The veggie garden team has been trying to keep cool during these triple digit days. Here’s what we did in the garden this week.
We had a very small harvest from both the row garden and raised beds. For the most part we picked tomatoes and a few squash.
The row garden team planted pumpkins, straight-neck summer squash, a second planting of okra and cantaloupe and spent some time weeding and cultivating the rows. We also worked on a leak in the row garden irrigation system. Most of the row garden is in good shape. The bush beans are about done. We made a pass at harvesting them, but there were very few beans left. We’ll pull them out next week. The watermelons are beginning to produce, although the vines are spreading all over the garden. We’ve tried to rein them in a bit, but they are pretty vigorous. The Top Pick southern peas are doing well. They already have long pods on them but the peas need to get a bit bigger before we can pick them.
We are still experiencing insect problems in the raised beds. We have been treating for them and cutting back the dead foliage to keep the beds cleaned up. The hot, dry weather has been a problem in the raised beds as well. In one of the beds our Malabar spinach had started to go to seed without producing the vines we need in order to harvest leaves. Since that is nearly always a problem of insufficient water, we reworked the irrigation lines to deliver more water to that area and cut off the seed heads in hope that the plants will begin to put out new growth. We also added another drip line to the culinary herb bed because the herbs along one side of the bed were dying from lack of water. The Japanese Trefele tomatoes have all developed blossom end rot. Since it is too hot for most varieties of tomatoes to set fruit now, we decided to remove that plant from the bed.
We put hinged lids on the three-bin compost system so that we can begin to put clean kitchen scraps in them in order to start the compost working without attracting varmints. We still have a bit of work to do on them before we are ready to try to kick-start the compost.
Since some of the raised beds are having trouble holding water we have purchased some coir (coconut fiber) to amend the soil in those beds in an attempt to get them to retain moisture better between waterings. We also plan to change the drip lines to a larger diameter in order to deliver more water to the beds.
We’ve reached the point where there isn’t a lot of actual weeding and feeding to do in the garden so the next several weeks we will spend some time maintaining the beds and checking the irrigation system.
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 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.