Time to begin again

Oh gosh, it's been a long time since I last wrote.

I wish I had something good to report regarding my veggie beds.  Through the end of August I got maybe a dozen tomatoes total, mostly due to lack of attention.  Two part time jobs and not of enough watering was too much for them to overcome. 

This is what I have now.

 

We had a hard freeze (26°) the week before Christmas and all the tomato plants froze.  There were actually 6-7 small tomatoes (about the size of Ping-Pong balls) on one plant that I forgot to pick.  Interesting that the Bermuda grass didn't freeze.

There was an okra plant in that white pot that I got about a dozen pods from.  I had no idea you could get over 60 seeds from one pod.  In the orange pot by the okra was my lone corn stalk from which I got one ear of corn.  It was only half developed but I saved the kernels. The black pot with the white stick had my bitter melon vine which produced three 'melons'.  I chop some of the melon (it looks like a very warty cucumber) and add it to my scrambled eggs along with some chopped sweet onion.  Yum!

On a positive note, the two little avocado trees that I had in pots seemed to have had no problem with the cold.  They were next to the brick planter on the front of the house which may have helped.  I have seven more avocado seeds that have just sprouted roots and stems - I'll pot those up next month, once they get a little bigger.

Lastly, in the white pot is a passion vine that my grandson planted.  There's still a little life in it since the freeze.  The large orange pot has the moringa tree sucker which sprouted up this year after the main trunk died.  The sucker froze. The small brown pot had a lantana plant that also froze.  The gray half-barrel has my blackberry vine and it did great.

I haven't written a New Year's Resolution list in a long while, but this year I think I should work on my short term goals list, specifically the gardening part.  It sure would make me feel better about raising most of my food once I'm on my little homestead if I could have some success now.  I did ok in 2015 with those indeterminate tomatoes and the cucumbers but I wasn't working at all back then. So, last month I let go one of the part time jobs and hopefully that will give me more time to dedicate to my gardens.  I won't have any outside jobs once I'm on my homestead, so I'll have no excuse then.

Until my next post, never give up, never surrender, and may all your dreams come true.