It has been a month since we have been able to do any work in the veggie demonstration garden besides simply checking to see what kind of damage the cold weather has wrought. This week we were finally able to get out and do some work.

Most of the raised beds were protected with frost cover during the last month or so. That’s always a good news/bad news thing. On the plus side, most of the veggies in those beds survived the cold snaps and Northers that blew in over the last month. On the other hand, the warmth that the frost covers provided made it possible for some cabbage loopers and army worms to survive the freeze. So we had some damage from those critters.

We raised the frost covers on the raised beds and pinned them up where it will be easy to drop them back down over the beds if we get another freeze. Then we got to work removing the spent and damaged plants and harvesting those that were ready. We were able to harvest a variety of greens, many of them from the planting table, and some from the more conventional raised beds. We also harvested most of the Brussels sprouts and cauliflower. There were a few beets that had gotten so big that they needed to be pulled as well. The collards were doing a little too well. They had grown so big that they overwhelmed the beds in which they were planted. So we decided to pull them out to make room for new transplants.

We had planted bunching onions in a 4×4 bed along with some Asian greens and Daikon radishes. The onions did well during the cold weeather so we decided to divide them, harvesting some and replanting others. All of the mizuna was killed by insects, so we pulled it out.

The cold snap also killed the sugar snap peas. That’s something that none of us had ever seen happen before and we aren’t quite sure why it happened. The vines on the north side died first so we think it might have been the cold north wind that did it, or maybe it was just the rapid change from unseasonably warm temperatures to very cold nights. In any case we had to clear out the dead peas. We will either replant them soon or wait until it is warm enough to plant beans or some other suitable vining plant on the trellis. All of the material that we pulled out, except that which is infected with insect eggs, will be used to make compost.

We cut back the asparagus this week and fed it with a thick layer of compost. Based on last year’s production, we expect to have a lot of sprouts again this year. Most of the culinary herbs, except the tender plants like basil, did well uncovered during the last month. We cleaned up that bed a bit and cut many of the herbs back because they have grown quite large and some of them had winter burn on the tips.

In the row garden we did some weeding, especially in the area around the spinach and kale, and loosened up the soil in one of the new rows. Then we ran some irrigation lines to that row and planted four parallel rows of onions in it. The garlic that we had planted late last fall is up and doing well. It was not damaged by the frost. We did have a lot of frost and caterpillar damage to the cabbage and similar crops. So we harvested the last of the Jersey Wakefield cabbage and the few remaining kohlrabi and donated them. Then we pulled out the rest of the cabbage plants, which were too damaged to produce.

Since the cold weather doesn’t seem to have killed off the caterpillars, we sprayed all of the raised beds and the whole row garden with BT to kill them off.

We will spend much of the next two or three months getting ready for our Spring Garden Fair in early April. By that time we expect to have a good mix of winter and early spring veggies growing in the demo garden.

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.

I’m not sure, but maybe it was Rodale who said that the best laid plans of mice and gardeners often go awry. In any case, that’s what happened to the veggie demo garden this past week. We had anticipated freezing weather and had wrapped most of the tender plants that we wanted to keep in frost cover. Unfortunately, the weather got colder than we expected and we had damage not only to the tender late summer and early fall plants, but also to some of the brassicas and other plants that we thought would ride out the cold with no need for cover.

None of the row garden plants were covered. Some escaped the frost unscathed while others died right down to the ground.

We had wrapped the Juliet tomatoes in the raised beds with frost cover in an effort to protect them because they were covered with fruit. Even though they were covered, they succumbed to the cold, as did all of the nightshade plants.

Not all of the veggies were hit by the frost. We covered many of the raised beds. We also covered the planting table. As you can see in this picture, all of the veggies in the planting table survived, even though it’s raised construction means that it gets cold wind not only across the top of the veggies, but also under and all around them. Even in the covered raised beds we saw some damage to plants like kohlrabi, which we were sure would withstand the cold and almost didn’t cover.

Some of the perennials were damaged by the frost as well. All of the fig trees except the Brown Turkey sustained some damage. The globe artichokes, which we expected would be hit by the frost, looked great. That was a nice surprise. We were also surprised to see that the asparagus, which looks like it would really be a tender perennial, had hardly been damaged at all.

Although a lot of the work effort this week was spent in pulling out the plants that were killed by the frost, we had a big turn out in the garden on our Tuesday morning workday so we were able to spend some time harvesting crops from both the row garden and the raised beds. We took an estimated fifty pounds of produce to The Caring Place this week. We donated three kinds of cauliflower: Snow Crown (white), Cheddar (yellow) and one large head of purple Graffiti.

One of the master gardeners who has horses on her property donated a truckload of manure, which we were glad to get. The row garden crew spent a good bit of their time spreading the manure, as well as some cottonseed meal and molasses, on the new rows that we intend to plant soon.

Here are a couple of pictures of the veggie folks at work in the row garden and raised beds.

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 finally got some cold weather, so the activity in the garden this week has been focused on preparing for that.

We harvested 13 heads of Jersey Wakefield cabbage (47 pounds worth) from the row garden and picked all of the red tomatoes from the row garden and raised beds and donated the produce to The Caring Place.

The raised beds experienced some insect problems before the cold front hit. There were leaf-footed bug nymphs on the Juliet and Celebrity tomatoes in the raised garden. We hit them with a homemade solution of a little bit of canola oil and a little blue Dawn mixed with water in a spray bottle. That seems to clog up their spiracles and the little buggers turn belly up within 30 seconds after it hits ‘em. There were army worms on the mizuna and Purple Osaka mustard this week. These are caterpillars of a small, gray moth. When they are present, they are there in large numbers. They can strip a mesclun bed overnight and they will migrate en masse from one food source to another. That’s why they are called army worms. In any case, being caterpillars, they are susceptible to BT. So, after picking off and squishing as many caterpillars as we could, we sprayed the affected plants with BT.

To prepare for the cold we wrapped the big Juliet tomato vines and several other large plants in the raised beds with heavy row cover (also called “frost cover”) and completely covered a few of the other beds that had veggies in them that we were worried would be killed by a light frost. Then we turned off the irrigation and wrapped the standpipes with an insulating material.

Hopefully most of the garden will survive the cold weather. We will find out next 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 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 is the fourth and final part of the Williamson County Master Gardener Association veggie demo garden team’s 2012 spring and summer garden experience. This part covers our experience with herbs and some other things that weren’t discussed in the previous posts.

Herbs

Most herbs are perennials in this area. We have had culinary herbs planted in a mound bed for some time but this year we decided to divide one of our 5×20-ft raised beds in two and grow scented herbs in one half of it. We planted all of them from transplants. They included many scented geraniums: Citronella, Coconut, Peppermint, Lime, Lemon, Ginger, Robert’s Lemon Rose and Atomic Rose. We also planted curry plant, lemon balm, penneyroyal, peppermint, green santolina, Pineapple sage and caraway.

The scented geraniums all did pretty well. We had problems with a tent caterpillar of some sort which nearly destroyed the penneyroyal, peppermint and lemon balm. Repeated sprayings of BT finally got them under control, but the plants were severely weakened and took a long time to recover. The Pineapple sage and a couple of the geraniums died before we figured out that they were getting too much water. The bed has a single irrigation system and, when we increased the amount of water during the summer in order to make the veggie half of the bed happy, it drowned the roots of the herbs, which do not like a lot of water. We finally resolved the problem by splitting the supply such that the veggie side of the bed uses ½-in drip line and the herb side uses ¼-in. That seems to have worked, but not until after we had lost three or four plants.

Although most of the culinary herbs are perennials, some of them are annuals, which die when the first frost hits this area. So we planted some annual herbs from transplants in the culinary herb bed too. The plants we added were: stevia, cilantro, Leaf celery, curly parsley, and Italian parsley. We also added some additional perennials: Lemon thyme, salad burnet, onion chives and lavender Grosso. All did well, although the stevia died back to the ground in early fall. It can sometimes overwinter if the weather is mild, so we’ll see what happens with it come spring.

The Planting Table

This year we planted some veggies in a planting table. This is a table that contains about a foot of growing medium and is designed to allow a wheel-chair to fit under the table while the user is tending to the plants. In early spring we filled it with a planting medium that we concocted ourselves using compost and other amendments that we had on hand and installed ¼-in drip line for irrigation. We planted a variety of fairly small plants including tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and cucumbers. This didn’t work out well for us. The planting medium did not hold water well and the ¼-in line didn’t deliver enough water to the plants. In addition, we had problems with cutworms and other insect pests. Eventually all of the plants died without producing any harvest.

In the fall we made some changes to the planting table. We removed the top six inches of planting medium and replaced it with a commercial potting soil designed to hold moisture and release it over a long period of time. We also replaced the ¼-in drip line with ½-in line. Then we planted veggies from seed which were a little more appropriate for the shallow soil. We planted: Golden and Baby Ball beets, Watermelon and Hailstone radishes, Monet’s Garden and Paris Market Mix mesclun and Rouge deVerne radicchio, all from seed . We also planted Galactic lettuce from transplants. That made a lot of difference in the results. We harvested a lot of greens as well as several of the root crops. They all did very well.

Melange

This section is just a catch-all for a few items that didn’t fit into any of the sections above.

We grew quite a variety of plants in containers this year. In the early spring we used the same planting medium in the containers that we made up for the planting table. It worked a lot better in the containers and all of the plants that we put in did well until the hottest part of the summer. When we reached those very hot days it became apparent that the planting medium wasn’t holding enough water to keep the plants happy. So in the fall we switched to the commercial potting soil that we used in the planting table. We also ran an experiment where we planted two containers of exactly the same size with exactly the same combination of Purple Top turnips, Golden beets and Carnival Blend carrots. In one container we used nothing but potting soil. In the other we used potting soil cut by half with coarse mulch to promote drainage. We wanted to see if the potting soil would rot the roots of the root crops in the container. What we discovered is that the plants did much better in the container with just the potting soil in it. So our recommendation is to use potting soil when planting veggies in containers.

There was a mention in a previous post of using African Blue basil to attract pollinators. We have found that this variety of basil does not die after it produces flowers but keeps on producing blossoms throughout the spring, summer and fall. The bees seem to love it and it has worked very well for us in that respect. However, this variety of basil is a vigorous grower and will soon form a large bush that can take over the garden. If you should use it to attract pollinators to your own garden, you might want to plant it in a landscape bed close to your vegetable garden or else prune it once or twice a month to keep it under control.

This is part three of the Williamson County Master Gardener Association veggie demo garden team’s 2012 spring and summer garden experience. This part discusses our experience with veggies that we planted in late summer and fall.

You can grow vegetables for all twelve months of the year in central Texas. So we are constantly pulling out spent veggies and planting new ones. This section of the garden annal really addresses the last half of the year. So, for the purpose of this document, late summer starts around July, when fall tomatoes are planted in this area, and fall includes the planting period from around September through the end of the year.

With the exception of the cherry varieties, most tomatoes quit setting fruit when the nighttime temperature is consistently above 60 degrees. After that the only yield is of the ripening fruit that was already on the vines when the temperature increased. Central Texas gardeners handle this situation in several different ways. Some just leave the plants in the ground because they know that, once the nights begin to cool off, the plants will start to blossom again. Others cut the vines back because they have often become large and unwieldy and are usually damaged by insects and disease by midsummer. Many gardeners simply pull the spring tomatoes out and put in new transplants in late July or early August. We did all of those things in the garden this year.

Most of the spring tomatoes in the row garden were spent by the end of summer. However, the Sun Gold lasted into November.

We left several of the heirloom tomatoes in the raised beds until the first cold spell when it looked as though we might get a frost. The plants had a few blossoms and a few green tomatoes on them at that time. We were worried that they might be damaged by a frost and they were too big to cover, so we picked the green tomatoes and pulled the plants out. After that the only summer tomatoes in the garden were a Cherokee Purple that had no fruit but a few blossoms and a Better Bush in a container which had about half a dozen green fruits on it. We decided to leave them in and hope that the first frost would be late.

We also planted a couple of Juliet and Celebrity tomatoes in late summer. The vines, especially of the Juliet, got quite large over the next few months and they were heavily laden with fruit when the first cold snap came. For that reason we concentrated all of our efforts on protecting those plants from the cold. That worked for us and we harvested tomatoes from those plants until past Thanksgiving.

We pulled out the Holy Mole and Costeno Amarillo pepper plants in early November because they had no more blossoms on them and we needed the space for winter plants. We left the Yellow Bell pepper in because it had fruit on it that looked as though it would ripen soon. We also left the TAM Jalapeno and Hungarian Wax peppers in their containers because they were still producing.

Most of the eggplants produced until late in the year, so we left the plants in the ground right into early December.

For the most part, though, we removed the late spring and summer plants from the raised beds and replaced them with fall and winter plants beginning around late September.

We planted a 4×4 raised bed with Italian vegetables. They included: transplants of garlic chives from one of our other raised beds, as well as transplants of an unknown variety of cherry tomato that popped up in another bed, garlic, Tuscana kale and Smoky Bronze fennel. From seed we planted: radicchio, Heirloom Italian lettuce, Rustic arugula, Blanca Riccia endive, broccoli raab and Red Russian kale. All have done well except for the radicchio, which takes awhile to come up and has been overwhelmed by faster-growing veggies, such as the broccoli raab.

We planted another 4×4 bed with mostly Asian veggies. The only non-Asian vegetable we put in that bed was Woody’s Special Centex Multiplying onions. When we put them in we thought they were bunching onions, but that does not appear to be the case. Whatever they are, they are doing well. The other transplants we put in that bed were jol choi and tatsoi. The things we planted from seed in the Asian veggie bed included White-Stemmed pak choi, Green Fortune Baby pak choi, Mei Qing Choi pak choi, Napa Monument Chinese cabbage and Miyashi White Daikon radishes. The Chinese cabbage seems to have been overwhelmed by the various varieties of pak choi but everything else has done well and we have harvested them throughout the late fall and early winter.

The other raised beds have been planted with a variety of fall and winter veggies from both seeds and transplants. All have done well unless noted otherwise below. Here’s the variety list:

Radishes (seed): French Breakfast, Easter Egg II, Sparkler, Hailstone, Watermelon. Many have been picked already as they are ready in about four weeks. So we are constantly replanting them.

Carrots (seed): Circus Circus, Little Finger, Carnival Blend.

Beets (seed): Baby Ball, Chiogga, Golden, Jewel-Toned Red, Gold & Candy-Stripe.

Turnips (seeds): Tokyo Cross. Some of these have been picked already and will be replanted.

Broccoli (transplants): Packman. This veggie is producing nicely but will probably be replanted before long.

Brussels sprouts (transplants): Jade Cross.

Cauliflower (transplants): Cheddar, Grafitti, Veronica Romanesco, Snow Crown. The Snow Crown has produced a couple of heads. As they are harvested, the plants have to be removed and replaced because they only produce one head each. The Cheddar and Graffiti are starting to head up, but the Veronica Romanesco hasn’t started to form a head yet.

Collards (transplants). We don’t know the variety of this veggie, but it is already producing.

Cabbage (transplants): Ruby Perfection.

Kohlrabi (seeds): purple and white Vienna. The kohlrabi is producing already and will have to be replaced because only one kohlrabi is produced per plant.

Lettuce (transplants): Flashy Troutback, Red Sails. These lettuces will soon be replaced because they are going to seed.

Mesclun (seeds): Paris Market Mix. This is a “cut and come again” variety that will produce all winter.

Other greens (seeds): purple and green mizuna, Purple Osaka mustard, Runway and Rustic arugula, Pot of Gold, Scarlet Charlotte and Fordhook White chard, broccoli raab. We are harvesting all of these greens, which should produce all winter long.

In the row garden we planted several varieties of garlic including Lortz Italian, Inchellium Red, Thai Fire and Romanian Red. We also planted kohlrabi, Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage, cauliflower, kale, Paris Romaine lettuce, Bloomsdale Longstanding spinach, carrots and Detroit Dark Red beets.

This is part two of the Williamson County Master Gardener Association veggie demo garden team’s 2012 spring and summer garden experience. This part discusses our experience with veggies that we planted in late spring and early summer.

Tomatoes seem to be the favorite of most vegetable gardeners. A few of our tomatoes were grown from seed, although many were purchased as seedlings. We planted them in a variety of environments. Almost all of the spring tomatoes were planted in early March. We kept them covered with heavy row cover until the last week of March in case there was a late frost. In the row garden we planted the following varieties directly in the ground: Juane Flamme, Cherokee Purple, Sun Gold, Celebrity, Champion II, Juliet, Momotero, Viva Italia and Persimmon. We planted Black Krim, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Celebrity, BHN589VFFT, Cream and Green Sausage, Chico III, Sweet Gold, Japanese Black Trifele, Mortgage Lifter, Sweet Million, Snow White, Black Cherry, Riesentraube and Cherokee Purple in the raised beds. We planted Better Bush and BHN589VFFT in eight-gallon pots and we even planted a Sprite and a New Big Dwarf in a bag of composted cow manure!

Of the tomatoes planted in the row garden, the Sun Gold far outshone the rest of the bunch. All of the others, except the Celebrities, produced a small yield. The Celebrities did well, but being a determinate variety, they only bore over a 2 to 3-week period and then they were done. The Sun Gold tomatoes were prolific. They bore all summer long and still had extremely tasty and viable fruit into late October. We lost several tomatoes from the raised beds early on due to what looked like insect damage, although we had put in cutworm protection and were never able to identify the culprit. The varieties we lost in that way included Cream Sausage, and BHN589VFFT. Later on when we had unseasonable rains and the ground was always too wet, we lost the Chico III and the Reisentraube to what looked like a fungus infection. We didn’t get a single tomato from any of those varieties. We had some problems with inconsistent irrigation at one point in the summer and, as a result, we lost the Japanese Black Trifele to blossom end rot after harvesting less than half a dozen fruits. The varieties that were most productive and bore well into the heat of late summer, as well as being voted tastiest by the garden team, were Snow White, Sweet Gold and Chocolate Cherry. All of those are cherry tomatoes. We had trouble determining when to pick the Green Sausage, which is a paste tomato. It seemed as though it stayed hard for a long time and then immediately went soft and mushy. We ended up picking them when they were still hard and using them for stir fry. The plants in the manure bag did well and produced until late summer. The Better Bush stopped production in mid-summer but we left it in the pot to see what would happen in the fall. The plant looked terrible, but it began producing again in early fall and had fruit right up through November. In general, the heirlooms (such as Cherokee Purple and Aunt Ruby’s German Green) did not produce well for us, although the Cherokee Purple lasted through the summer into late fall and still had a green tomato on it in November. The Black Krim, which is a Russian variety that normally does well here, was also not very productive. We think the unusually wet summer may have had something to do with the lack of production but we aren’t sure.

The other nightshade plant that many people like to have in their central Texas vegetable garden is peppers. We planted a variety of those too. In the raised beds we planted Costeno Amarillo, Holy Mole, California Wonder green bell and Yellow Bell. We planted TAM Jalapeno and Hungarian Wax peppers in pots. All of the peppers did well except the green California Wonder. That plant was damaged when still young and never recovered. All of the peppers produced from mid-summer right through the end of October and the TAM Jalapeno and Hungarian Wax produced into November.

We planted quite a few eggplants in the raised beds and containers too. We put a dwarf variety called Fairy Tale, which produces clusters of small, less than four inches long, fruits in a container. It produced all summer and fall, although production dropped off in late fall. In the raised beds we planted Green Goddess, Prosperosa, Pingtung Long, Listada de Gandia, Rosita and White Lightning. The best producers were Pingtung Long and Rosita, although all of them produced quite well. The Green Goddess developed something that looked like a fungal infection in late summer and we weren’t able to save it. The rest survived into late fall and most were still producing into early November. The Rosita took a long time to mature. In fact, it looked pretty bad in mid-summer and we nearly pulled it out. It revived when the heat waned, however, and became the best producer we had.

Tomatillos are members of the nightshade family that grow well in central Texas, so we planted one transplant of each of three varieties this year. The Verde Puebla got wiped out early when the row cover over the bed came loose in a high wind and beat the poor plant to death. The Purple tomatillo got huge and was covered with blossoms all summer long, but didn’t produce a single fruit. After a bit of research on the Internet we decided that it was because that variety needs two plants of the same variety in order to be pollinated. The Pineapple tomatillo was a star though. It is a low-growing plant that produced dozens of small, tasty fruits all summer long. Everyone who tasted them was surprised at how sweet and delicious they were. They make great salsas but are sweet enough to eat by themselves straight out of the garden.

We planted lots of squash and related plants this year in the row garden, raised beds and even the containers. Most of them eventually succumbed to squash borers but nearly all of them produced some fruit. The Zephyr squash that we planted in the row garden produced compact plants with a lot of fruit and the production season lasted longer with that variety than with any others. In the raised beds we planted Yellow Crookneck, Black Beauty zucchini, Early Butternut, Delicata, Summer Scallop Trio and Tri-color zucchini. The Yellow Crookneck, Tri-color zucchini and Summer Scallop Trio all produced well. We didn’t get more than a couple of fruits from the Black Beauty zucchini before the squash borers destroyed it. The Early Butternut didn’t produce at all and although we got a few small fruits from the Delicata, which is a winter squash, it didn’t really produce much, even though the vines lived until late summer. We planted Romanesque zucchini in one container. The plant grew well but didn’t produce any viable fruit.

In the row garden we sowed seeds for several members of the gourd family that tend to sprawl and take up a lot of space. We planted cantaloupe, and several kinds of watermelons and pumpkins. We had some problems with missing fruit and insects on these veggies, but they all did reasonably well. A variety of watermelon called Sherbet was the favorite of the garden team. The pumpkin varieties we planted were Large White, Musque De Provence, Marina DeChiogga and Knucklehead. None of them produced a lot of fruit, but they all produced some interesting specimens.

We grew several varieties of cucumbers this year. We planted Spicemaster Bush cukes in both a container and the raised beds. They weren’t prolific producers but we did get some fruit from them. We also grew Armenian cucumbers, which are really more like long melons. They didn’t produce a lot of fruit but what they did produce was tasty and they did well on a trellis. By far the most productive cuke, however, was Lemon cucumber. This one produces small round fruit and, while most cucumbers taste bitter when they turn yellow, this variety is sweet and tasty at that stage.

Legumes are always a favorite in the garden. We planted many varieties from seed in all of our planting environments except the containers. In late spring we planted Kentucky Wonder pole beans in the pea/pole bean bed. They produced a lot of vines and blossoms but not much fruit. Another type of pole bean that we planted was Asparagus beans (also known as Yard Long beans), which are a prolific Asian variety that is good in stir fry dishes. They produced well for us although they grew so fast that it was necessary to pick them every two or three days to keep them from growing so big that they were too tough to eat. We planted several varieties of bush beans in the raised beds, including: Contender, Yellow Wax, Gold Rush Wax, Dragon’s Tongue, Royal Burgundy and Black Wax. The Contenders were prolific producers. The others were less productive. We planted Contender bush beans in the row garden too and also three varieties of southern peas: Top Pick, Crowder and Purple Hull. The Contenders produced well. We got a lot of beans from them which we donated to a food bank. All of the southern peas were good producers. We especially liked Top Pick, which produce their fruit near the top of the bush, so they are much easier to pick than other varieties.

We planted sweet corn in the row garden this summer but it was a complete disappointment. We had some strong storms which blew many of the stalks over. Just about the time that the corn began to come back from that we discovered that insects had eaten much of the “silk”. We aren’t sure, but we think grasshoppers were the culprits. In any case, because each strand of silk is attached to a kernel of corn, if that strand doesn’t get pollinated then no kernel is produced. So we ended up with most of the ears containing only a few kernels. We had also planted sweet corn in one of the raised beds along with Kentucky Wonder pole beans and Yellow Crookneck squash. This combination is called “The Three Sisters” and is said to have been planted by native American people. We had insect problems and irrigation problems with that bed, however, and none of the veggies in it developed any viable produce.

Radishes are always a favorite in the garden because they usually go from seed to maturity in about a month. So they can be planted among other slow-growing vegetables and harvested before the other veggies need their space. For that reason they are useful for marking rows of slow-developing veggies such as carrots. We planted and harvested radishes all year long. Some of the varieties we have used are: French Breakfast, Hailstone, Watermelon, Easter Egg, Rudolph, Pink Beauty, Early Scarlet Globe and Sparkler. All did well.

In the heat of summer most leaf crops do not fare well. One that does like the heat is Malabar spinach, which is not really a spinach but rather a tropical vine that has leaves that can be used like spinach. We planted the red-stemmed variety from seed and the green-stemmed variety from transplants. We had a little trouble with the red-stemmed variety going to seed when the plants were very small until we discovered that this veggie likes a lot of water. After we increased its water supply it took off and did well for us. The green-stemmed variety had no such problems. It was a vigorous grower and produced many more, and larger, leaves than the red-stemmed variety. However, the leaves were more bitter than those of the red-stemmed variety and no one who ate them was crazy about the taste.

The Williamson County Master Gardener Association veggie demo garden team would like to share the results of our 2012 spring and summer garden experience with our gardening colleagues and friends. We hope that the information provided here will be useful to you as you plan your vegetable gardens for the 2013 season.

This report is rather long so it is presented here in multiple posts. This is part one. This part discusses our gardening philosophy and the experience we had with veggies that we planted in early spring.

First, a word or two about the vegetable demonstration garden organization and the overall garden philosophy that was used this year. There are two main sections of the vegetable garden: the row garden is used to grow vegetables for donation to food banks; the raised beds and containers are used to demonstrate the types of vegetables that can be grown in Williamson County and ways to grow vegetables when space is limited or if the gardener has some physical problem that makes it difficult to garden in more conventional ways. In general the same types and varieties of vegetables are grown in both sections, but the row garden focuses on vegetables with a long shelf life and the demonstration section focuses on a greater variety of edibles, including perennials. Both sections of the garden use a philosophy that can best be described as “smallest footprint” or “as organically as we can”. We use organic compost, some of which is made on site and some of which we buy, and we use an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) philosophy with respect to insect pests. So, e.g., if we have problems with caterpillars, we hand-pick them off of the plants and, if that doesn’t keep them under control, we use bacillus thuringiensis (BT), which only affects the larval forms of insects that actually eat it. We refrain from using insecticides that might kill “good” bugs, such as ladybugs and we include flowering plants such as African Blue Basil in the garden in order to attract pollinators.

We planted a diverse set of veggies in the Vegetable Demonstration Garden’s row garden, raised beds and containers this year, both in terms of types and varieties. Some did well for us and some not so well. In some cases we were able to determine why certain veggies didn’t produce well for us. In other cases we weren’t able to make that determination.

Some of our earliest plantings this year were of potatoes, which we planted in the row garden. We planted one row of Red Lasota, half a row of Yukon Gold and half a row of Kennebec. We planted them in trenches and initially covered them with about six inches of soil. As the tops grew out of the soil, we covered them with a mixture of leaves and compost until we had a mound on each row. The spring and early summer were unusually wet, which is not a good thing for potatoes. As a result, the Yukon Golds got very mushy and the Kennebecs just didn’t produce. The Red Lasota did great, though, and we were able to harvest a lot of them and donate them to a food bank.

In January we planted Melting Sugar Snap and Sugar Daddy edible pod peas in the pea/pole bean bed. The first planting just didn’t do well so we replaced them a couple of weeks later with Alaska Wilt-Resistant and Melting Sugar peas. They didn’t do well either so we gave up on early spring peas and decided to devote that bed to pole beans.

Early in the spring we planted 1015, Yellow Bunching, White Bermuda and Red Southern Belle onions in a variety of environments. Most of them did fairly well. The 1015’s, which we planted in the row garden, did especially well for us this year. We also planted both onion and garlic chives. The onion chives petered out over the summer, but the garlic chives did so well that we had to divide them and give some away by the end of summer.

There were a lot of greens in the raised beds from last year’s plantings, but we put quite a few additional greens in this spring, mostly from transplants. We planted some red and green Romaine lettuce seedlings that we had grown from seeds in peat pots. We also put in transplants of: Bright Lights and Fordhook Giant chard, red and green Oakleaf, Firecracker, Red Fire, Green Bibb, Buttercrunch and Red Sails lettuce, and radicchio. In addition we planted Tendergreen mustard from seed. All did well.

Other plants that we put in from seed included Early White Vienna and Purple Vienna kohlrabi and Purple Top and Tokyo Cross turnips. We did get some production from these plants, but not as much as we had anticipated. We also planted parsnips from seed into pockets in the concrete blocks that form one of our raised beds. There is no irrigation directly on that area and we wanted to see if the parsnips would grow there. The answer was that the tops did fine but they didn’t produce any viable roots.

We reorganized some of the beds this year. In the process we transplanted globe artichokes and strawberries. We don’t know what the varieties were. We transplanted the artichoke crowns directly into the ground and they seemed to like that. We got quite a few chokes this summer, although none of them were very big. We planted the strawberries directly into the ground inside the circular bed that we use for pole beans and peas. Our thought was that the legumes would grow up the trellis and shade the strawberries from the mid-summer sun. That didn’t work real well. The berries were prolific producers in late spring and early summer, but the mid-summer heat killed about half of them. We had to replant them in early fall.

Our asparagus, which is a perennial, was planted about three years ago from crowns. We do not know the variety. We cut the brown, frozen stems back early in the year and they began to produce new shoots in the spring. Production lasted for nearly a month. When three-quarters of the shoots were smaller than the diameter of a little finger, we stopped harvesting and let the shoots “fern out”.

We have a bed of blackberry plants in the demo garden. We aren’t sure what variety they are, although we think they are Brazos. We pruned and fed them in early spring and were rewarded with a bumper crop of berries a few months later. We had a lot of cane growth over the summer so we pruned them again in early fall to keep them from forming an impenetrable mass of brambles.

Another quarter-inch of rain fell on the garden this week, some of it while we were working.

The rain didn’t seem to bother the insects, though. We had a lot more damage in both the row garden and raised beds from cabbage loopers and another caterpillar that we couldn’t identify. We hand-picked as many as we could find and sprayed BT to kill the rest. On the plus side, we still have ladybug larvae munching aphids on the remaining eggplants. So we made sure not to spray anything there.

The insects didn’t inhibit the harvest though. There isn’t anything ready in the row garden yet, but we harvested a lot of things from the raised beds and containers. We got more Juliet tomatoes and quite a bit of eggplant this week. We also picked several handfuls of sugar snap peas, some bok choi, a few heads of Snow Crown and Cheddar cauliflower, some broccoli, a handful of radishes and scads of greens. We picked a lot of mizuna and purple mustard and a couple of bags full of broccoli raab and arugula. We also picked some endive and Heirloom Italian lettuce.

Some folks seem to think that it is necessary to harvest greens by pulling them out when they are ready. We don’t do that in the demo garden. Our approach is sort of “cut and come again”. We take a few leaves off the stalk if the plant lends itself to that method or just cut about half of the leaf if it doesn’t. That encourages the plant to either put out new leaves or to continue to grow the cut leaf. In this way we can harvest greens over a long period of time without the need to replant. Of course, a lot of greens, particularly most types of mustard and lettuce, tend to grow quickly from seed in cool weather. So they can be planted in succession and harvested by pulling the whole plant, if that works better for you.

We had spread some compost on one of the big raised beds last week. This week we turned that under in preparation for planting next week. We weeded several beds as well. In addition we did some work on the three-bin compost system, moving compost between beds, adding some nitrogen-rich fertilizer and wetting the compost down to encourage it to heat up and create some compost we can use.

The row garden was dry enough to work this week so we tilled some cottonseed meal into the new rows that we intend to plant soon. The kohlrabi and beets needed thinning again, so we did that too.

We are still working on the post mortem of the summer growing season. When we have the analysis done and written up, we will post it here.

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 got a quarter inch of rain in the veggie garden this week.

The rain softened the ground in the row garden enough that, with the help of quite a few of the veggie garden team and several interns, we were able to remove most of the weeds in the area where we need to plant in the near future. We also thinned the kohlrabi and other seedlings.

We harvested small quantities of a lot of different veggies from the raised bed and container areas this week. Our produce included: tomatoes from the Juliet vines we planted in late summer, several types of eggplant, radishes, beets, turnips, chard, mustard, mizuna, lettuce, arugula, broccoli raab, collards, broccoli, and sugar snap peas. In the process of harvesting and cleaning up the raised beds we ran into some leaf-footed bugs, which we squished, and some caterpillars, which met the same fate. Just to be safe, though, we sprayed BT on the plants that had had caterpillars feeding on them.

We did some maintenance on the raised beds too. We pulled out some spent plants and added compost to a couple of beds in preparation for planting more winter veggies. We also replaced a malfunctioning pressure reduction valve and did some maintenance on the supply lines and emitters.

We are still working on the postmortem of the summer growing season. When we have the analysis done and written up, we will post it here.

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.

Most of this week was spent in tending the new seedlings and maintenance activities.

In the row garden we hand-watered the new seedlings several times. They all seem to be coming up well and we will soon have to thin them, especially the turnips. We also spent some time weeding and clearing nut sedge from the area we hope to plant in the next couple of weeks. The weeding we have been doing has resulted in a mound of grass and weeds, which cannot be put into the compost bins. So we hauled that off to the trash bin. We fixed some leaks in the row garden drip system and fertilized the cabbage and cauliflower with fish emulsion.

We were able to harvest a couple of eggplants, a couple heads of broccoli and one head of cauliflower from the raised beds, as well as a handful of Juliet tomatoes and quite a few greens of various types. We even picked a couple of handfuls of sugar snap peas, which are doing way better than the peas we planted in the early part of the year. We’re still clearing out summer plants to make room for fall veggies in the raised beds too. This week we pulled out the Holy Mole and Costeno Amarillo pepper plants and cut the red-stemmed Malabar spinach back a good bit. It will die at the first frost, but we’ve decided to leave the one remaining planting of it in until then.

Speaking of frost: we didn’t have the frosty weather we had anticipated this week, so we took the row cover off of the Juliet tomatoes after two days in order to let them have a little more sun.

We planted a few radishes to replace those that we have harvested over the last couple of weeks. We also planted some radicchio, which we had originally planted in the Italian veggie bed but which didn’t come up or else was overwhelmed by the broccoli raab.

As you might have noticed from the photo of our experiment with root veggies in containers, the turnips in those two pots were crowding out the other veggies. So we thinned all of the veggies in both pots this week. Hopefully that will result in production of some of the root veggies we hope to grow in those containers.

We have had a problem lately with the ground between the two 5×20 raised beds getting very wet on the days that we water the beds. So we put tuna cans on the ground between and around the beds on the day before the drip system ran so that we could see if there was an errant pop-up sprinkler coming on that was creating the soggy situation. There was no water in the cans the next morning so we assumed that the problem must be with the drip system. We had reworked the drip lines on one of those beds a few weeks ago and thought that maybe we had introduced some leaks. A test showed otherwise, however, so we tested the drip system on the other bed. We found that the pressure reduction valve had become clogged with calcium and several of the low-level emitters were pointed such that they directed some water out of the bed. So we will replace the valve and reposition the emitters and see if that solves the problem. In addition, we cut back the run time on those drip lines because it was still set to combat the drought and heat of midsummer and we don’t really need that much water now.

In other news, we have started working on a post mortem of the summer growing season so that we can tell you what worked for us and what did not. We will post the results here as a special journal entry so that you can use the info as a guide for your own veggie gardens next summer. Stay tuned. We expect to have the post up in a couple of weeks.

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.