Food We Planted
- Seeded into flats:
- Cabbage
- Kohlrabi
- Rainbow Lacinato Kale !!!
- broccoli (green and PURPLE!)
- cauliflower (white and PURPLE!)
- Swiss Chard
I prefer to use flats that have 72 one inch compartments (pictured below). This keeps the amount of soil mix required to a minimum and just generally makes handling, watering, and shading easier.
I used SunGro Horticulture Propagation Mix from The Natural Gardener. It was the largest bag I could find and was a fraction of the cost of buying it in tiny little bags.
Food We Harvested
Harvest Summary
Total Harvested: 1.75 pounds
Total Market Value of August Harvests: $13.92
Food We Foraged
We did not forage any food this month. BUT! I DID see someone foraging nopales from our yard!! She knew what she was doing, too, and only selected the small, tender paddles. We don’t have a lot of tuna (those are the prickly pears, themselves), but there are a few that could be harvested.
Note: Market values are determined on current produce rates at Costco, HEB and/or Central Market, when possible, as those are the places we usually purchase produce. If a price was unavailable at those venues, prices may be referenced from other Austin-area grocery stores or farmers’ markets.
Food Growing in the Ground
- Tatume Squash – Healthy. Plantings from July are recovering from having their shade sloth removed and are blossoming.
- Waltham Butternut Squash – So, last month I gave up on the butternut and stopped watering it. I thought it was dead. But, it’s not! It lives! And, weirdly, it finally looks healthy. The squash vine borers are nowhere to be found!
- Corno di Toro Pepper – Stressed. I’m pulling this in order to make room to plant Brassicas in September.
- Little Mama Roma Tomato – Healthy. Shade has been removed and, while there are blossoms, still no sign of tomatoes.
- Purslane – Healthy.
- Garlic chives – Healthy.
- Thyme – Healthy.
- Oregano – Healthy.
- Sage – Healthy
- Lavender – Healthy.
- Fennel – Seed is ready for harvest. (Yeah, I’m never going to harvest the fennel seeds.)
- Lemon grass – Healthy
- Kale, curly – Healthy. When Hurricane Harvey dropped all that rain and the temperatures, the kale was resurrected, and we’ve harvested 2 pounds per week ever since. It’s tender, sweet, and aphid free!
- Lambs quarter – Gone to seed. Slowly cutting it down and soft mulching it into places where I would like ti to grow next year.
- Jujube – Healthy. Harvested about 1 pound of fruit from the uppermost branches of our southmost tree. The tree at the northwest corner of our lot did not produce this year.
- Fig – Healthy/stressed. Irrigating minimally.
Food Growing in Containers
- Thai (Kaffir) Lime – healthy
- Meyer Lemon – Healthy.
- Mandarin – We aren’t getting along. Anyone want a weirdly shaped mandarin tree that hasn’t produced any mandarins? We ran out of space to plant it in a good spot, and it clearly hates living in a container.
- Bay Laurel – Healthy
- Key Lime – Healthy. Producing many limes. The tree shape displeases me. Looking for resources to learn pruning and shaping techniques.
- Ghost Pepper – Healthy. I relocated its container and, in doing so, I ripped the root, which had grown out of the bottom of the container and into the ground. Oops. It was shocked for several weeks and dropped all its fruit. It’s still improving and will certainly live, but it will need to be in a secondary containment to keep that from happening again.
- Lemon grass – Healthy
- Garlic Chives – Healthy
- Basils: Thai, Holy, and Italian Sweet, all healthy and producing nicely! I’m still looking for a way to use Holy Basil. Tea, maybe? Let me know if you have suggestions!
- Locoto Pepper – Dearly departed. It’s super dead.
- Chocolate Habanero pepper – Healthy and flowering, no fruit yet.
- Tangerine Dream sweet pepper – Stressed/stunted/not producing.
Water Usage from 7/14 to 8/14
Notes about our water usage: We collect and use water from the air conditioner and rain events to reduce the need for metered water in the garden. We account for metered water usage using a hose-end water meter, like this one. We account for the amount of collected water by estimating 3 gallons per day for the air conditioner and manually counting buckets after a rain event (all estimates are based on our Super Technical 5-gallon Bucket Measurement Method) .
- Total Household Water Consumption: 4400 gallons
- Garden Water meter total: OOPS! The meter failed! No number this month. I’m pretty are this was a user error. Stay tuned.
- Collected water: 93 gallons (estimated at 3 gallons per day)
- Percentage of our total water consumption used for garden: 5.48% (Since our irrigation patterns were similar, I’ve used the number from last month)
- Compared to our neighbors: We used 18 fewer gallons of metered water than the average resident in our area.
August Expenses
- Water: $2.64 (Calculated as 6% of total water bill)
Hippie Christmas Miracles
I found our tables (pictured, top) on the curb once while I was on a jog around the neighborhood, and Mister helped me load them up and bring them home. The screens are from our windows that don’t open (we rent an old house). The PVC and bamboo that form a frame were Hippie Christmas finds (that means we found them on the curb). I’m pretty sure we bought the zip ties, though. #usewhatyouhave #buynothing
Thoughts on all that
As you can see, August was a slow month. I don’t grow much in the summer, due to the heat and because I have an aversion to nightshades, which make up the bulk of the typical summer garden.
This is the time in the garden that I spend cleaning up, pulling weeds, and adding compost to the beds in preparation for my favorite of all of the seasons: Fall. September is a busy time for planting and it’s best to start with the beds made, just like in regular life.
Do you have questions or concerns that you would like me to address in future posts? I’d love to hear from you. You can leave a comment here or contact me via Facebook or Instagram.
shirley
i have never heard of 3/4 of the items u grow, but really enjoy the pictures n recipes. would love to try a jujube apple. thanks for enlarging my vocabulary, which i have no doubt is mispronounced. toodles baby girl!
Lesley
I didn’t know of jujubes either, until a friend of our moved to a house with a jujube tree. They aren’t apples, but they sure resemble them! They produce in August, too, which earns them Texas summer street cred. So glad you are enjoying the posts!!!
shirley
in the beet n carrot soup recipe it says to chop the bay leaves. other recipes i have seen put the whole bay leaf in n then recommend u remove prior to serving. what flavor does the bay leaf add? individual preference regarding chopping or removal?
Lesley
Oops! Thanks for pointing that out. It’s fixed now. I never chop bay leaves and always remove them before the puree. The flavor is kind of a tangy, bright flavor, but they are impossible to chew. A little goes a long way with the bay leaves, too, particularly if you are using fresh – one or two should do it in most any dish. Bay laurel trees are easy to find in nurseries, too, and grow nicely in containers.
shirley
shocked that i even remembered that bay leaves are removed, and now i know why. i like this blog!