A terrific time was had by all at the Spring Garden Fair last Saturday. The weather was cloudy, windy and cold at first but got much more pleasant as the day progressed. We had a lot of visitors to the vegetable demonstration garden where we had demonstrations on composting, transplanting tomatoes, using herbs and building raised beds. We had herbal cookies, gave away a lot of tomato transplants, answered myriad horticulture questions and had a great time visiting with all the folks who stopped by.

We spent this week doing last minute cleanup and maintenance in the demo garden. The weather was crazy again and we lost some plants to the cold and and had a few more broken by the wind. On the plus side, we got over an inch and a half of much-needed rain.

The row garden crew was happy to see that the beans and cucumbers that were planted last week were up by the time of the fair. They have been fighting nut sedge in the rows and have now resorted to solarizing the areas that were worst hit. That gave us an opportunity to demonstrate solarization to the Garden Fair visitors, so we were able to make lemonade out of that lemon. We are worried that all of the commotion might have had a negative effect on the killdeer that have decided to nest in the row garden. We noticed that the nest which had had four eggs in it last week only has two now, and the mama bird was not happy with all of the company she got Saturday. Hopefully the two eggs that were left will hatch.

We ran out of remesh for tomato cages right before the fair so we spent an hour or so Friday building a matrix of bamboo poles to support some of the tomatoes in the raised bed area. It looks great, though, and should do the job for us when the tomato vines get a little bigger.

We are still having a lot of problems with aphids. We combat them by using a vigorous spray of water. One time won’t do it though. You have to spray them three or four times over the course of a week or so to get rid of them. So we did that in some really chilly, windy weather this week.

Many thanks to the whole master gardener crew who put on this year’s Spring Garden Fair and a special thanks to all of the folks who came to the ag office grounds to check the garden out, learn some things about gardening in Central Texas and take advantage of the native plant sale.

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. Be sure to come to the Garden Fair on April 6th for a great native plant sale, free seminars and fun for the whole family.

With less than a week to go until the big Spring Garden Fair and plant sale on Saturday, April 6th the veggie garden team has spent much of the last week sprucing things up and getting ready for the fair. We will have master gardeners available in the demo garden to demonstrate and discuss vegetable gardening subjects such as growing tomatoes from seed, composting, solarization and building raised beds.

To get ready for the fair visitors we have been putting down mulch between the rows in the row garden and also around the containers in the container garden so that, whether the weather is dry or damp, it will be easy for folks to walk through the garden. Weeding is a chore that we always do in the garden, but we have been at it a little more vigorously this week. We had some plants damaged by the late cold spell last week so we spent a bit of time feeding and trimming those plants and trying to make them healthy again. We have removed the floating row over from all of the plants except that which is used as a wind break around the tomato cages in the row garden.

Despite the fact that we tend to mulch our garden heavily, the windy weather this spring has been drying out the surface of the ground in both the row garden and raised beds. In the raised beds this has caused us to have a low germination rate for things we planted from seed. We tried several different methods of combating this problem, but the only thing that seems to work well is to ensure that the surface of the beds stay damp until the seedlings are big enough so their roots can reach the water from the drip irrigation. So we have been adjusting the mulch and tweaking the irrigation system in an attempt to accomplish this. This week we added another drip tape to the row garden and some micro-sprinklers to one of the raised beds.

Our only harvest this week was a few heads of broccoli, some asparagus and some greens from our winter planting.

In the row garden we finished installing cattle panel trellises, including one that is really an arbor. We plan to plant vining veggies on these trellises and have already begun to do so. This week we planted four varieties of cucumbers and two of pole beans. In the raised beds we planted some Straight Eight cucumbers. We’ve had a lot of volunteer Malabar spinach coming up in the beds where we grew it last summer. So we have been pulling some of it out and letting the seedlings near the ends of the beds grow. When they get big enough we will put trellises on the ends of those beds to contain the vines.

We hope that you will come to our garden fair and plant sale to see the fruits of our labors… and the veggies of our labors too!

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 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. Be sure to come to the Garden Fair on April 6th for a great native plant sale, free seminars and fun for the whole family.

It’s less than two weeks until the Garden Fair and plant sale on Saturday, April 6th. We hope you are planning to join us and see what’s growing in the veggie demo garden.

It was pretty much seasonal or warmer than usual for most of this week, but the forecast for the coming week includes a warning of a possible late freeze. So, in addition to our normal gardening activities, late in the week we prepared for the cold spell.

In the row garden we harvested twenty-seven pounds of kale, spinach and lettuce and donated the produce to The Caring Place. That was the last of those winter crops so we amended those rows and another one where we have installed cattle panel as a trellis to get them ready to plant beans, cucumbers and other warm weather crops. We planted one of those rows with Contender bush beans.

We sprayed Spinosad on some of the rows to try to combat aphids and other insects that have been feeding on the plants. Another problem that we have been fighting in the row garden is an invasion of nutsedge. So we put some clear plastic down in the area of concern to solarize it and, hopefully, kill off the nutsedge.

In the raised bed area we spent some time sprucing things up for the Garden Fair. We made new plant labels for those plants which still had temporary labels that had been used to mark them when they were planted. Then we trimmed the grass and weeded around the beds and container area. The grass had made an especially bad encroachment on the pole bean bed and, after spending a great deal of time weeding that area, we decided that we will have to install some sort of edging around this ground-level bed to keep the grass out. While we were weeding we discovered some leaks in the drip line, so we repaired them as well.

We continue to hand-water the new transplants and seedlings as the strong winds this spring keep blowing the mulch around and drying out the ground over the seed beds. Most of the cool weather seeds have sprouted now and are doing well, although their roots aren’t yet long enough to reach the water from the drip lines. Some of them are coming up rather thickly. In most cases we have thinned them but this week we transplanted some of the carrots that were too thick just to see if that would work. The warm weather seeds are starting to sprout now too. We have some bean sprouts up as well as a few squash and cucumbers. We put in some more transplants this week. We planted tomatoes and peppers in the containers. In one of the raised beds reserved for nightshade plants this year we put in transplants of peppers and eggplant. In another bed we have been doing companion planting. This week we planted petunias (a companion for beans) in that bed.

Insects have been a problem in the raised beds already. We’ve had to use a strong water spray to get aphids off the cauliflower. A tomato hornworm had eaten parts of some of the recent transplants. On some of the other tomatoes, the edges of the leaves were a little black. We weren’t able to determine the cause of that problem, so we picked off the leaves which were black on the edges, added some more compost, watered them and readjusted the mulch.

In addition to the new season’s plantings, we still have plenty of veggies from last season, such as lettuce and other greens, that are doing well.

The herbs, both perennials and recently planted annuals, are also looking good. So we will have parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme for the Spring Garden Fair.

Because of the high winds this weekend and the forecast of a late frost, we fertilized and watered the plants late in the week and covered as many as we could with a mulch of dry leaves. The wind had beaten some of the transplants down pretty well before we got there, so we may have to replant a few of 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 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. Be sure to come to the Garden Fair on April 6th for a great native plant sale, free seminars and fun for the whole family.

Three weeks til the big Garden Fair and Plant Sale! The veggie demo garden team is working furiously to get things ready for the big day.

The weather this past week has been typically crazy with everything from nearly a freeze to record highs. We’re being optimistic that there won’t be anymore frosts this spring so we’ve removed most of the row cover except for that which is intended to act as a windbreak for tender new plants.

We have harvested some produce this week, mostly in the row garden where we picked lettuce, kale and spinach and delivered it to The Caring Place. Our only harvest from the raised beds this week has been asparagus, which isn’t producing a lot of spears, but is producing them steadily.

We’ve also been planting transplants and seeds and tending new seedlings in almost every part of the garden.

In the row garden we weeded around the perimeter, applied compost to all the existing plants and then mulched them and fertilized them with fish oil emulsion. We prepared a row for planting tomatoes and then made 25 cages out of remesh and covered the circumference with row cover to block the wind. Then we planted 20 tomato plants including: early girl, celebrity, viva Italia, snow white, memotaro, bella rosa, sun gold, juliet, beduin, black prince, old German, porter, purple clash, and Cherokee purple. After planting we fertilized the plants with worm castings, watered them, and then installed the cages.

In the herb beds we have cut back the oregano and rosemary and planted holy, cinnamon, Thai, purple and Italian large leaf basil; Russian oregano; lemon thyme; nutmeg, attar of rose and orange scented geraniums; pineapple sage; and Goodwin creek grey lavender. For some reason the culinary herb bed seems to appeal to garter snakes because we have run across several of them there in the past week or two, and a few in the other beds as well. We usually just move them gently out of the way and leave them in the general vicinity of the beds to do their insect control thing.

We planted the pole bean bed with three kinds of pole beans. We also ran some irrigation to the African Blue basil that we had planted in the middle of the pole bean bed last week as a draw for pollinators.

The row covers had been coming loose in the high winds and the loose covers whipping in the wind scrubbed out some of the things we had previously planted. So we replanted spacemaster bush cucumber and greyzinni squash in the planting bed.

In the remaining raised beds we have planted the following things in the last week or so: mesclun, bronze fennel, purple Osaka mustard, parsley, cilantro, several varieties of radishes, daikon radish, white and purple kohlrabi, carnival and dragon carrots, corn salad, Italian lettuce, golden and yellow beets, several varieties of tomatoes, edamame, Roma beans, peppers and marigolds.

Some of the plants which seemed not to have sprouted have apparently just been waiting for warmer nights because this week saw the appearance of mache and kale sprouts that have been overdue for nearly two weeks. Some of the other seedlings, such as turnips, chard and even some Red Russian kale, have gotten big enough that we have had to thin them this week. We are glad to see that the sprouts have finally poked through the ground. We have been hand-watering the seeds for several weeks in an effort to try to keep the ground from crusting over and making it difficult for them to poke their heads above the surface.

We’ve done a lot of work over the last several months, but there is more to do before the Garden Fair. Stop by on April 6th and see our handiwork.

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 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.

There are only four weeks left until the big Garden Fair and Plant Sale! So we have been working twice a week in an effort to get the garden ready for the big day.

The wind has continued to bedevil us this week. The high winds last Tuesday ripped some of the row covers to shreds so we will have to replace them. They also made it impossible for us to plant. So we spent much of that day doing bed maintenance and weeding the row garden and perennial areas. We hand-watered many of the beds, especially those that have been recently planted with seeds. The wind has been so strong that we may have lost some of the seeds and may need to replant.

We did harvest a good bit of lettuce from the row garden this week so we were able to make a delivery to The Caring Place. We also pulled some radicchio out of the planting table. There wasn’t enough to donate, so we divided it up among the folks who were hardy enough to brave the 40 mph wind gusts.

The weather was better later in the week and we got a lot more done. We harvested some radishes, lettuce and other salad greens from the raised beds and planting table. In the row garden we cultivated and weeded all the rows and added more drip line to the irrigation system.

With the wind at a more normal level we were able to amend several of the raised beds and to plant seeds that would have blown away earlier in the week. We put a heavy layer of compost as well as molasses and cottonseed meal on the beds where most of the nightshade plants (tomatoes, peppers and eggplant) will live this summer. We try to rotate the nightshade plants between the beds each year to make it more difficult for the crawling insects and nematodes that like nightshade plants to attack them.

Last week we had divided and transplanted several herbs in the culinary bed. This week we gave the herb beds a dose of compost, molasses and cottonseed meal as well.

We planted beets, mustard, radishes, Asian greens, beans, squash, cucumbers and watermelon from seed. We also put in some tomato transplants. We had planted several veggies from seed over the last two weeks. Some of them seem to be making it and some not so much. We have seedlings of turnips, Asian greens, chard, beets and kohlrabi poking through the ground now. However, some of the chard as well as the mache and kale have failed to make an appearance. These plants have small seeds and it is possible that the high winds over the last week and a half have blown them away.

After planting we fed everything with liquid fertilizer containing fish oil and seaweed extract and then hand-watered the seeds and transplants.

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 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 continued to spend a good bit of time on irrigation projects this week. We usually try to test the irrigation system this time of year when there is not a lot of planting going on in the garden. We did that this week and discovered several problems. We had a few leaks and the emitters in some of the quarter-inch lines had become clogged with calcium. We replaced the lines we weren’t able to fix and repaired the leaks. After more than two weeks of work we think we have the system in shape for the upcoming gardening season.

The weather has been a problem for us, as it often is this time of year. We have covered some of the raised beds with row cover to protect young seedlings from the cold nights but the recent windy weather has been blowing the covers loose. In addition, the wind has dried out the areas where we have newly-planted seeds, so we have had to hand-water frequently in order to keep the soil damp enough so that the seeds can germinate and break through the surface.

Much of the work we have done in the garden lately has been to prepare for our Spring Garden Fair on April 6th. We have been working diligently to remove the nut sedge and other weeds from the row garden and to cover the paths between the rows with a heavy layer of mulch in an effort to keep the weeds from coming back. In the culinary herb bed we pulled out some of the larger herbs, such as the garden sage (salvia officinalis), divided them and replanted some of the smaller divisions. That’s a lot of work because some of these herbs can grow quite large and they usually have an extensive root system which requires a lot of digging to remove.

Some of the winter and early spring plants are beginning to bear now. We have been picking kale from the row garden off and on all winter and will continue to do so until the weather becomes quite warm. The asparagus is beginning to sprout now and we have harvested small quantities for the last week and a half. Based on its performance last year, we expect the number of sprouts to increase a good bit over the next two or three weeks. The strawberries are developing fruit now too. There was only one red-ripe berry this week, but it looks as though there will be more in the next week or two.

The beginning of March is the time of the average date of last frost in our area. So we will start planting the early summer crops such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, beans and squash, although it is likely that we will have to keep them under row cover for much of this month to guard against damage from a late frost before the Garden Fair.

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 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 had to upgrade the irrigation lines on one of our 5×20 beds this week so last Tuesday morning we ran a little impromptu hands-on class in drip irrigation for some of the veggie garden team members who wanted to get more experience in that area. It was a little chilly for plumbing work, but all who were interested got to lend a hand in the upgrade and we all felt that it was a positive experience despite the weather.

We worked in the garden Friday morning too, but the cold weather kept the crew to a minimum of hardy souls. Despite the relentless cold north wind that assaulted us all morning we got quite a bit done. In the row garden we started installing trellises made of cattle panel held up with t-stakes. They are sturdy and we will use them to grow viney crops so that we can get more plants in less ground space than we would if we let the vines sprawl. Hopefully that will allow us to donate even more produce this year than we did last year.

In the raised bed area we harvested the last of the collards to make room for new plantings to mature in time for our garden fair on April 6th. To that end also we prepared a bed for tomatoes and began planting veggies in the 5×20 bed where we had installed the new drip lines earlier in the week. We planted Asian greens, baby pak choi, Jewel Tone beets, Tokyo Cross and Purple Top turnips and mache. That last item is a winter green (also called “corn salad”) that we have never planted before. Like chard, mache is supposed to last longer into the warm weather than greens like lettuce and kale. We decided to try it to see if that is true. We also planted some additional veggies from seed in the other 5×20 bed. We already had chard transplants there but we added two additional varieties from seed: Scarlett Charlotte and Pot ‘o Gold. We also planted Red Russian and Tuscan kale. Then we added two kinds of mizuna and some Purple Osaka mustard. The strong winds of late will make it a challenge to keep the seeds damp until they have sprouted and have sufficient roots to reach the water from the drip lines, so we put some row cover on the north side of the bed to act as a wind break.

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 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.

Today you get a twofer: two weeks worth of garden diary info compressed into one entry.

We had uncooperative weather again the past couple of weeks; but that’s par for the course in Central texas this time of year, and the veggie garden team pushed on through the storm (well crazy weather anyway).

In the row garden we amended a row in preparation for planting tomatoes next month after the average date of last frost. Unfortunately, weeds don’t really care about frosts and are already starting to show in the row garden. Nut sedge has been especially bad this spring and we have been trying to keep it under control so that it doesn’t become a worse problem for us later in the year. It is worst in the area between the rows so we are taking steps to get more mulch laid down there.

Both nut sedge and Bermuda grass have been problematic in the raised beds. We have been pulling them out by the roots and preparing most of the beds for planting with spring veggies after the average date of last frost. We’re not quite there yet, since the average frost-free date here is in early March, but we did plant some late winter/early early spring veggies in the raised beds. We have planted peas ( a couple of times, since they didn’t make the first time), as well as marigolds (for companion planting), spinach, chard, lettuce, cabbage, radishes and onions. This has made it necessary to hand-water many of the veggies and seedlings until they get established. In fact, we are going to change the irrigation system in a couple of the beds this coming week, so hand-watering is all the water those beds have received except for a little rain. In order to help the beds retain moisture between watering, we have mulched several of them with pine straw. A lot of the seedlings have needed thinning the past couple of weeks, so we’ve spent some time doing that. We’ve also fertilized many of the seedlings. In addition, we have prepared a bed for tomatoes by working in some fertilizer and granular molasses.

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 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 weather has been kind of crazy as it often is this time of year. Never-the-less, the demo garden crew has accomplished a lot over the last week or so. Some of the folks working the garden this month are new to vegetable gardening. So the more experienced veggie gardeners have been conducting some impromptu training. We discussed soil samples and how to send them into Texas A&M to get an analysis of the garden soil before adding amendments. We also discussed drip irrigation and showed some of the new folks how we use it in the garden. Finally, and this is a good news/bad news story, because aphids, cucumber beetles and leaf-footed bugs have appeared in the garden earlier than usual this year, we have been able to show those critters to the new folks so they will know that they are pests in the garden and need to be contained if we are to have a decent harvest.

Speaking of harvesting, we did harvest some produce this week. We had been nursing some red cabbage and multiple varieties of cauliflower along in the raised beds all through January, but they had finally become so mature that we had to harvest them. Most of the collards and kohlrabi had so much aphid damage that we decided to remove them. We pulled most of the remaining Brussels sprouts as well. Some of them were beyond the point where they should be harvested and others were just in the way of where we need to plant new veggies for the upcoming season. We harvested some rainbow chard, but we left some Fordhook giant chard in the bed for harvesting in the not too distant future. We are pretty much done harvesting in the raised beds for now, except for the chard and “cut and come again” greens like mesclun. We cut some kale in the row garden and delivered three grocery bags of it to The Caring Place. We may be able to harvest some lettuce before long too.

We did more cleanup in both the row garden and raised beds. In the row garden we cultivated three rows and amended them with compost, horse manure and molasses. We dug a trench in another row and then dug in a mixture of several kinds of sand along with some coarse mulch. We are going to plant potatoes in this row soon and they don’t like to have wet feet, so we wanted to make sure that the row drains well. Then we planted several rows with red and green cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi and red onions. We sprayed all of the existing veggies with Spinosad in an effort to combat the invasion of cucumber beetles.

We worked on the irrigation system in the raised bed area, replacing a splitter valve and removing the irrigation system from one of the beds in preparation for upgrading it in the near future. We also put new batteries in all of the battery-operated timers in both the row garden and raised beds. We amended several of the raised beds with compost, pulled weeds, trimmed back some overgrown arugula and planted carrots, peas and cauliflower.

We’ve been working on the compost bins the past week. We emptied all of the usable compost from the three-bin system last week and this week we started some new compost by chopping up garden refuse and putting it in the starter bin along with some high-nitrogen fertilizer.

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 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 are working in the veggie demo garden twice a week these days in order to get things ready for early spring planting and the garden fair in the first week in April. This week we continued our efforts in both the raised beds and row garden. We also spent a good bit of time working on our compost area.

We have three types of compost bins in the garden these days. The simplest bin is one that uses a flexible material sort of like the material that is put under roofing shingles. It is formed into a cylinder about three feet in diameter and about that high and held in place with T-stakes. The advantage of that type of composter is that is it inexpensive and easy to construct. The downside is that it is difficult to turn the compost and to remove the completed compost. For that reason, ours has been sitting, unturned, for nearly a year. This week we pulled the bin off of the pile and discovered that we had several wheelbarrow loads of really good compost inside. We used all of it to amend the row garden.

Recently one of the master gardeners donated a used two-bin tumbler composter. This is basically a drum with a frame that allows you to turn the drum over with a crank. That allows you to aerate the compost with very little effort. We have only recently begun to add material to this bin, so we haven’t yet produced any compost from it. This week we topped up the contents with some green material that we obtained by cleaning up the frost damaged plants.

Our major compost system is a three-bin system that eliminates the need to turn the compost. The way it is intended to be used is that new material is placed in one of the end bins. We use the left bin for this. Although the material in the first bin can be pretty coarse, it is best to shred or chop it before putting it in the bin. After that material has worked for awhile, we move it to the center bin. The process of moving the material automatically aerates it so that eliminates turning. If it looks at this stage as though the compost isn’t working very well, we add some high nitrogen material (e.g., cottonseed meal) at this step in order to make the compost heat up. When the compost in the center bin is pretty well decomposed, we move it to the other end bin. In our case that’s the right-hand bin. When we need to use compost, we take it from that bin. Over the course of the year new material ends up getting put into the wrong bins and sometimes things like live oak leaves that don’t break down easily get added to the mix, so about once or twice a year we have to do a reset to get things back in order. That’s what we did this week. We took all of the good compost out of the right-hand bin and used it to amend the row garden. Then we loosened up the compost from the other bins, moved it to the center bin and added some cottonseed meal to start it working. We have a lot of material to add to the left-hand bin and are working on chopping and shredding it so that we can get things started working there.

We spent a lot of effort this week weeding the row garden, turning the soil and amending it to get ready to plant in the next couple of weeks. We cleaned up the rest of the freeze damage, thinned the spinach and lettuce, and planted onions, and leeks. We planted 4 varieties of onions: Texas Super Sweet 1015Y, Texas Legend (an improved variety of 1015Y, available only to mail order patrons), Texas Early white and Southern Belle red. The variety of leeks we planted is called Lancelot. We also rototilled several new rows and tested and repaired the irrigation system.

In the raised beds we harvested cauliflower, cabbage, Daikon radish, kale and bok choi. We amended some of the beds, cleaned up more freeze damage and planted radishes, carrots , and lettuce. We also did some irrigation work.

Although we had some cold weather over the last several weeks, it hasn’t seemed to bother the insects much. We spotted a lot of cucumber beetles in the row garden as well as a few mature leaf-footed bugs. So we sprayed the beds with Spinosad to try to kill them off.

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 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.