Week Ending 03/24/13

It’s less than two weeks until the Garden Fair and plant sale on Saturday, April 6th. We hope you are planning to join us and see what’s growing in the veggie demo garden.

It was pretty much seasonal or warmer than usual for most of this week, but the forecast for the coming week includes a warning of a possible late freeze. So, in addition to our normal gardening activities, late in the week we prepared for the cold spell.

In the row garden we harvested twenty-seven pounds of kale, spinach and lettuce and donated the produce to The Caring Place. That was the last of those winter crops so we amended those rows and another one where we have installed cattle panel as a trellis to get them ready to plant beans, cucumbers and other warm weather crops. We planted one of those rows with Contender bush beans.

We sprayed Spinosad on some of the rows to try to combat aphids and other insects that have been feeding on the plants. Another problem that we have been fighting in the row garden is an invasion of nutsedge. So we put some clear plastic down in the area of concern to solarize it and, hopefully, kill off the nutsedge.

In the raised bed area we spent some time sprucing things up for the Garden Fair. We made new plant labels for those plants which still had temporary labels that had been used to mark them when they were planted. Then we trimmed the grass and weeded around the beds and container area. The grass had made an especially bad encroachment on the pole bean bed and, after spending a great deal of time weeding that area, we decided that we will have to install some sort of edging around this ground-level bed to keep the grass out. While we were weeding we discovered some leaks in the drip line, so we repaired them as well.

We continue to hand-water the new transplants and seedlings as the strong winds this spring keep blowing the mulch around and drying out the ground over the seed beds. Most of the cool weather seeds have sprouted now and are doing well, although their roots aren’t yet long enough to reach the water from the drip lines. Some of them are coming up rather thickly. In most cases we have thinned them but this week we transplanted some of the carrots that were too thick just to see if that would work. The warm weather seeds are starting to sprout now too. We have some bean sprouts up as well as a few squash and cucumbers. We put in some more transplants this week. We planted tomatoes and peppers in the containers. In one of the raised beds reserved for nightshade plants this year we put in transplants of peppers and eggplant. In another bed we have been doing companion planting. This week we planted petunias (a companion for beans) in that bed.

Insects have been a problem in the raised beds already. We’ve had to use a strong water spray to get aphids off the cauliflower. A tomato hornworm had eaten parts of some of the recent transplants. On some of the other tomatoes, the edges of the leaves were a little black. We weren’t able to determine the cause of that problem, so we picked off the leaves which were black on the edges, added some more compost, watered them and readjusted the mulch.

In addition to the new season’s plantings, we still have plenty of veggies from last season, such as lettuce and other greens, that are doing well.

The herbs, both perennials and recently planted annuals, are also looking good. So we will have parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme for the Spring Garden Fair.

Because of the high winds this weekend and the forecast of a late frost, we fertilized and watered the plants late in the week and covered as many as we could with a mulch of dry leaves. The wind had beaten some of the transplants down pretty well before we got there, so we may have to replant a few of them.

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. Be sure to come to the Garden Fair on April 6th for a great native plant sale, free seminars and fun for the whole family.