Hello and Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog where I hope to entertain you and myself with a journal of my "backyard farm." I'm located in the historic city of San Augustine in deep East Texas, behind the Pine Tree Curtain on the old El Camino Real de Tejas, a 300-year old road first laid out by the Spanish when Texas was a colony of Spain. You can read more about San Augustine and El Camino Real by clicking on the link in the column on the right. There are also links to Christ Church, Episcopal, where I am the vicar.

Gardening in San Augustine is a joy. The rich red-brown soil is just the right mix of sandy loam which holds water well and won't clot when it's wet. You can work it after a rain without it gumming up on you. It will grow just about anything when there is enough rainfall, but it is also suitable for irrigation during the drier summer months.

Irrigating might get expensive, especially since the city sewer bill is determined by how much water you use; usually about half the water bill. But---I have my own well and water system so I can irrigate without paying for the sewer. Most of the houses in San Augusting have water wells because until the 1970s the city water was from a deep well and the water was too hard and alkaline to use for watering plants. It was sure death for azaleas. In th 70s San Augustine switched to a surface source from a newly constructed Town Lake, so now the city water won't kill your garden, but the water bill will kill your budget. Luckily my home water system still functions and I'm not dependent on city water for watering the garden.

I like to work at landscaping my yard as well as work in the garden and my home was recently chosen as "Yard of the Month" by the San Augustine Garden Club. I'm posting some pictures of the yard and flowers as well.

The picture at the top of the blog is the front of the house. The beds in front are red salvia with white azaleas behind. In front of the azaleas are a row of white begonia and in front of the begonias are ageratum alternating white and blue. It's geting too hot for begonias now and they're starting to look sun-burned. The red salvia blossoms fade rapidly too in the sun, but they'll be back looking vivid agian in September and last until frost in the fall. The ageratum is going great guns in spite of the heat. I had a little trouble with some kind of spider that withered a few of the ageratum, but I just pulled up the effected plants and put put them in the garbage and that seems to have stopped a full-scale infestation.

I put down a weed barrier webbing in the front flower bed for the first three feet from the foundation of the house then added another three feet, curved at each side and mulched the whole bed with pine-bark mulch, which is readily available in bulk from Pineville, a small community close by.
I scooped out a shell-shaped bed outside the back door which has an old nandeena I inherited as a foundation plant. I planted a Don Juan "leaning" rose--a rad variety that is my favorite rose next to the nandeena. In front of the nandeena and the rose, I planted three crook-necked yellow squash plants, which have turned out to be producing fools. I've already gathered and frozen 5 pounds of squash, plus I've had meals of of them non-stop for about a month. They're still producing althought the plants are showing their age.
I planted a lantanna in the center of the bed in front of the squash, which I have to hack back once a week to keep it from taking over. I bordered the bed with yellow marigolds with purple petunias behind the border, and planted some ageratum left over from the front bed in the apex of the triangle the bed makes with the driveway and the sidewalk from the back door. The petunias have just about given up in the heat so I pulled up some of the worse-off ones and planted four pepper plants; two small "button" purple ones and two others that are also small. The latter start off yellow and get fire-red as they ripen. Both the purple and yellow/red peppers are hot, hot, hot, and make wonderful pepper sause for purple-hull peas and speckled limas.
The garden patch in the back yard patch is about 10X15 feet and has a row of okra, two rows of green beans, one row of yellow wax beans, a row of black-eyed peas, a row of bell peppers with three sunflower plants at the far end, a row of four egg plants with a hill of yellow crook-neck squash at the end, and a final row of climbing speckled lima beans. I didn't get the garden in until fairly late in the season because I didn't get the ground tilled in time. I planted everything except the lima beans on June 14 and everything was up in less than a week. The picture of the patch was taken about two weeks after I planted it. The black-eyed peas literallly shot up in two days. The green beans are blooming and I expect to eat my first beans in about two weeks (probably raw while I'm in the garden weedig.) I didn't get the limas planted until July 3 because I didn't know when I boughtthe seed that they were the running kind and I had to wait until I had something for them to run on. I'll post some later picture of the garden when my new camera arrives. (My old one died and I've ordered a new one.) Because the growing season here usually runs through October, I'll have a good harvest of beans and okra probably as late as the first of November.
The last picture is a small flower bed that is visible from my breakfast room window. It's the first place I broke ground when I moved to this house last September. I had a dog-wood tree I'd been wagging around in a pot during the time I was living in a travel trailer while I was promoting my novel "A Perfect Peace." When I moved in here I planted the tree and finally got around to digging out a flower bed around it in March. The second picture is what the bed looked like in March. I planted pansies in the bed then, but when it got too hot for them, I pulled them out. I've got some coleus and marigolds in pots sitting in the bed, but I've also got four coleus in the ground and have planted zenia ("old maids") seeds, which will probably be up next week.