With less than a week to go until the big Spring Garden Fair and plant sale on Saturday, April 6th the veggie garden team has spent much of the last week sprucing things up and getting ready for the fair. We will have master gardeners available in the demo garden to demonstrate and discuss vegetable gardening subjects such as growing tomatoes from seed, composting, solarization and building raised beds.
To get ready for the fair visitors we have been putting down mulch between the rows in the row garden and also around the containers in the container garden so that, whether the weather is dry or damp, it will be easy for folks to walk through the garden. Weeding is a chore that we always do in the garden, but we have been at it a little more vigorously this week. We had some plants damaged by the late cold spell last week so we spent a bit of time feeding and trimming those plants and trying to make them healthy again. We have removed the floating row over from all of the plants except that which is used as a wind break around the tomato cages in the row garden.
Despite the fact that we tend to mulch our garden heavily, the windy weather this spring has been drying out the surface of the ground in both the row garden and raised beds. In the raised beds this has caused us to have a low germination rate for things we planted from seed. We tried several different methods of combating this problem, but the only thing that seems to work well is to ensure that the surface of the beds stay damp until the seedlings are big enough so their roots can reach the water from the drip irrigation. So we have been adjusting the mulch and tweaking the irrigation system in an attempt to accomplish this. This week we added another drip tape to the row garden and some micro-sprinklers to one of the raised beds.
Our only harvest this week was a few heads of broccoli, some asparagus and some greens from our winter planting.
In the row garden we finished installing cattle panel trellises, including one that is really an arbor. We plan to plant vining veggies on these trellises and have already begun to do so. This week we planted four varieties of cucumbers and two of pole beans. In the raised beds we planted some Straight Eight cucumbers. We’ve had a lot of volunteer Malabar spinach coming up in the beds where we grew it last summer. So we have been pulling some of it out and letting the seedlings near the ends of the beds grow. When they get big enough we will put trellises on the ends of those beds to contain the vines.
We hope that you will come to our garden fair and plant sale to see the fruits of our labors… and the veggies of our labors too!
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.
Leave a Reply