Up here in North Texas, we have a pretty good climate for a lot of produce. I have tons of tomatoes right now just loaded with fruit (still a couple or three weeks from being ripe), and I've got more zucchini and yellow squash than we can eat. The watermelons are coming along nicely. No fruit on those yet, but it's still early for those to set fruit. I'll probably start seeing little watermelons toward the middle of June. I have some bell peppers, but they just aren't doing much of anything. Don't know what's going on with that.
And that's just the summer stuff. In the fall, I can plant garlic, broccoli, mustard greens. There's a variety of onion developed in Texas called Texas Supersweet 1015Y. The 1015Y part of that name refers to the appropriate date for setting out the onion sets in the fall on October 15. I grow a combination of hard neck and soft neck garlic. Soft neck garlic is supposed to do better in warmer climates like I have, but they don't produce a scape (the little stalk that would be the flower spike of the garlic plant, but you can harvest them while they're still young and tender and cook them like asparagus, and they are to die for). I get better bulbs out of the soft neck varieties, but the hard necks still do alright, and they have those delicious scapes, so it is totally worth it.
I"m not into corn. It takes up too much room, and the fresh corn you can buy at the farmers market is just as good as what you can grow at home, so I don't bother.
I'm interested in pawpaws, and would like to plant a few of those trees (they're not self-fertile, and you need more than one variety for cross pollination to set fruit), and I expect I'll get to that someday, but I had too much to do in the garden this year to get to it. Not a lot of fruit trees will grow well in Texas. It's too hot for cherries, raspberries, most peaches, most apples, apricots, and a bunch of other things, so I haven't messed with any fruit trees, but if I had the right climate, I would have a whole orchard of sweet black cherries. Have you ever had a pie made from fresh sweet black cherries instead of those sour red ones that come in a can? If you haven't, you should make one immediately (well, not immediately. the sweet cherries are best in July, so wait until then when they are at their best, and at their cheapest). I add a little Disaronno to the pie to give it a little extra kick with the cherry-like flavor of the amaretto, and it's amazing. I look forward to those sweet cherries every year, and I make more cherry pies than i care to count. I've even had people tell me they don't like cherry pie, and I encourage them to taste the ones I make, and they are immediately converted. Pie made with fresh sweet black cherries is about one of the best things in the world that exists.
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