So, I am trying again with an expanded garden of herbs and vegetables this year, since I have a simply staggering number of good-sized pots and six medium-sized raised beds, of which I can only afford currently to fill three of them with that good growing soil … If I had known when I first moved into this house, what I now know, I’d have had the nasty clay-like topsoil stripped down to the caliche (about eighteen inches) and brought in a truckload of prime growing soil. Alas, I couldn’t afford something that drastic then, so I have made do ever since by growing the delicate stuff in the huge array of containers and planting tough natives or native-adapted in the ground. Honestly, I could make bricks very readily out of most of the dirt in my yard.

This last week Costco had bags of container soil available for a very reasonable price, so I’ll go back and get two more. I have a huge collection of garden seeds, and many of them are coming along very nicely. Some years I have had better results or better luck than others – this year, I hope that everything is aligning in my favor. The usual herbs – parsley, fennel, basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano and cilantro are doing pretty well, since I could shelter them during the very worst weather earlier in the year. With the teeny yard that I have, I hope to have enough fresh vegetables to have something fresh every day from the garden, for as long as the vegetables bear – I managed that feat the year that we were in Utah and had a large garden plot. And Texas is milder, weatherwise, than Utah…

As for vegetables in my current garden – one raised bed is full of various bean plants, and the other of potatoes, which won’t be ready to harvest until the green tops wither and die. I have a large pot with climbing pea plants in it, and last night we had some of the first fresh peas from it. Okra, tomatoes, various squash, cucumber, and peppers fill out the rest of the containers. But this week, since a client paid in full for a project, I took the plunge and bought a bigger, sturdier greenhouse to replace the small plastic one, which had disintegrated after a couple of years use. That greenhouse was a cheapie from Amazon; not only was the plastic cover shredded, but half the connectors had splintered as well. I looked around and found a suitable aluminum and polycarbonate panel greenhouse on Wayfair. It came today, in two boxes, and on two different trucks, since somehow the two got separated. The instructions, of course, were in the second box, which arrived about two hours after the first. The second driver was ransacking his truck, looking for the other box – was quite happy to hear that it had arrived already. So, that’s the project this week – putting it together will be like assembling a full-size Erector set – aluminum beams, polycarbonate panels, and about a kajillion nuts and bolts.  And I’ll have to re-site the paved path that leads to the back yard gate, as the greenhouse sticks out about six inches too far, and fit out the inside with paver blocks and gravel…

It’s not just that I need a greenhouse to propagate seedlings in a sheltered space so much, as I need it for those days and weeks when I have to move plants into shelter against the cold. With this greenhouse, I can run an extension cord from the house to power a small space heater, on those periods when it gets very, very cold, and skate through periods of bad weather without losing half of my plants. And that’s the project for this week and next.