The heat this past week made working in the garden a little less pleasant than it usually is. The team persevered however and accomplished a good bit of work.

We were just about out of both mulch and compost but the good folks at Gardenville came through with a donation of both amendments. We are very thankful to them for supporting our all-volunteer demonstration garden.

This week we harvested squash, tomatoes, blackberries, strawberries, artichokes, eggplant, peppers, lettuce and beans from both the row garden and raised beds. We had enough squash, tomatoes and beans to donate them to The Caring Place.

In the row garden we tilled fertilizer into some of the fallow rows to prepare them for planting. Then we planted sweet potatoes, okra and Southern peas. As always, we spent a lot f time weeding between the rows.

In the raised beds we pulled out some winter crops that were bolting. Then we amended some of the beds and planted okra. We cut the blooms off of the basil and several other herbs to keep them from going to seed and weeded several beds as well. We moved a trellis in one of the beds to give some support for the volunteer Malabar spinach growing at one end. We also removed the row cover supports on that bed because they were in the way of the trellis.

We potted up the remaining pomegranate bushes this week and ran irrigation to them. When we tested the new irrigation we turned up several leaks in the raised bed area, which we repaired. In the process of doing that we found that someone had tampered with one of the timers and caused it to fail to run. So we had to hand-water the beds that were affected. When we watered one of the 4×4 beds we suddenly had an explosion of baby rabbits. It turns out that a mama rabbit had dug a burrow in the bed and when we watered it, the burrow filled with water. We dried the babies off and put them back in their nest after the water receded, but we’ll have to figure out what to do about them before they eat up all our produce.
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As if rabbits in the carrot bed weren’t problem enough, we are still having trouble with stink bugs in the tomatoes and squash bugs and borers on the squash. Spinosad is helping with the stink bugs and squash bugs, but the borers are much more difficult to deal with.

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.

This week we harvested 165 pounds of potatoes and several pounds of green beans from the row garden for donation to The Caring Place. We also donated 21 pounds of garlic, which we trimmed this week after picking and drying two weeks ago.

We sifted our home-made compost and used it to amend several rows, including the rows from which we had harvested onions last week, in order to prepare them for planting with summer veggies. Then we planted both Burgundy and Clemson Spineless okra in one of the rows and used a broad fork to cultivate some others. We also spread some mulch on the tomatoes to keep the roots cool and moist.

We’re still fighting insects, especially squash bugs, in the row garden so we sprayed Spinosad to try to get rid of them. The weeds are coming back with a vengeance so the team spent a lot of time weeding the row garden this week to try to get a handle on them.

All of that activity caused in a couple of breaks in the row garden irrigation tapes, which we repaired before they could result in water loss.

In the raised bed area we harvested chard, tomatoes, eggplant, beans, artichokes, a few carrots, a couple of squash and a handful of blackberries. Squash bugs continue to be a problem in the raised beds so we inspected all of the squash plants, killing the bugs we found and removing the eggs from the undersides of the leaves. We are also experiencing problems with thrips and spider mites, so we sprayed with Spinosad. Some of the plants in one of the beds have what appears to be caterpillar damage, so we dusted them with BT to try to stop that.

The herbs are doing so well in this hot weather that they need to be cut back nearly every week to keep them from crowding each other. The surface of the raised beds, especially the scented herb bed, have been pretty dry. The herbs really don’t mind that, but some of the veggies looked kind of thirsty so we did some hand-watering to help the plants that needed a little extra moisture.

We’ve had some pomegranate bushes on hold since before the garden fair. They had outgrown their pots so we re-potted about half of them into larger ones this week. We used a mixture of prepared potting soil, compost, cottonseed meal and agricultural molasses as the potting medium. Then we installed micro-sprinklers on them to keep them watered while they develop new root systems.

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.

We got nearly an inch of rain in the demo garden this week and we hope y’all got some too. We only had one real work day in the garden this week because we are expanding the demonstration garden to include more than the vegetable and rose gardens and we wanted to focus on the expansion.

Even with only one official work day we managed to trim and bag over 700 pounds of onions from the row garden. We had red, yellow and white onions. There were so many that we shared some with the garden crew, the ag office folks and the road and bridge folks, who are the garden landlords. Then we donated nearly 350 pounds to The Caring Place and another 350 pounds to the Round Rock Area Serving Center. It was a hard four hours of work to trim and donate the onions but we felt a real sense of accomplishment when we were done.

In addition to the onions, we harvested a dozen Zephyr squash and over 15 pounds of Contender green beans from the row garden on Tuesday and another 8 or 10 pounds of beans later in the week and donated them to The Caring Place. We picked a couple of squash, a white eggplant, some tomatoes and a few other veggies from the raised bed area as well.

The blackberries are starting to produce now and the tarragon that we planted a couple of weeks ago seems to be taking hold. So we are happy about those things.

On the negative side, squash bugs ( https://insects.tamu.edu/fieldguide/aimg61.html ) and stink bugs are becoming a real problem now. Squash bugs killed a hill of pattypan squash in the raised beds and infected nearly every other squash plant in both the raised beds and row garden. The adults are pretty slow moving so you can usually just pick them off and squish ’em. The nymphs and eggs are more of a problem. The nymphs get down near the base of the squash stems where you can’t get at them without damaging the plants and the eggs are firmly attached to the leaves so some leaf damage usually results when you try to smash them. We sprayed them with spinosad twice this week but they have still been a problem. We may have to switch to neem oil, especially on the eggs.

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.

This week has been harvest time in the veggie demo garden, especially in the row garden. In the past week we have harvested some kohlrabi, a few cherry tomatoes and 8-1/2 pounds of beans for donation to local food banks. We pulled the garlic and onions out of over two hundred feet of three to four foot wide rows. That’s a lot of garlic and onions. We are still curing the garlic. It should be ready for donation in a couple of weeks. We laid the onions out to dry such that the leaves of one plant cover the bulb of the one before it so that the bulbs aren’t directly exposed to the sun. Once the bulbs have dried sufficiently we will trim the tops and roots and donate them.

The pepper plants in the row garden were getting kind of windblown so we made cages for them out of remesh and anchored them firmly to keep the plants from falling over. We fertilized the peppers with an organic 6-2-2 fertilizer, worked in some agricultural molasses to feed the microbes and then mulched them heavily.

The recent rains have caused the weeds, especially the nutsedge, to try to take over the row garden. So we spent a lot of time weeding and trying to remove the nutsedge “nuts” so that it won’t come back.

In the raised beds we harvested several varieties of snap beans, white, orange, and purple carrots, red and white onions, artichokes, turnips, radishes, chard, kohlrabi, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers and one white eggplant.

We thinned some of the veggies in the raised beds and also pulled out more of the winter vegetables that were bolting (i.e., going to seed) or were just too damaged by insects to be worth harvesting. Pulling out the spent winter veggies left room to plant some new things. This week we put in scallopini and straightneck squash and in the culinary herb bed we added a tarragon plant. Some of the seeds that we had planted last week have failed to sprout, probably because the wind has dried the surface of the beds out. So we tried putting some light row cover over the seeds to act as mulch. Finally we fertilized the chard, kale, squash, tomatillos, Asian greens, mache, turnips and beets with a liquid fertilizer containing sea weed extract and fish emulsion.

We weeded most of the raised beds this week too. The raised bed area doesn’t seem to have the nutsedge problems that we see in the row garden, but there are plenty of other weeds to keep us busy.

Insects have become quite a problem in the last week or so. We have had problems with cucumber beetles for weeks and are still fighting them. Lately we have begun to see more stink bugs, of several types. We had a couple of brown stink bugs and a handful of leaf-footed bugs. This week we saw harlequin bugs ( https://insects.tamu.edu/images/insects/common/images/a-txt/aimg77.html ) in the garden for the first time. Nearly all of these stinkbugs are bad guys in the garden. They tend to attack tomatoes and other plants by feeding both on the fruit and also the young stems. We combat them by spraying with spinosad. If you have bugs in your garden which you cannot identify, you can contact the Williamson County AgriLife organization for help. However, you might be able to identify the insects yourself by consulting the Texas A&M Department of Entomology’s website at https://insects.tamu.edu/extension/insctans/identification/

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.

We got some much-needed rain this week and hope that all of our gardening friends got some as well.

Before the rain fell we spent some time in the perennial area working on our fig trees. Fig trees are native to central Texas and do well here. They don’t require a lot of care but they do need to be fed each spring, summer and fall and, as they are shallow-rooted, they need some mulch to protect the roots from our hot Texas sun. So we fed all the trees and extended the mulch on our Brown Turkey fig tree out to the drip line.

There was some produce ready for harvest this week. We pulled a lot of the garlic in the row garden but we have to dry it before we can donate it. The only thing we harvested from the raised beds this week was a few Red Dragon carrots. The artichokes are producing well and we have harvested a few of them over the last couple of weeks, but they are rather small and not really worth cooking. So we will probably let them go to flower because they produce a beautiful, almost iridescent, blue bloom.

We are still planting a few things. This week we planted tarragon and some other herbs in the culinary herb bed.

We sprayed spinosad on the beans and sweet potatoes because something has been eating them and we haven’t as yet been able to determine what it is. We also spent some time weeding the row garden. The downside of getting rain is that it makes the nutsedge and other weeds grow faster than usual. So we have been hard-pressed to keep up with them.

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.

With the weather looking a little better this week we removed the row-cover windbreaks we had put up last week in both the row garden and raised beds.

In the row garden we sprayed many of the plants with Spinosad to try to control a major invasion of cucumber beetles. Those little buggers will eat the blossoms off of many plants before pollination can occur. We had some plants were looking kind of peaked so we fertilized them with fish emulsion. As always, we spent some time trying to remove the nutsedge and other weeds in the row garden.

We’ve had a few cucumber beetles show up in the raised beds too, so we will probably spray for them there next week. We had our first sign of caterpillars on the tomatoes this week. We hand-picked them but if anymore show up next week we may have to hit them with BT.

In the raised beds we harvested cabbage, chard, turnips, spinach and sugar snap peas. We planted some red-veined sorrel to take the place of some of the winter crops that were pulled out. We also planted pentas in one of the beds to try to draw pollinators.

We removed more suckers from the tomatoes in the raised beds and fertilized them as well as some of the seedlings that have recently come up. We also hand-watered some of the transplants that were put in last week. In some of the beds we added micro-sprinklers to try to help the seeds to germinate.

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.

Record-breaking lows again this week! Mother Nature is definitely testing the veggie garden team’s resolve this spring. On the plus side we got three-tenths of an inch of rain which we were definitely in need of after the windy weather. The cold weather kept most of the gardeners home, but a few hardy souls showed up and, well fortified by hot coffee and cookies, tended to the tasks at hand.

We had some damage to the irrigation in the fig tree area. They are watered by quarter-inch drip line which looked as though it might have become entangled with a weed whacker. So we repaired those lines and tried to pin them down where they won’t get in the way of the lawn maintenance crew.

We have had windbreaks made of row cover wrapped around remesh cages around all of the tomatoes in the row garden. Normally we would remove them by this time of year, but the strong north winds have been such a problem that we not only left them in place, but also built windbreaks on most of the raised beds as well.

We didn’t harvest anything from the row garden this week, but we did pick some things in the raised bed area. We thinned the Daikan radishes and pulled out a few nice roots in the process. We also cut a handful of asparagus, although that is about done now. The strawberries have not been producing much this year but we got a few of them this week too.

We are still planting spring veggies. In the row garden we used a broadfork to loosen the soil in one row where we planted three kinds of sweet potatoes: Beauregard, Georgia Jet and Centennial. Sweet potatoes are a relative of morning glories and the tops of the plants are viney with trumpet-shaped flowers that look a lot like morning glory blossoms. They are planted from rooted cuttings called “slips”. When they are first planted they have very little in the way of roots and have to be kept moist. As you can imagine, that has been difficult this week. So, even though we mulched the row, we had to go out to the garden a couple of times this week to water the sweet potato slips. We are keeping our fingers crossed that they will make it. We also planted a twenty-foot row of zucchini this week but, as they were planted from seeds, we were less worried about the wind-dried soil having an impact on them.

We have pulled a lot of winter veggies out of the raised beds of late, so we have been replanting those with summer crops. We invigorated the soil by adding compost, cottonseed meal and a general organic fertilizer and planted three hills of “Trombetta di Abenga” squash in one bed. They are climbing squash so we will l have to make bamboo tripods for them after they have grown a bit. In another bed we planted two hills of “Lungo Bianco” zucchini. That is an Italian heirloom variety that grows on relatively compact bushes. We had previously planted “Lemon” cucumbers, a round variety that is yellow when ripe, but only one seed had sprouted. So we replanted them this week. Only one Armenian cucumber sprout made it as well, so we replaced those with “Heart of Gold” cantaloupe. After planting we mulched the hills, and the strawberries too, heavily and fertilized all of the new seedlings with a combination of fish emulsion and seaweed extract. We have been putting seaweed extract on all the plants during this changeable weather because we believe it helps them to survive the cold nights. We thought we might have to replant the “Sugar Baby” watermelons, which we intend to grow on a trellis because the fruits are cantaloupe-sized, but those seeds finally sprouted after we put the micro-sprinklers on that bed, so now we have half a dozen healthy plants.

In the culinary herb bed we replaced the flat leaf and curly parsley and marjoram that we pulled out last week.

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.

The unseasonable weather continues to add spice to our gardening lives this spring. Despite the challenges the team has persevered.

This week in the row garden we harvested some beautiful Jersey Wakefield cabbages for donation to The Caring Place. The cabbage is finished now and we intend to use that row for sweet potatoes soon. So we worked some compost into it after harvesting the cabbages. We cultivated the row where we are growing viney crops on trellises and added an irrigation line for a row that was recently added to the garden.

The tomatoes are big enough now that we needed to do some work on them this week. We’ve been removing suckers and lower foliage from the plants to try to increase airflow in order to discourage mildew and also to make the plants put their energy into creating fruit instead of foliage. This usually results in less fruit but what is produced is generally bigger and of better quality than if the plants are allowed to put their energy into creating foliage. After removing the suckers we fertilized and mulched the plants.

This week we planted bush beans, sunflowers, giant peanuts and straight and crookneck summer squash in the row garden. We also planted a chile piquin, which is a perennial that is sort of the granddaddy of all Texas peppers. Then we cleaned up some more nutsedge. That’s a never ending chore in the row garden.

The raised bed harvest this week included asparagus (which is doing great this year), a couple of varieties of chard, spinach, Red Sails lettuce (some of which surprised us by creating heads), one last cauliflower, peas, some onions, a few radishes and a handful of strawberries.

The rain this month has made the weeds grow like crazy. So we spent a good bit of time weeding the beds this week. We had Malabar spinach in several of the beds last year and it reseeded itself in them. The increased moisture this month has made the seeds sprout, so we went through and ruthlessly pulled most of them out before they took over the bed. Malabar spinach is a great summer green, but if it gets enough water it will take over an entire bed. Even though we grew it on trellises last year, it kept trying to take over the cherry tomato trellises which were located nearby.

We pruned the suckers from the tomatoes in the raised beds just as we did in the row garden. After pruning we gave them a foliar feeding with liquid organic fertilizer. We thinned the turnips and and other veggies that were too close together. We also pulled out some of the cool weather crops, such as lettuce, that had started to bolt (i.e., produce flowers and seed heads). Once that happens they usually get tough and bitter. As we pull out the winter crops we usually add compost and fertilizer and replace the winter veggies with summer crops such as squash and bush beans.

The aphids continue to be a big problem. We are reluctant to spray them because the ladybug larvae have been chowing down on them and several of them have started to pupate. So we have continued to use water sprays to treat for the aphids. Even so, they have destroyed several cruciferous veggies, especially the red cabbage, which they seem to prefer over the green. Something has been munching on the beans, but we haven’t been able to determine what it is. So we sprayed them with spinosad to try to keep the critters in check.

In the herb garden we removed the flat leaf and curly parsley because it had gotten too big and tasteless and we also removed a marjoram plant that we had previously transplanted and which just couldn’t come back from the transplant. The rosemary had grown quite large so we cut it back severely. We also pruned the scented geraniums and lemon verbena.

We expanded our perennial area by planting two pomegranate bushes. We ran irrigation lines to them from the fig tree area in order to help them get started. They should be able to survive without that by next year. While we were at it we changed the irrigation in the planting table from half-inch drip lines to micro sprinklers because the surface dried out so quickly that the seedlings have had a hard time getting water.

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.

The unusual weather conditions, with record low temperatures at least a month after the average date of last frost, continue to make this an interesting year for vegetable gardening in central Texas. If this is your first attempt at vegetable gardening in this area, don’t be discouraged. Even experienced central Texas vegetable gardeners have found this to be a challenging year for spring veggies. The low temperatures in the latter part of the week caught the veggie team by surprise and we had to scramble to cover tender plants to protect them from the cold. That effort seems to have been successful.

That’s more than can be said for our attempt to battle nut sedge in the row garden by solarizing the affected area. That just didn’t work real well for us. So we decided to do things the old fashioned, brute force way. We used garden forks, spades and other digging implements to dig out the nut sedge and consign it to the trash can. We never put things like that into the compost bin because, if the compost doesn’t heat up enough to destroy the weeds, then they will just sprout up everywhere we use the compost.

We were able to do a bit of harvesting in the raised beds this week. We picked some asparagus, lettuce, turnips, radishes and one head of cabbage. We fertilized the tomatoes and cut back some of the lower branches to aid in air circulation in an effort to avoid mildew. Then we hand-watered some of the newly planted seeds and seedlings. We also spent some time weeding the raised beds and cutting back the winter greens that were trying to go to seed.

In the row garden we harvested a few heads of cabbage. Then we planted some Soyu cucumbers because the Straight Eights that we planted a couple of weeks ago don’t look real good right now.

The aphids continue to be a major problem in both the row garden and some of the raised beds. We hit them with a strong jet of water again in hopes of dislodging the little buggers. If that doesn’t work we will have to resort to spinosad.

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.

Now that the garden fair is over for another spring we spent this week harvesting some of the winter plants. In the row garden we harvested cauliflower and broccoli and in the raised beds we harvested some cauliflower, chard and lettuce.

We planted hot peppers, golden wax beans, tomatillos, loofahs (gourds) and cantaloupe in the row garden. We also did some test plantings of several varieties of bush beans, some with inoculant, and some without. Then we fertilized the new plants with fish emulsion.

We planted, or replanted, beans, okra, onions and squash in the raised beds. We also divided our multiplying onions and fertilized the tomatoes and peppers with a combination of seaweed extract and fish oil emulsion.

Both the row garden and raised beds still have a lot of aphids. They have destroyed some of the cabbage in the raised beds, so we had to pull that out and throw it away. We sprayed Spinosad on them in the row garden and tried an organic spray with a mixture of essential oils on the aphids in the raised beds. Hopefully that will get them under control.

Some of the irrigation in the container area was not working properly and it was difficult to see what the problem was because we had piled leaves around the pots to help regulate their temperature. So we changed the irrigation in that area to make it more accessible and fixed the problem. We also fertilized the container plants with fish emulsion.

The demonstration garden is located north of the Williamson County Extension Office driveway at 3151 SE Innerloop Road, Georgetown, Texas. Master gardeners are usually at work in the vegetable garden on Tuesday and, sometimes, Friday mornings from 9:00 to 11:00. Anyone is welcome to stop by to see the garden or to ask questions of the master gardeners.