In looking up information about the winter solstice, I encountered this fantastic website: www.timeanddate.com/calendar, from which I printed this handy condensed one year on a page calendar. One can get this calendar with holidays for any of the major religions, all of the major religions, and many other choices of annotation, some of which takes two pages. One can get calendars for many other countries besides the United States. One can get calendars with each of the 12 months on a page. One can get these calendars in color, also. A tool is available on this site for personalizing calendars! One day I spent half a day, and messed up my computer, trying to get this information, so easily available at timeanddate.com.
Monthly Archives: December 2013
Winter Solstice 2013, Garden, Galveston, TX
The garden one hour after the Galveston, TX Winter Solstice which occurred at 11:11AM CST. It is cloudy today, so we cannot see the shadow marking the lowest point that the sun goes at noon. The photo was taken at about 12:20 PM, close enough to noon to have been interesting.
Winter Solstice narcissus, which will bloom one place or another over the coming weeks.
Narcissus in the background beat out the grass. The Narcissus is darker green than the grass to the right. The multi-colored green plant in the foreground is variegated ginger, which grew well before Ike. The grass seemed to protect its roots, so that it is now flourishing for the first time in over five years. I will check on the edibility of the roots. I think that I know it is edible.
The narcissus around this cypress comes up later than some of the other bulbs. This may be becaus I was placing coffee grounds around the cypress tree, and it raised up the level of the soil (fact), which may be the reason that the narcissus comes up later, (the kind of opinion that we could call a hypothesis).
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Dense narcissus around the live oak.
This summer solstice gives an opportunity to benchmark some of the plant progress in the kitchen garden, and the front landscape garden. It was a rainy 68 2/3 degrees Fahrenheit today. Weeds will begin to grow again, soon.
Garden, 14th Week
Overview of garden 14th week, a day before the winter solstice. 
Green cabbages are growing better on the shadier south end of the garden. The green cabbage at the far end of the garden is doing the best of all. The garlic has gotten a lot bigger over the last week. We had a small harvest of parsley to bake on our fish. 
Mesclun mix is growing in the foreground. We are supposed to have five varieties of salad greens in it. I’ve seen at least two or three kinds. 
From front to back, lettuce, a very few carrots, perhaps a couple of beets, which were badly eaten by something, and a couple of dill plants which will survive if it does not freeze. 
The larger growing radishes did the best. one or two are probably overgrown, but we are keeping them until Christmas. Some may grow when the light changes. We’ll see what happens to the others. The garlic planted on this end of the garden is doing very well. We may expect that, because with the clove, they may not be light dependent, yet, and must not need certain light conditions to be a switch. The whole onion I planted did not grow, even though it does not need the energy. Either the onion got damaged in transit to our house, or it needs certain light conditions. The onion and chive seeds kept popping up and disappearing, even though October was an OK time for planting.