Since we moved, I haven't been very dedicated to our gardening. Part of this is we haven't made new garden beds yet and are limited to pots. Part of it is that I knew we were going out of town several times, and didn't want to have unestablished plants that needed extra care. Even so, many of the plants we have are growing well, I think because this spring is so much milder than last spring.
Our chard is doing well though I need to transplant it. And see that oregano? Yep, it's the same plant as last year. Also could probably need a bigger pot, which means we need to get more big pots. We also have basil and parsley from last year, although I desperately need to plant more. One bonus of our new house is it came with a huge rosemary bush! Rosemary is actually a perennial in Texas.
Also from last year is this ornamental pepper. Man these are spicy! We haven't actually used them for much but you would only need a few to add a lot of spice. It's a heirloom so I can get you seeds if you want. Each pepper is only about 1/2" long. The green ones were just put on, the red ones have mostly dried out, and you can see it has flowers so it's going to be putting on more soon.
This is one of our orange trees. Even though they are small, they have a few oranges growing! They smelled so great when they flowered around March. Mostly these oranges are an investment for future fruit though, after the trees get larger. Same goes for the blackberries we planted this winter.
In spite of giving our regular size peppers zero care, they have also been producing. I think they might do better in the pots than when we had them in our raised bed. We planted sweet and spicy banana peppers, and spicy mariachi peppers. Still waiting for our tomatoes to ripen and cucumbers to grow (I think the squirrels may have snagged ripe tomatoes while we were out of town).
This is a peaberry, also native. You can't see it well in the picture, but it has small cones of pink flowers. The great thing about most Texas native plants is that they only need watering once a month (and most of the time it rains enough that we do not need to water at all). The only problem we're having right now is lots of weeds are coming up through the gravel so I've been pulling them up...maybe we will have to put down the weed blocking cloths eventually underneath the gravel, but this will be a monumental task to do...other ideas are appreciated (we do not use herbicides).
