Alright this is just a place to come in and chat here about Texas Gardening - anything about gardening!! I will try to add a new thread every week!! So someone tell me what are you up to and how does your garden grow?
Sit A Spell
I'm freezing right now. Had to turn the heat on earlier today, it's going to be in the 40's tonight!
I reworked two long beds outside the back fence this weekend, hope they don't mind the chilly weather after being moved around.
We shredded all the plants that I cut from the backyard garden Sunday afternoon.
I used the shredded materials as mulch on the vegetable garden.
It is all nicely tucked in now, waiting for Spring.
Well lets see, the only thing I am up too right now is wishing that whole "global warming" thing would kick in so I could cut the heater off. Its 38 deg. outside and I was not made for this.....
Kat
Well 38 or not I have decided no heater unless DGDs are here. The electric is a killer. So far we have burned the fireplace one time. I can't carry in the wood so I just go without when DH is at work.
Tomorrow warmer again....
I hate this cold weather - my big thing this this week is a huge over haul of my pond - going from a fish shape to a circle shape! That is going to be a mess but I will post some pics on here about how it looks when done (I hope it looks good in the end!!)
I'm working on a new raised bed by my back door. It's going to be for milkweeds. It got down just to freezing last night...the last one was worse, had 29 degrees last week. I just hope the wind is gone. Hate that! I haven't decided about starting seeds in pots. This drought makes it really hard to keep new plants alive.
Linda
I need to get more milkweeds in the garden... one of these days! I planted out a lot of seeds for wildflowers so I hope they really take off this year!!
I got a pretty good start on a new iris bed:
cardboard, metal edging, enough soil for 1/3 of it
(man, it takes a lot of soil to make a new bed!)
Stopped by Long John Silver's & fished (get it? snork!) a bunch of cardboard out of their dumpster to make a pathway near the iris bed.
I played with my new chipper/shredder today! It was a great feeling to know that not all of the bird-dropping trees would end up in the landfill. I now have a tiny pile of wood chips that are headed to the compost bin.
sit.....wish I had time to sit! Back in the "overtime grind" got house taxes and a new air conditioner to pay for...
I do, however,have some lovely rudbeckia and tomato seedlings underlights in my garage. You can see by the pic that I've been so busy that its easier to put trays on top of trays than to adjust the chains on the lights! lol I have simply GOT to find time to do that. Now this weekend I'll need to start zinnias and peppers.
What a pitiful but highly effective little "set-up" it is!
Here's a close up of the first batch of plants (these were started 1/7/06)
Now where's my mountain dew? I need some caffeine to do about 4 more hours of work so I can get up at 5 am and start all over again!
I am soooo looking forward to the arbor gate on the 29th!
Debbie
A new Iris bed - that is going to look great. I am fighting with the new pond - it is going to be smaller but a soild form so the dog will stop tear holes I have to fix all the time (I am just tooooo cheap to buy the thick liner!).
Sylvia - where did/do you get your dirt around here and about what do you pay for it? I need to get way tooooo much dirt for spring but I have no idea where to start and dont want to do the hauling 1000 bags home depot again (alright not 1000 but 200 and it took forever!)
Its warmer !!!! and I am not running the heater...Happy Happy Joy Joy!!!!!!
Hey everyone in the Harris/Montgomery/Fort Bend County Areas. Just an FYI if you have CenterPoint as your Gas Co....CHECK YOUR BILLS AND READ YOUR METERS!!!!!!
Mine went from 42.00 in Nov. to 191.00 in Dec. and 2 people I work with showed me there's.....over 200.00 dollar increase. When CP was called on the bills their execuse was that "They read the meters wrong". My bill said that we were averg. 5.2 ccf per day, however after reviewing the meter and there math it seems that we are averg. 2.2 ccf per day.
Yeah, ours went from $38.76 last month to $239.80 this month. :-( We didn't think of checking our meter.. I'll go do that now if I can figure out where it is. Did they drop your bill when you called?
Whoa - I'm from h-town but all electric. That stinks!!! Good luck with your bills.
I'm working on repotting all the mark-downs I've gotten. I can't believe how many wonderful plants I've gotten that they had marked down to 50 or 75 cents to get rid of.
Also working on starting seeds, but mine don't look nearly as good as Debbie's!! And many were started earlier... what's your secret Debbie? The overhead lights? Mine are outside in the mini seed greenhouse
Amy
OK Amy where did you get those???
I live in Mont Belvieu.
Thanks :o)
Mitch, I thought I could get this bed filled by using a few bags of soil from Home Depot.
Why did I think this?
It's a mystery...
I've bought wonderful compost from Travis Equipment Co in Midlothian, & they do deliver, but this was a few years ago, so I don't know how much it costs now, what their minimum load is, & what delivery costs now.
They also have top soil, & they can mix compost & top soil if that's what you need.
Living Earth is on the I-35 access road, on the east, northbound side (going toward DeSoto) .
You can buy bags or pick-up loads, or they'll deliver it by the cubic yard. They used to charge us the same delivery fee that they would charge someone in north Dallas!
Sandy,
Lowe's on Garth Rd. in Baytown... but they are getting very low on stuff, though they are pretty continuously adding stuff to them =) Last time I checked they had
several varieties of sweet potato vines and some draecenas.
Amy
This message was edited Jan 19, 2006 4:23 PM
Amy,
We are going to have to meet sometime. I was going to Lowe's today,
but needed to take care of something else.
Hoping for tomorrow. I have to go to Krogers and get DH a prescription. I love Lowe's when they clearance plants.
Thanks,
Blessings,
Sandy ^8^
thanks Sylvia - I will check around I just have no idea what a good price would be! I have called the place on !35 several times and they say they will get back with me but they never call me back! So Living Earth is out.. I have dont he Home Depot thing and have empty bags to prove it - just not something I love to do in my little car for 10000 trips to not ruin the shocks. I did learn fast that Lowes cost about .25 cents each per bag on the whole... so I drive around Hampton to the big HD there... Dont care for the one over on I35... I might end up doing that anyway..
Ya'll must run the heat alot. Mine is heat, hot water heater, dryer, and oven...I baked alot at Christmas. Mine went from $28 (which I thought was outrageous) to $52.
Deb
edited to add--at these oil prices I dread to think about the AC bills this summer!
This message was edited Jan 19, 2006 4:59 PM
We don't run the heat THAT much... According to the bills we used 1.7CCF last year in December and 5.9CCF this year - that's just wrong. There is absolutely no way we used that much more this year. Our neighbor's bill went up over $200, too, so maybe the meter reader's gauge was off or something. I tried to call CenterPoint several times today, but they have a message on the phone saying that all of their phones are busy and to call back again later.
I need help with the soil in my raised ... its almost hard as a rock. I have my Hellaborus in there and a couple of other things. But that soil has gotten so hard its suffing out my ground cover.I wish I had an auger, its too hard to pick.
:( What do you do with soil like this when you got plants in the ground?
Sylvia
keep adding a new layer of compost year in and year out 1 to 2 in thick - the plants will thank you with extra blooms to.
Thanks Mitch, but where am I going to get compost?
Sylvia
Well HD had some for sale.. just bougt a few bags myself to help cover what I had vrs what I needed!
Thanks will do...I just hope my plants can wait that long.
Sylvia
I have a compost pile but always seem to need extra compost (it's really so good for the garden! Love it!). In the San Antonio area we have GardenVille and Fertile Gardens (and other companies) for bulk compost (among other really great things). Those two even have the bag-your-own option. I never buy any pre-bagged compost...guess I'm spoiled. With the drought getting worse by the day, this could also turn out to be the Year of the Mulch. We had big piles of brush we had accumulated on the property and had to pay someone to come in and put them through a chipper-shredder (rather than violate the burn ban) so we have that mulch (mostly cedar and live oak) and a half CY of hardwood mulch from GardenVille. So I've got a lot of mulch I need to put out. Mulch, mulch, mulch!
Linda
Huh... I never thought of getting someone to make mulch out of all of the pecan branches that fall in the backyard. What a great idea!! How much did that cost to get done, Linda?
~ Marylyn
I have the feeling after the weather we have had this summer, there will be a lot of stuff for composting! I went to Botanic Garden's Compost Outpost the other day and got some ideas. Most of their's are from http://composters.com. But they didn't have to pay for them I am sure. LOL! I am thinking about getting one of tumbler type, because I don't think I would keep up with turning one by hand. DH is afraid it would smell too. He tells me he would rather buy a load of compost when I needed it. I don't think he understands how satisfying it would be to make my own!
Sedrick--this time of year, scarf up all the bags of leaves folks put out. I have sheet composted for years like that and have really good soil in the areas I have done it for about 3 years. Then I steal grass clippings in the summer.....let nothing go to the landfill unnecessarily is my motto. lol
If you can still find leaves up here let me know where! I brought home 50ish bags and I still need more... to much more to count but I cannot find more at this point.
Do you just stop and pick them up? I've seen bags of leaves and grass clippings sitting at the curb and have been tempted to grab them.
Yes-- I just pick up those bags! Its an addiction....now I have my 17 year old daughter trained to pick me up bags (hey--she's gotta pay for that gas money for her car somehow, right? lol). She's actually surpassed me in skill. She's gotten real good at figuring out which bags have been filled by a mulching mower and has the perfect mixture of finely shredded grass and leaf mixture. She gets extra money when she finds a nice big load of those!
We must admit, we are powerless to control ourselves. Our motto is "let nothing go to that landfill that my mother can use in her garden".
Here are the "leave theives" in action now....mine is the one in the camouflage shirt. I think somehow she thinks that will make her "invisible" as she stops and throws those bags in her trunk. lol
This is the smile of a gas gauge going from "E" to "F" in a teenagers car! lol
Kinda reminds you of the little ant that can carry that huge load...amazing what "little ants" will do when they need gas to go to the internet coffee cafe!
I don't currently have a compost pile, but working on getting one. But one year when I had bagged up about 10 large bags of dry leaves from my yard, I put them on freecycle. Someone snapped them up! If I had put them out to the curb at that time, I would have had to buy those paper bags at 50 cents each. So try putting a "Wanted" request on your local freecycle site for bags of dry leaves for composting if you need them.
I am so proud of all of you guys, collecting all those leaves and composting, mulching and doing all those things that so good for the soil. It's the way to go.
We do collect leaves too, it seems that you can never have enough.
Our nieghbors now this by now, and bring us their leaves and clippings too, and we get quite a few from our own trees.
We have been seriously composting for about 9 years now, although I have gardened organically for a long time.
We finally settled on a series of bins made of concrete blocks that can be adjusted, raised or lowered or configured,according to need.
We don't turn the compost, so it takes about a year, but it works great.
Just recently we harvested one of the large compartments, and it yielded 750 pounds of sifted compost. I feel possitively rich!
Okay, yall have got me. I have been wanting to start a compost bin for awhile, but im just not sure where to start. I know that I would have to have some kind of bin, but not sure what kind or what to put in it (obviuosly leaves) but what else? Any ideas????
Also, as to C.P.. We do have all gas appliances, however we have never had a Gas bill like this. When I talked with CP, I was told to go and read my meter and get back with them. I have been trying to call all week and cant get through. However, I have also been reading my meter every few days and so far we have used 38 since they read the meter (22 days). Now for December they said that we used 141 ccf in 28 days and November was 25 ccf.
The one person I know that has gotten there bill lowered works for Entergy. When he told the CP rep that he spoke with that he worked for Entergy, they offered to lower his bill. He has now filed a complaint with the PUC.