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.
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