Gardening in Texas

About 14 years ago, I wanted a garden to make our own salsa with tomatoes and jalapenos. We'd just moved into our house. The place we selected must have been the place where all the rocks dumped when the lot was cleared for our house built in 1969. Also on the place was clay and bedrock.

Well, it took more work than we had figured. Not one shovel of dirt did we dig that did not scrap rocks. Huge rocks. Little rocks. And the clay was of such a stiff quality that it could have been shaped into pottery.

Once we had the bed ready, we brought in lumber and made a partially raised bed. Into the space, we added composted hay, manure and sand. Not having a tiller, we mix it with a shove and garden fork. That took days and days of sore backs.

My husband said we could buy some night crawlers from the bait store and add them to the garden. I said, yeah, that's a great idea. Worms need to be in a garden. I bought a container of a dozen and took it to the garden. I dug a hole and dumped in the worms. With the care of a mother putting a child to bed, I covered the brood with a blacket of dirt.

At last, the bed was ready. With high expectation and eagerness, we went to the nursery and bought tomato plants, jalapeno plants and black-eyed pea seeds. A day or two later, I noticed that the lower stems on the tomatoes had been chewed off. Grub worms. In the next few days, the deep rich green of the leaves were fading and nearly went yellow.

The plants grew but not long after they had grown large, another worm was eating the leaves off. My tomatoes were stripped. That year, there were no tomatoes and very few jalapenos.

Our conclusion was that the mixture was too hot, that is, the manure was too rich. The plants were weakened and bugs ate them.

We have learned and are doing a better job.