's only 39 degrees. Oh, and we just had rain and hail. At least it was short lived. This morning around 8am we had one of those cold fronts come through, and we got rain. Then again around 11 we got more rain. Between the two we got just over an inch of rain. The wind has been blowing since last night. The strongest wind gust was 29 mph. But we're not done with the cold yet. We have cold weather for the next week.  He ten day forecast shows nights around, just above and just below freezing. At least we're better off than the Dallas area.  They got tornados. About 8 people are dead from those tornados. I guess we'll just take the rain and cold. Though the east coast has had unseasonably warm weather.  Not much you can do about the weather. And our current weather patterns attest to that. Funny note.  Christmas Day Las Vegas got a smattering of snow. Wonder what the odd...