Herbs in Winter: Rosemary

Rosemary is a great all-season herb for West Texas - use it in the landscape and in the kitchen all year round!

Rosemary stays green all winter which provides a welcome burst of green during the cold, brown months.  As such, it also provides a burst of fresh flavor in the kitchen!  Dice it up for cooking, or snip several longer woody branches from a mature plant to use as flavorful skewers for kabobs.

While tolerant of poor soils, rosemary in not tolerant of over-watering.  I don't usually water my front landscape at all in the winter - whatever runs off the front of the house is enough.  As you know, we've had a ton of winter preciptation this year, and here you can see the die back that results when rosemary gets wet feet.  This is the view when walking out my front door right now - beautiful, isn't it?  Between runoff from the roof and a slope in the sidewalk that retains water, this rosemary's not completely happy!

Here's the same bush from the front which doesn't look so bad.

Rosemary gets a slight burgundy winter color at the tips, but it doesn't affect the overall look of the plant much.  You'll also notice that the plant gets a slight gray-green color to it in winter and turns a brighter green with warmer weather.

Here's another stand of rosemary about twenty feet away which looks a little better.  I planted this about four or five years ago from three quart-size plants I bought at the garden center.  You can see that the they've all grown together to form one large planting.  That's a crape myrtle in the foreground and Cabaret Miscanthus grass in the back which is really pretty in the summer.  (Ornamental grasses can be cut back in the winter if you prefer, but I usually leave mine until they start to flush again in the spring.)

Worth Visits the Alamo!

But will he remember it?  Doubtful, but I will...

Want to see the oldest known photographic image of the Alamo, taken in 1849?

The famous "camel's back" arch was not original to the structure.

Stone walls and arches that surround the site were erected in the 1920's.

Splash and make a wish!

Archetectural detail on the front facade.

Worth enjoys an ice pop outside the gift shop.

Checking out the big guns...

Side view from inside the Convento Courtyard.

From Remember the Alamo by Patrick Cox, Ph.D

"The eighteenth century Franciscan chapel survived more than a century of hurricanes, floods, epidemics, hostile Indians and, finally, secularization and distribution of the mission's assets to the local community. In the early 1840's, bats and owls inhabited the former mission and battlefield. The ruins also attracted the young boys of that era who played among its crumbling walls. The U. S. Army probably saved the abandoned structure when it turned the place of worship into a quartermaster storage building in 1846. (It's hard to fathom that hay and hardtack were housed in the same rooms that witnessed Christian rituals and bloody combat). "

How true...

Davy Crockett Meets Freddy Krueger

My sweet nephew Wortham got to take his first trip to The Alamo this weekend, and I was lucky enough to be there and get to buy him a souvenir. I know, it's not related to my garden, but it's my blog, and I can post what I want to!

Winter Color for the Landscape

Winter in Lubbock doesn't have to be be brown all the time!  Nandina offers great winter color for West Texas.  Here are a few pictures I snapped in my back yard.

  

Nandina provides brilliant winter foliage!

Landscaped with City of Lubbock free mulch and drift wood from the farm.

Nandina is available locally in several varieties than can be used as a ground cover or a samll to medium sized bush.  The green plant in front is Mediterranean Pink Heather which stays low and compact.  It is green all year long and displays small pink blooms in the winter.  Don't over water, though, it likes to stay dry.

Mediterranean Pink Heather blooms (close up).

Debbi, This One's for You!

Debbi, I just found your previous comments, so here are some images of January's stark beauty... just for you!

Sad, but oddly beautiful...!

Wind Chimes

God's Christmas light display in January

(Enlarge this one... It's worth it!)

Juniper on ice

Graphic art courtesy of the patio chair

Starting Seeds Indoors Using Jiffy Pellets

Okay, so my neighbor harassed me tonight about not having posted anything lately - at least she's nice enough to check out my blog from time to time!

So in the last week I've been starting my peppers and tomatoes in Jiffy Pellets which are basically compacted peat used to germinate your seeds indoors.  Just add water, and watch them grow - kind of like Sea Monkeys but faster!

Jiffy Pellets in two sizes, dry and compact and then expanded with water.

Jiffy Pellets in the tray...

...and with the lid on.

So I started my peppers a week ago - Costa Rican Sweet, Habanero, Poblano (Ancho), Hungarian Wax, and Sweet Banana.  Last year I had tons and tons of Hungarian Wax and Banana peppers, but I wanted to add more variety this year, hence the others which all came from Burpee.  Costa Ricans are listed as large and great for grilling, Habanero are for HOT sauces and dishes, and Poblanos are for stuffing. 

You might ask, "Why no jalapenos since you live in Texas??"  Well, I had such a bumper crop a couple of years ago that I'm still using those which I dehydrated and then pulverized into a powder in the blender - a little of that goes a long way!

Red, orange, and yellow Wax and Banana peppers from last year's garden.  I canned tomatoes in a hot water bath, but the peppers I just packed in straight white vinegar and stored in the fridge with no heat processing.  They've been delicious all winter - in fact, I think I like them even better once they've marinated, plus the hot vinegar that results is great for flavoring all kinds of dishes!

For tomato varieties this year, I'm trying Black Truffle Hybrid (a hybrid of the heirloom variety Black Truffle), Sun Gold Hybrid (a yellow cherry tomato), Jubilee (yellow medium), and Roma (a reliable producer for this area).  The Black Truffle and Sun Gold are new for me this year (from Burpee).  I grew the Jubilee last year, and the yellow color jazzes up any dish!  I also grow the Roma every year as it gets enough size for slicing but is not so big as to have problems with cracking.

More Pictures of the Ice Storm

A Bone is Good in Any Weather!

I love this picture of Bullet - it's like he's floating in the snow!

These are my boys Bullet and Samson - as you can see, they have their winter coats and this ice storm we're having doesn't slow them down at all!

Sam in the forefront

Cleaning a Cast Iron Pan

Let me tell you about an old cast iron pan I recently restored.  Here's the finished product.

Here's what it looked like when I started - no lie!

I started cooking with cast iron a couple of years ago with a 10" pre-seasoned Lodge Logic pan I bought at Wal-Mart.  I love cooking with cast iron!  It heats very evenly, and you can get it very hot which is great for searing.  I had never successfully cooked omlets until I started using cast iron.  I have an electric stove, and the coil wouldn't heat the pan evenly - cast iron has solved that!  I cook in a cast iron pan almost every single day...

This was actually my grandmother's old cast iron pan.  Since my brother had expressed an interest in cooking with cast iron, I thought it would be cool for him to have one with a history, so I asked my parents if they could scrounge up one of my grandmother's old pans.  We grew up on a farm next to my grandparents.  They've both passed away now, and we fixed their house up to be a kind of hunting house and I knew that most of her old cookware was still down there.  Luckily, my parents found two of her cast iron pans which meant one for my bro and one for me!

Since I wanted to give my brother his pan at Christmas, I had to clean it up quickly after arriving at my parent's house, and I ended up grinding the massive carbon build-up off of the pan with a variety of sanders and steel wheel brushes attached to an electric drill.  It was a really messy job, and I looked like I'd been working in a coal mine!

I have since learned a better (and cleaner!) way of rehabbing cast iron.  Here is a great website for all things cast iron - I used the oven cleaner method to clean my grandmother's pan.  All you do is spray aerosol oven cleaner all over the pan, wrap it in a plastic bag (to help control the fumes), and wait.  I put mine in a cold oven just to keep it out of the way and let the oven cleaner sit on it for eight to twelve hours at a time.  I did this probably four times over a couple of days.

This removed the vast majority of the carbon build-up, but I wanted to speed things along.  To remove the last of the build-up, I used the hot coals method, where you build a fire and place the pan on the hot coals.  I think this method could be used for the entire cleaning process and would like to try that sometime.

I used the fire pit in my back yard for this job.  I had read that using this method could cause the pan to crack if you heated it too fast, so I built the fire and while it was dying down, I set the pan on the grilling rack to start warming it up.  When the fire burned down to coals, I put the pan directly on the coals and left it for an hour or so.  Afterwards, the carbon build-up looked gray, and when I touched it, it literally fell apart and blew away like baby powder - wow!  I also like this method because it gives me a good excuse to sit by the fire with my dog.

Samson, helping...

My grandmother lived to be 97, and she fried everything.  My mom pointed out that she wondered how many calories had passed through this pan over the years - I can't even imagine!!

SHA-ZAM!

This pan appears to be a pre-World War II pan based on the weight and smoothness of the pan.  It also has a break in the heat ring at the twelve o'clock position which is indicative of a Lodge pan.  Here is a great link on old vs. new cast iron pans, and here is a picture of my new Lodge pan on the left and my grandmother's pan on the right.

Early Season Leafy Greens - Lettuce, Spinach, and Kale

About a month ago, I decided to try an experiment in my garden.

Last year around the end of March we had a late-season snowstorm.  The temperatures dropped down into the mid-20's or so, but I noticed that the lettuce, spinach, and kale I had planted in the garden about two months prior looked really fantastic in this horrible weather.  After it was all over, they exhibited no leaf burn or die back of any kind.  In fact, they had never looked better!

Now I know that leafy greens need cold weather and will bolt with warm temperatures, but I never expected them to thrive like that in THAT kind of cold!

So this year I decided to plant my leafy greens even earlier to see what would happen.  I'd love to have a longer harvest season, and it would be glorious to get something fresh from the garden during even the winter months. 

I probably should have planted a fall crop to last through the winter, but I have to admit that I'm usually eeking out the last bit of production that I can from my tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini in the fall and haven't gotten around to cleaning up my garden by that point, so I didn't get a fall planting done.  Instead, I planted lettuce, spinach, and kale seeds around mid-December, so we'll see what happens.

Those of you who live in this area know that we've had some tremendously cold temperatures this winter, and we also had about eight inches of snow at Christmas which is unusual for Lubbock.  Obviously, with all this cold weather, my germination rates have been pretty slow, but I started seeing some green about two weeks ago.  So far the growth has been very slow, but my seedlings have at least progressed enough that you can now see them on camera.  Here are some pictures I took this morning.  The lettuce and kale have germinated, but so far none of the spinach has - I'll keep you posted.

Lettuce seedlings - planted mid-December

Kale seedlings - planted mid-December