North Texas Gardening - winter is 6 days away officially.

While in Chicago for Thanksgiving, Judy gave me some Day Lilies and Egyptian Walking Onions from her yard. The flowers of Day Lilies are edible and I wanted to be able to add them to garden salads next Spring. I refused to buy some simply because anyone who has them must thin them regularly. I don't know what color they are; never bothered to ask because I don't care. They sat forgotten, tightly packed in plastic bags until we had weather nice enough for me to want to go outside and plant them. Em feared our cold weather would kill them. :-)


I planted the Day Lilies at the edge of the asparagus patch. The entire East fence garden patch up to the beginning of the North fence garden patch is now perennial with this addition.

The Day Lilies butt up against the lettuce patch, which is getting really weedy while neglected due to weather, other activities, and just plain laziness.

Volunteers from Spring's lettuce are being left to grow in the grass. Em won't mow again until Summer of 2010 begins.

The hard freeze didn't affect the asparagus

but it did a number on the sweet potatoes

and
the rubber tree may not survive.

I'll be leaving both in place until Spring as an experiment to see if they'll resprout or not.

Broccoli and regular onion starts are doing fine, as is parsley. Fruit bushes (the few that lived from the 25 I bought last Spring did much better once I stopped weeding around them.


Kale still has a few meals left in it, and strawberries, mints, cilantro are all doing well amongst small weeds and fall refuge.


There will be a few more nice days this week (although not getting up to 70), so I'm hoping to get out and plant some turnips and onion seeds. I didn't "plant" the walking onion seeds, but more tossed them in the North fence garden with the other onions. One good rain will "plant" them, or I'll give them a little push this week when I get out there again.

Last step will be to gather some of the leaves from the front yard and mix them up in the back gardens, both as mulch and soil amendments.