Where in the Blooming World am I?

Why, I'm in Texas! The only place for me!

We are in Jackson County, Texas, with Edna being the County Seat, and a hub of activity. We are in the Gulf Coast area, about 90 miles north of Corpus Christi, 100 miles south of Houston, and we can't go much farther east. We are in zone 9a, about 35 miles from Victoria, Texas. This is "Texas Revolution country", and Jackson County was one of the origional 23 counties formed in Texas.

We garden year 'round. I am growing veggies right now- cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, onions... Brussel sprouts.....(I hate eating these vegetables, if they are cooked, but I love to watch them grow). I have lots of flower seedlings; Poppy, snapdragon, calendula, sweet peas, viola, pansy, and dianthus are all showing their pretty new foliage. Things are leafing out and putting on buds- a dangerous thing. Peaches for one, are budding, and if we get a freeze, which we could (easily),we will not have fruit this year. My confederate roses are leafing out and they are just gorgeous. I just wish they would wait awhile. Hibiscus' is also leafing out. That might die if it gets cold, unles I protect it.

We have nasty black gumbo for soil, but we can grow anything in it. It is among the most fertile of soils, just doesn't have much air in it. Slick when it is wet. Hard like a brick when it is dry. I figure I am going to use some of it to throw some bowls one of these days. Our primary problem with our soil is that it is very alkaline. That is hard to fix.

We have a nice Master Gardener group here, and I am involved in that. We are always doing some project or another. Right now, we are working on a Native Plant garden, with a Rain garden incorporated into it, in partnership with the 4-H kids. It is going to be fun, planting this. Collecting our plants will be fun too.

This is a very rural environment. Even in town, it is 'country'. We don't live in Edna, but in a small community about 10 miles away, if you take the back roads. We do have a post office, where we live, but no mail delivery. We have to go to the post office to collect our mail. It is o.k.

In Edna, we have a WalMart, an HEB grocery store, several florist, mexican resturants, Pizza Hut, LOTS of attorneys, about 5 banks, and goodness knows how many churches! Maybe 8 churches? or more. We have a hospital district- did have two, but that is a sore subject- and we have lots of good doctors come in on a weekly basis from Victoria, about 25 miles.

Important to me, we have a good hardware/lumber yard that will usually give the big BOX stores a run for their money. I love to buy lumber, and hardware, paint, glue, whatever.....

We are actually almost on the bay, but the way things are laid out, we have to go around about 17 miles to get to the salt water to fish or whatever. That is fine with me. We also have hurricanes around here, too, sometimes.

Lots of ranching, and farming here, so we have good feed stores.

Our county is very generous to us. They maintain a brush site, where we can haul all kinds of refuse, and they grind it up for mulch, which eventually turns into compost that they will load for us, free of charge. We also have a cotton gin close to where I live, (a few blocks) where I can get all the cotton gin trash that my little heart desires. It has been composting there for years, and is BEEutiful!

This is a good place to live. I invite y'all to visit, when you can.