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.
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