Warming weather, blue skies, temps around 70F and up. Looks like spring is almost here. Tearing out the winter garden in bits. If it looks like it might bear a bit longer we let it live. Eggplants are gone, one sweet chili left with at least two fruit on it. Lots of chard, spinach, mesclun mix, beets and other greens to harvest. Will do our best for those.
Soon we will be going to our favorite garden store and picking up tomatoes, eggplant, sweet chiles, etc. Black crowder peas came in yesterday from Victory Seeds, will plant those along the back fence with string to climb. Have seeds for green beans and everything else we will plant.
The kumquat tree still has about a dozen fruit on it that will be picked tomorrow. We make a tossed salad with sliced kumquat fruit mixed in that is very tasty. Fig and pear trees are starting to put on buds. Need to prune the pear tree, to many "rain" limbs on that one. Won't take long to lop them off and set the limbs aside for possible smoking meat later in the year. We're hoping to get at least a small crop of the Tenousi pears, a mix of European and Asian pears that is supposed to be tasty. Tenousi is self pollinating according to the ag agent.
The blueberries are starting to put on buds too, seems the Christmas tree limbs we laid around the bushes are helping as they slowly turn into a nice mulch. Need to find a place to rake up a bushel or two of pine needles to help with the blueberries, they need the acid of those plants.
We've been getting some days up into the mid-seventies that make me happy. I could not survive somewhere it gets cold and stays that way for months. I guess it is because the USN ship I was on in '58-'59 was always poking around the Atlantic ice shield looking for Russian subs. Never found one but it was always cold on the bridge, my duty station. I reckon we Texans from SE Texas just never adapt to cold. I was 18 years old before I ever saw snow and that wasn't in Texas.
George