Tilapia Filet Baked in Yogurt

I found a similar recipe on the Internet and adapted it to use ingredients that are growing in the garden today. Recipe is for one person.

Cut a tilapia filet into bite-sized bits and put it into a baking dish.
Pour on enough un-flavored yogurt to pretty much cover the fish, preferably whole milk yogurt that has not had anything done to it to make it "smooth and creamy."

Cut some lemon grass, parsley and dill from the garden and, using scissors, cut the herbs into bits directly onto the yogurt-covered fish.

Cover and put into a pre-heated 350 degree oven or dutch oven on top of wood stove in which the fire has burned down to red-hot coals.

Cook until the fish is done (you can tell it's done when it flakes apart when you stick a fork into it).

Sprinkle on some chopped shallot or chives or green onion and some freshly ground black pepper just before serving.

Time to prepare: 10 minutes, including cutting herbs from garden. 15 or 20 minutes or so to cook. Cost: $2.50 for the fish; $0.50 for the yogurt. A cent or two for the olive oil and vinegar for the salad and the black pepper. Total is half or less what one would pay for a toxic meal from a fast food joint.

Serve with fresh mixed greens from the garden and fresh tomato. I do not have tomatoes growing in the garden now, as the tomato plants were all killed by a freeze back in late November. The day before the freeze, I picked all the green tomatoes off the vines and stored them in closed paper bags to ripen. Next year, I plan to try growing Long Keeper tomatoes.
http://www.southernexposure.com/productlist/prods/49125.html
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange blurb claims that they can last in storage up to six months. I'd be happy if they could last through February.

I don't mind going a couple of months (Mar - Apr) without fresh tomatoes. It makes them seem that much better when you finally have them again in the garden in May.

What's Blooming on November 16

I'm a day late for Carol's blog, but today's roster of blooms will, perhaps, be more interesting, because we had the first frost of the season last night.

I harvested 3/4 of a five gallon bucket of tomatoes yesterday, and half a bucket of lima beans. There were many green beans too small to harvest, so I covered the row of plants with burlap, after giving them a good soak with the hose.

I will wrap the tomatoes individually in newspaper, to keep them from drying out while they ripen. We'll have fresh tomatoes for many weeks to come.

The temperature stayed below freezing for only an hour or so. There was frost damage to the sweet potato vines I have not yet gotten around to harvesting, to the tomato plants, the Cuban oregano, and to one of the datura plants. Far as I can see, nothing was actually killed. I have scores of little volunteer basil plants that came up under a rose bush. When I need basil for cooking, I pull up a whole plant. Maybe I'll transplant a few of these into containers, so I'll have fresh basil over the winter. Since winter here in central Texas last only a couple of months, and we can grow cool season crops through most of it, there is no great need to can or otherwise preserve food. The greater need for this comes in high summer, when everything either dies or goes dormant, save the heat-lovers such as sweet potato vines and okra. But potting up a few basil plants is probably worth the effort.

OK, here's what's still blooming:

Roses:

Maggie

Mutabilis (only a few blooms)

Clothide Soupert

miniature (five bushes still going strong, covered with blooms)

Knockout (this one bloomed profusely all thru the summer but is finally slowing down, has only a few blooms now)

Zinnias (still going strong)

Orange flowers from Great Outdoors in Austin (the flower look a bit like those of the golden shrimp plant, Pachystachys lutea, but the flowers and plants are different enough that I doubt they're closely related. I've pasted in a pic above.)

Salvia Victoria

Pavonia

Datura (in protected area, no frost damage - flowers delicate shade of yellowish pink - I really need to learn more names!)

Echinacea (flowering very nicely now that the weather has cooled a bit)

Penta

Marigolds

Mums (just a few still blooming)

Snapdragons (seedlings purchased from Fanick's nursery in San Antonio)

Viola

Petunia (old fashioned purple, very fragrant)

Canna lily (the ones in exposed locations suffered some frost damage, but the ones in protected areas are still fine)

Plumbago (planted along south side of wood fence -- survived the frost with no damage)

Bouganvillia (south side of fence)

Oleander (south side of fence)

Mexican mint marigold (Tagetes lucida)

Vinca minor

Orange cigar plant (Cuphea micropetala)

Green beans (I include these even tho I grow them for food rather than flowers -- the kind I'm growing at the moment [a French variety] make the loveliest lavender blooms.

What's Blooming in My Garden Today

Maggie rose
Clotilde Soupert rose
Knockout rose
red salvia (volunteer, do not know species)
Indigo spires salvia
pavonia
zinnia
marigold
snapdragon (transplants from nursery)
fanick's perennial phlox
plumbago - blue & white
coral vine
vinca minor
penta
orange flowers from Great Outdoors (don't know name)
white & pink flowers from Great Outdoors
cigar plant
Tecoma stans (Yellow Bells)
Oleander
vitex (doesn't usually bloom this time of year, but shrub was stressed over the summer)
yellow & pink 4 o'clocks
garden mums

Harvesting:
tomatoes
peppers
sweet potatoes
butter beans
southern peas (Mandy, blackeyed, purple hull)
turnip greens
radishes
Barbados cherry
dandelion (wild)
chicory (volunteer)

Annual Food Plants Growing but not yet harvestable:
Broccoli
Cabbage
Spinach
Lettuce
onions
beets
green beans (fall crop)
squash (fall crop)

Perennial Food Plants Growing:
Pear (unknown varieties)
Peach (unknown varieites)
Peach (donut)
Plum
Cherry (Royal Lee)
Mulberry
Loquat
Tangerine
Apple (Pink Lady, Anna)
Fig (has many green figs, may or may not ripen before first frost)
artichoke
blackberries
dew berries
pecan (natives & unknown varities)
elderberry

Fruit / Nut trees I would like to add this year:

Asian pear
low chill peaches
Ein Shemer apple
jujube
paw paw (maybe, tho I don't think it will do well in our alkaline soil)
almond
persimmon (non astringent)
pomegranite
Doreset Golden apple
Himrod grape

Treatment for Rose Black Spot

This treatment will not harm critters such as earthworms and ladybugs.

For each gallon of distilled or rain water, mix in:
1 aspirin
1/4 cup vinegar (5% sn)
1 Tbsp liquid fertilizer
1tbsp horticultual soap or dishwashing soap

Spray leaves of rose bush and the surface of the soil under the bush.

Water - The New Oil

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_25/b4089040017753.htm

Excerpt:

T. Boone Pickens thinks water is the new oil—and he's betting $100 million that he's right. Roberts County is a neat square in a remote corner of the Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling hills, tall grass, oak trees, mesquite, and cattle. It has a desolate beauty, a striking sparseness. The county encompasses 924 square miles and is home to fewer than 900 people. One of them is T. Boone Pickens, the oilman and corporate raider, who first bought some property here in 1971 to hunt quail. He's now the largest landowner in the county: His Mesa Vista ranch sprawls across some 68,000 acres. Pickens has also bought up the rights to a considerable amount of water that lies below this part of the High Plains in a vast aquifer that came into existence millions of years ago.
If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. The electricity generated by an enormous wind farm he is setting up in the Panhandle would also flow along that corridor. As far as Pickens is concerned, he could be selling wind, water, natural gas, or uranium; it's all a matter of supply and demand. "There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That's the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing," he says.
In the coming decades, as growing numbers of people live in urban areas and climate change makes some regions much more prone to drought, water—or what many are calling "blue gold"—will become an increasingly scarce resource. By 2030 nearly half of the world's population will inhabit areas with severe water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. Pickens understands that. And while Texas is unusually lax in its laws about pumping groundwater, the rush to control water resources is gathering speed around the planet. In Australia, now in the sixth year of a drought, brokers in urban areas are buying up water rights from farmers. Rural residents around the U.S. are trying to sell their land (and water) to multi- national water bottlers like Nestlé (BW—Apr. 14). Companies that use large quantities of the precious resource to run their businesses are seeking to lock up water supplies. One is Royal Dutch Shell, which is buying groundwater rights in Colorado as it prepares to drill for oil in the shale deposits there.

What I'm Harvesting

Tomatoes

Squash

Peppers

Blackeyed Peas

Mandy beans

Amaranth

Herbs

Corn (the ears are all dried up and the kernels have to be saoked before cooking)

What's Blooming Today

Cypress Vine (Ipomoea quamoclit)

Coral Vine (Antiginon leptopus)

Impatiens

Echinacea

Chives

Oregano (all kinds)

Dittany of Crete (Origanum dictamnus)

Morning glory

Mutabilis Rose (China rose)

Madame Alfred Carriere (noisette rose)

Knockout Rose (hybrid tea)

A few other hybrid teas, just barely (the blooms get crispy and ugly within a day of fully opening, but they can be cut as buds and brought into the house, where they will open and last for a while)

miniature roses - all varieties

Zinnias - all varieities

Ruellia

Trumpet Vine (Campsis radicans)

Blush Noisette rose - I'd highly recommend this "antique rose" (developed in 1817) for gardeners with hot summers. It keeps blooming throughout the summer. Mid-fall is the heaviest blooming time in my garden. It's pretty much pest-resistant, though it does get light infestations of black spot in the spring and fall if there is a long rainy period.

Perennial Phlox Texas Superstar 'John Fanick' - beautiful, fragrant, loves hot weather (Phlox paniculata)

Vinca minor

sunflowers of all kinds

canna lily

crinum - genus Amaryllidaceae, don't know the variety. I got the original bulbs around 12 years ago from an elderly neighbor who'd been growing them for many years in her garden here in Lockhart. They seem to thrive in any kind of soil. I've grown them in Lockhart, San Antonio, and also in my garden in the sand hills, where they've naturalized. The ones that are blooming now are dusky pink. There's also one with spiderly white bloom. I think it may be Crinum purpurascens.

day lily - I can't keep up with all the different varieties, so I don't know which ones are blooming now.

Butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii)

four o'clocks

althea hibiscus (Rose of Sharon)

Plumbago (Plumbago auriculata)

Cenizo (Leucophyllum frutescens) - It rained a bit over the past week, and the Cenizos are covered with lavender blooms. Very pretty, especially with the silver-leaved variety.

Did I mentioned cedar sage? (Salvia roemeriana) The hardest part of listing What's Blooming is that every time I go out in the garden I notice something I forgot to include.