It’s only taken 3 years (gardening means patience, remember?), but, at last, our Darrow blackberry vines are bursting into flower. When we planted them originally, they were bare-root and nearly bare-leaf tiny little things. I think we got one blackberry last year, but things are really showing promise now.
This flourishing has inspired me so much that I purchased 4 more blackberry plants — Natchez thornless this time — in hopes they will weave their way through our new fences. Check in with me on those in 3 more years!
But blackberries aren’t the only things happening in the garden this year. The most recent to debut are some blue potatoes — not exactly what I ordered from Johnson’s Backyard Garden but I guess I’ll take them.
When we lived in California and had a food waste collection bin as well as the ones for recycling and trash, we’d regularly find potatoes growing in the bin. They just couldn’t help themselves and had no clue they’d been discarded. Potatoes don’t like Central Texas nearly as much as California, but these responded pretty darned well even though I left them outside for weeks and casually buried them about a week ago.
In these last two pics, you get a good picture of what’s been going on around here in the last couple of weeks — it has been raining! You may have heard news about the devastating flooding in Houston. Well, we’re getting a bit of that ourselves, though not to the same degree, before it heads East to the Bayou City. Hence the muddy leaves that have been splashed by rain pounding into the soil.
Adjacent to these sprouting potatoes, we’ve got some baby rainbow chard and… watermelons!
And the piece de resistance of any vegetable garden — the tomatoes. Right now, our little Sun Gold cherries are coming along nicely, but the larger ones are just beginning to flower. I’m all ready, though, as you can see by the new tomato cages and other supports that I’ve put in place.
You’ll see by these photos that I’ve got some irrigation stuff going this year — FINALLY — which I’m writing about in a separate post. So stay tuned!
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