Seedlings, no tag

These shorties sprouted from the pits of some exotic fruit eaten 3+ years ago. Cherimoya? Mamey? Sapotes? Canistel? Weeds? The tags are long gone.

Both seedlings were in a pot which was plundered by squirrels, haphazardly shifted around the garden whenever our construction site encroached, stowed in the dense shade of a tree and rarely watered, abandoned outside all winter, then repotted. It is amazing that they have survived my plant propagation 'technique'.

Maybe someone will recognize the leaves and if so, tell me please! I think it might be nice to know what I am growing.

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.