Gardening in Houston

Now that we have full time jobs, a house, and a dog, there is less time to go around. Here is a little bit of productivity we have managed outside of the office:



Our backyard. Nishadi gets full credit for the pink bougainvillea flowers and sturdy stands. She gets all the credit in part because they have thorns and I strongly dislike thorns.

Red Silk Pomegranate tree/bush. Hopefully this will bear fruit eventually. It does not have any fruit right now and I'm not sure how old it is supposed to be before it is supposed to start growing actual pomegranates.

Tangerine tree. I've brutally ripped off most of the baby tangerines, because supposably it helps the tree focus on growing roots. That wasn't much fun but hopefully it proves worthwhile. I did leave  a few though, I couldn't help it.

Planting everything I hope I have done more work than necessary. I dug out like a 5 or 6 foot radius (wide and deep! I hate the Houston clay!) for each tree, and created a mixture of native soil, my own compost, and purchased compost and azalea soil. Then make sure it is on raised ground when you fill in the dirt around the root ball, and cover it with mulch.

Mostly I'll learn from trial and error, but the resources I've used for research so far:
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/
Neil Sperry's website and book
http://thebellhouse.weebly.com/ and specifically this post

Our berry bed. I built a trellis for blackberries to grow on. Hope it doesn't kill them off. There are two bushes under there. On the left is the arapaho bush, which as far as I can tell only has one branch still alive. The right bush is the Ouachita, which you can barely see one of its white flowers blooming there.

I'm really hopeful for them because I held off on blackberries because of the thorns - but these two varieties don't have thorns! The downside is they probably need more cold winter than Houston usually provides, so I'm guessing they only grew well for the local nursery because of this last abnormal winter, and they will soon die off.

The bushes outside the trellis are blue berries. The tiff blueberries is the tall bush on the left, and the brightwell berries are on the low bush on the right.

It's easy to see the flowers here, (I don't remember what kind, they are annuals of Nishadi's choice) but it's difficult to see the strawberries. There are a few Everbearing by the tall Tiff blueberrry bush, and a few chandler in between the trellis and the brightwell berries. I've heard to expect these strawberies to die in Texas heat without several precautions that I dismissed by planting as seen here.

Next time you visit will hopefully be in season for some harvesting! We've already had some of the blueberries from thees bushes, but those formed before planting this last weekend, so it doesn't really count as much.

I keep repeating the word "hopefully" because I haven't really done this before. I don't want to get too attached to growing my own food, however meager, so in my mind they will all be dead by winter. On the other hand, if they succeed, I want to try growing from seed and other harder things.

Bella for scale, before we bought brick

Some Ouachita seem to be doing well.
We haven't tried any yet, do you think that one is ready?