A big mess...

We had our first freeze a few weeks ago. Manperson and I heard these really loud sounds outside our bedroom window and thought there is no way they are playing baseball this early on a Saturday morning. We were correct. Our pecan tree had a massive small limb and leaf drop.  The back patio was covered as was anything within 5 to 10 feet with several inches of it. Starting to dislike the pecan tree even more. I know it serves a purpose in keeping the house cool in the summer, but this is the second major mess it is has created. The last time it was a pecan drop all over the patio and the pecans were too early and unhappy enough that is was just another big mess with no reward. Not that I eat pecans much anyway. I know that a lot of the early, sad pecan drop was the stress the tree has been under because of the long-standing drought conditions. But I don't care, the tree is now on my list of too much work. I don't think I will be planting any nut trees anytime soon and if I do they will be of the dwarf variety.

I also regret not pulling out all the tomato plants before it froze. I was just too taken with the tiny green tomatoes and the pretty yellow flowers. They all melted in the freeze which was exactly why I didn't bother planting any and created and particular ickyness in my raised beds. In the 4x4 bed, the sugar snap peas, nasturtium, swiss chard all didn't make it, on the other hand who knew salad greens were so frost hardy. I'm planning on my vacation from work to totally redo the 4x4 bed and start some new salad greens. Apparently, one can plant them and spinach all through the winter months. I haven't even been watering my ollas. The last time was just before it froze to make sure they didn't break. In the 4x8 bed, the volunteer tomato plants were yet again a pain, along with it's closeness to the pecan tree. I don't know how much time I will need to spend removing leaves from my veggies.  The other unexpected painful plant was the dill, it didn't exactly melt, just keeled over, but greenly still I think I will keep it confined next time. I realized finally that the mystery plant that I have been trying to figure out in the middle of my 4x8 raised bed is not something I planted. On the good front, the cabbage lopers liked it enough to leave some of my other plants alone. On the bad front, they kept other stuff I planted from growing. I'm pulling them all up when I clean up the 4x8 bed. I got one more green harvest out the 4x8 bed with some really tasty rapini. The cauliflower bud does not look happy after the freeze, I think any cauliflower I plant again will either need to be done early or protected from freezes. The hardy greens i.e. kale, collards and mustards as well as the tsoi tsoi, rapini and what is left of the broccoli all made it through just fine. Yay, brassicas, mostly hardy. I have some small broccoli shoots that are growing and hopefully will make it through subsequent freezes. 

I will write more postmortem gardening sum-up  during the winter break including all the new plants I planted in early november, pictures, and future plans.

Updates...

Check out how tall one kind of sugar/snow pea has grown and it is even larger since I took this picture. I'm probably going to totally redo this raised bed for the next growing season since except for the swiss chard and salad greens it mostly produced stuff that I wasn't interested in eating or things that I didn't plant, but are turning out to be plants that I've planned for next summer and new raised beds that I'm going to convince manperson to build. Manperson has his own growing project though. He plans on growing cigar plants and making his own cigars (ambitious, indeed).

Here is a close-up of one of my sugar snap pea plants that is producing what looks and tastes more like snow peas. I really need to read up on these plants since I have more seeds waiting to planting for the next growing season and no idea what went wrong...

I still have no idea what is in the center of this raised bed except that it is painful to touch and the cabbage lopers and snails love it enough to mostly leave my other vegetables except the cauliflower alone. The cauliflower is coming back though after having been mostly decimated and I hope to have a picture of my pretty white cauliflower bud soon.

The big single broccoli plant here seen right after a rain, seems to be one that may not develop side shoots. I heard that I could eat the rest of the plant including the leaves. I'm going to give it two weeks to see if some side shoots develop then try to eat broccoli leaves.

The two broccoli plants that are together promise more broccoli later, there are already side shoots developing...

Here is the most snow peas/sugar snap peas, I've been able to harvest at one time. They are laying mostly on mustard greens and a few swiss chard (gotta plant more swiss chard next time, my 1 plant has been really prolific).

Here are the broccoli finally ready to be cooked and eaten on a bed of mostly collards with a few kale leaves mixed in and 1 mustard green leaf.

A few posts ago, I put a yellow mystery flower on my blog. The "Manperson's" friend D said the plant was a tomato plant, but I didn't plant any tomato plants. I went through all my seeds hoping one of them would explain these plants that were overtaking my raised beds and also popping up in other places in my backyard. I had 12-13 of them just in the raised beds. I recently pulled out two so that my lettuces and spinach had a little more room. I also pulled up some nasturtium which never flowered which was taking room from plants I'm actually willing to eat. It turns out that D was right. I have tomato plants. I didn't plant them so they were either in the soil or birds brought them, who knows. I now have a few with little green tomatoes. It will interesting to see what happens since we are hitting cold season. I wanted to plant tomato plants, but this is not tomato season in Austin according to my planting guides...

Stats so far...

6 salad green meals (3 each for the man and I), and 1 big meal with in-laws

7 baskets of kale, collards, mustard green, red swiss chard, and some random other brassica type greens that I'm not sure of type/name mix

Maybe 2 handfuls of snow peas & sugar snap peas

3 broccoli heads and more on the way

Some of my backyard experiments have failed. I stuck foil around one of my leaf/tree limb compost areas. It made the ligustrum that I thought was dead grow back fairly vigorously, arg! At least the other ligustrum stumps haven't vigorously sprouted again. All in all, I'm super happy with my backyard right now. I used to hate going back there and now I'm sad when it is too dark to really visit with my plants...

Eventually, I will have an update on all the new plants in the backyard. My fabulous mother-in-law took me plant shopping for my recent turkey birthday.