Last week, Houston had snow for the earliest it has ever had it in its recorded history, on December 6. Everyone made fun of us for getting excited, but when it has only snowed a handful of times in this city in the last 200 years, its a pretty big deal. In the 8 years I've lived here its snowed three times. (Oh my god, I've lived here eight years. I didn't think it was ever going to be in my personality to live in one place like this. Feeling the need to move. Mostly the need to live in Europe again, which is, of course, impossible for both Byron's and my professions.)

Ok, that was a sidetrack. Back to the freeze. I knew that the garden would be effected, and made sure to harvest everything that was ripe. And the next morning, the basil plant had turned black, but everything else looked like it survived. But over the week of the wintery (though above freezing) weather, the pepper and fall tomato plants also died.

So, to get to be 6 months of nostalgia... a little memory. Byron built the garden right before we went to Mexico to get married. This was his way of dealing with wedding planning, forget finding an outfit to wear for a beach wedding, let's build a garden and buy a lemon tree! Byron can be very sweet sometimes, he just hides it... except when he's building a garden for his intended.

Here is the garden when it was planted.

At this time, Byron declared I "ruined" the garden by not putting enough plants in it.

I proved him wrong as you can see how it exploded through the summer:

We did best with the small tomatoes, cherry and grape. At the height of the summer, there were so many tomatoes that we just kept them on the kitchen table and snacked. The large tomato plants didn't do so well. We learned later we should've been pruning them, because they grew high, they just didn't produce a lot of fruit. Of course, we all know about the feed-me-seymour cantelope plant that took over and destroyed my grass but only produced 3 cantelopes.

Then there were some rain storms. The tomato plants were infested with bugs and basically died. I didn't have to mourn too much though. Shortly thereafter, the pepper plants exploded with live. I had more habanero than I knew what to do with. And bell peppers like crazy (enough that I fed some to Bella the parrot). I tried planting fall tomatoes but they never really flourished.

And then the freeze.

It looks sad, doesn't it?

There's one glimmer of wonder, though, which is the onions. I planted them in the original planting. They fell over and wilted in the summer. But they have sprung back to life. The broccoli appears to be flourishing too (though no broccoli is ready to be harvested yet) and the lettuce is doing well enough to support my salad habit - though one of the varieties is a little bitter. However, the rest of the garden is going to be on hold until the next planting season in February. Byron is planning for multiple other patches of garden. But I'm happy with this for now. Though I think maybe I'd like to include strawberries and sweet peas next spring. But really, I look forward to tomatoes the most. I probably eat one tomato a day. I am going to move the spices and hot peppers into pots, so they'll be more room for "big" vegetables.