From my fall garden, I learned that root crops (carrots, beets, parsnips), cabbage, and broccoli do well here. We're carrot lovers and could eat them at every meal, so they'll be a garden mainstay from here on out. These went into slaw and soup and were especially good steamed, with ginger and a little butter.
Interesting thing about broccoli: in the supermarket, we can buy only the flower bud--the rest of the plant goes to waste. But the leaves and stems are tasty: chopped, cooked in olive oil with garlic, onion, and a splash of balsamic vinegar--salt, pepper, hot sauce to taste. The chopping goes faster if you roll the leaves first. Good over pasta. My cabbages are slow to head up (not enough cold weather, I suppose), but the leaves make very nice cabbage rolls.
Dry, dry, dry. I can water the garden, but there's nothing I can do for the fields and trees, which are suffering. Central Texas is going through the worst drought since the 1950s. There's been almost no rain in 17 months, and the weather folks have changed our category from "extreme" to "exceptional," the worst in the country. Most of the creeks are dry, our little lake is dry, and our rancher friend Dolly has sold off half her cattle: there's just no grass. Our cows are making do now, but unless we get rain soon, they'll be in trouble too. Nothing on the horizon, either--the La Nina "event" in the Pacific is sending our normal late-winter rains elsewhere.
Writing: I'm going back through the entries in the journal/book I wrote in 2008, getting it ready for UT Press (due end of March). Another couple of weeks on that project, then back to China's Holly Blues, for a final edit. I've started a new journal for 2009: calling it "Mosaics." I'm using a software program called LifeJournal that I purchased through a Story Circle link (which means that Story Circle earns a bit through the purchase). I like it very much, especially the "topics" feature, which lets me tag every entry (and parts of entries) with a topic--then I can search later, by topic. If I'd had that for the 2008 journal, it would have saved me an enormous amount of work. If you're interested in the software, please check it out through the Story Circle link at the bottom of the home page on our book review site.
Reading note: Until I moved to western South Dakota, I did not know about rain, that it could come too hard, too soft, too hot, too cold, too early, too late. That there could be too little at the right time, too much at the wrong time, and vice versa. . . I had not realized that a long soaking rain in the spring or fall, a straight-down-falling rain, a gentle splashing rain is more than a blessing. It's a miracle.--Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography