Year-Round Gardening

Lately a lot of folks have asked us how they can get started homesteading! Well, we’ve been living off the land for decades here in central Texas. So, I’m excited to share with those of you who are beginning homesteaders. Or, join in if you simply want to boost your green thumb for some patio tomatoes or herbs.

Local friends, I’m here to tell you that gardening in central Texas is year-round. Our climate is excellent for growing a wide range of crops every, single week of the year. We don’t ever have to stop, and our family literally grows a large percentage of the food we eat all year long. That’s great news! It’s a blessing to continually plant and harvest. And, while we can’t grow everything you might find in a grocery store produce section, through the years we have grown literally dozens of different varieties of fruits and veggies right here in our garden. So, I’ll start right where we are today on our homestead: finishing up our winter crops, enjoying early spring crops, and planting our summer crops. So much growing, so let’s dig in!

Click here to get our ultimate vegetable planting guide for central Texas. These are things we actually grow, and the easy to use guide tells you when to plant. If you live anywhere in McLennan, Hill, Bosque, Coryell, Hamilton, Bell, Limestone, and Falls counties in Texas, you can do this, too! And most gardening principles apply no matter where you live, so there’s something for everyone!

I took these pics yesterday. The first shows a row where we planted beet seed way back in January. Nothing came up for several weeks, so we assumed the seed was not viable. But the row was still weed free and ready, so we planted onion transplants in the same row. The little onions were immediately attacked by cutworms this year, but Houston started a regimen of weekly spraying with a biologic caterpillar control, bacillus thuringiensis. Bt naturally occurs in soil, but it is a specific toxin to certain immature stages of some insects. It is an excellent caterpillar control. To see how we use Bt, click here, https://amzn.to/3c1kBOm

After managing the cut worm issue, the onions continued to grow through some significant rainfall. We received over 17 inches of rain here at Pecan Bluff in the first 3 months of 2020. That’s over half our average annual rainfall, before the end of March! In the middle of all that crazy rain, we planted our potatoes. Potatoes need to go in the ground on Valentine’s Day, so we managed to get them planted about that time. The rain continued, and these potato rows stood in water off and on for several weeks, but didn’t rot. As soon as the green plants poked their heads up, we began adding mulch around the plants. This encourages the stems to lengthen, and ultimately produces more potatoes