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.
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