Year Round Food Gardening for Houston & Southeast TexasClimate, Weather and Landscaping in the Years Ahead
I gave a short talk on the drought and the increasingly chaotic climate in the Houston and Southeast Texas area. The talk was in mid-November 2011 at the Organic Horticulture Business Alliance (OHBA) Drought Symposium. http://www.obhaonline.org
As best I can tell, all or most predictions come from the same 10 or so models. Radio/TV/newspapers typically just use government predictions. Commercial media often though exaggerate threats and possibilities possibly for commercial reasons.
General Weather information: Go to http://www.weather.gov ; then click on the map of the Texas Gulf Coast, then click on area map of Houston or wherever. You can enter a zip code there and bookmark it. If it matters a lot whether the prediction is correct, read the detailed discussions at the bottom right of that website. There are hourly forecasts for your zip code for the next 3 days and radar maps that show you how rain is moving through the area.
Longer-term info: A summary of what is expected for the months ahead is updated monthly. Typically, they run 10 computer models and pick the middle one.
What weather happened:
For summary information about historical weather averages and extremes:
For info relevant to landscaping and gardening, go to
For drought:
Lately, I have been reading my gardening books and combing the internet trying to get information on how different vegetables do at different temperatures. For example, given that all sites in Southeast Texas just busted all time hottest month data, should we really be planting tomato plants, carrots, beets, snap beans as the schedule says?
Briefly the answer would seem to be “yes.” Mostly they all sprout in high temperature soil (mine was 83˚F 1 inch down the other morning before the sun got on it) in what is now the carrot bed. They don’t sprout as well or as quickly though so will need plenty of scarce water.
Another question though is will they grow in that temperature of soil, and in the air temperatures after they come up? After a lot of searching I have developed a huge table of vegetables and temperatures that I will put in the next edition along with planting by temperature guidelines as the months increasingly become hard to predict.
What is shocking though is that the data I have assembled seems to not be systematically available anywhere on the web, and virtually all the agricultural extensions just tell people to follow the local planting calendar “based on years of study” the Missouri guidelines say. This is another way of saying that no one is ready for the directions that climate change is headed.
One reason we garden in Houston is to have a cheap and easy chance to drink this Moro blood orange juice.
