Changing of the Seasons

I pulled up all the black-eyed peas today along with quite a few weeds and some Mexican Heather that was amazingly well rooted. I planted 41 cloves of garlic evenly divided between Russian Red and plain old white from the grocery store. I still have several heads from this summer’s harvest, just haven’t done that much cooking around here. I felt bad pulling up the Mexican Heather since the bees have still been very active but there’s enough other plants blooming in the garden to make up for it. Plus I don’t have any plants for the fall that need pollination and the 3 heathers were taking up a good chunk of the main vegetable bed.

In place of the peas, I planted 5 rows of fava beans using seeds from last year. I have no idea if they’ll even germinate, they accidentally spent half the summer in the garage which can’t be any good for them. I didn’t get a harvest of fava beans this year as the unusually cold winter killed off all the plants. Hopefully, that doesn’t happen this year though they are such a pain in the neck to shell that I always wonder if it’s worth it. It’s easier getting the liver and the chianti than it is the fava beans.

I don’t plan on having any other fall/winter vegetables, didn’t get any of the cole crops planted in time. I may do a cover crop but will probably just mulch the beds. There are three fall tomato plants but they aren’t producing much of anything. The okra continues to put out 5-10 pods a day seems like which is a lot of okra for one man to eat. Also got 30 or 40 jalapenos yesterday with another 30-40 on the remaining plants. Guess I’ll have to do some canning soon.

We got 7/8ths of an inch of rain last night which is certainly a blessing. It looks like we’re going to get mostly missed by the front that is coming through though central Texas is getting a good chunk of rain and they’ve certainly needed it.

The hummingbirds seem to have migrated, I haven’t seen them in the back yard any. This summer, there were often 4-6 of them between my neighbor’s and my feeders. It was fun to watch them. I expect the goldfinches to show up soon. I left the thistle feeders out all summer, not sure if I’ll have to clean them out or not. Last year, I went through more than 40 pounds of nijer seed for the gold finches.