Holiday greetings, late and early

In the long silence since I wrote about the surprise incidence of snow, perhaps you are wondering if the frozen plant trauma required a little stay for rest and medication? Not this time. As amazing as having water freeze outside all by itself is the fact that none of the tropical plants suffered, even though some snow stuck around til morning.

I'm blog lazy, but busy otherwise, gardening and holiday-making. I've sent out Christmas cards a mere two days after Christmas this year. It's no good considering them generalized holiday greetings, current til about mid-January, as they specifically reference Christmas in the pre-printed message inside. What's a Buddhist sending Christmas cards for, anyway? Well, that was to be addressed (heh) in an off-topic blog entry called How a Buddhist Decorates for Christmas. I'll sit on that for next year.

In the event that I continue this internet indolence past 2008, I'll say it now: May the New Year be wonderful, lush, fruitful, and muddy!

[sound of cork popping]

Grape leaf in dry grass

An Idea Becomes a Houston Garden Blog

The genesis of this blog came about this way: I went to check on my pears, which were hanging there looking an unripe green. Dang if there wasn’t a hole in one where something had recently gnawed. My greed and competition kicked in and I picked all the pears right then. Actually, the whole crop amounted to 7 pears, since ‘Spalding’ has only been in the ground a year. This also explains why I didn’t know what a ripe pear off this tree was going to look like.

I didn’t know what it would taste like, either, but I can tell you now that a Spalding pear is a marvelous crunchy Asian pear with a European pear shape. While I polished off one still warm from the sun, I thought: How am I going to remember when to pick these pears next year? Gardeners used to keep logs of when and how things were planted, treated, harvested. Maybe I should get one going.

Well, you can see what happened to that line of thought. I arrived at the idea of a blog, but believe me, I am not going to write a farmer’s almanac for Houston here. See Urban Harvest for that. I will not give you my garden’s to do list. I promise I will not tell you about the Houston weather either (At any given moment you like or dislike it—so what?) Instead, I will offer you what seems like the most engaging of my many garden-related lines of thought. I hope that you will enjoy and be even inspired by them.