Week Ending 06/06/12

Here’s what’s been happening in the demonstration veggie garden over the past week.

We’ve been tweaking the watering schedules and times to abide by the local watering restrictions and deal with the lack of significant rain over the last month or so.  This activity has revealed a problem with insufficient water retention in some of the raised beds.  We will have to address this problem by the time of fall planting, probably by adding additional compost or perhaps something such as coir (coconut fiber) or peat to the beds that are having problems.

Someone appears to have stepped on the row garden timer, so we replaced it and mounted the new one on a post so that it cannot be stepped on.

There are some fairly new seedlings in some of the raised beds, and the row garden as well, so we have had to hand-water them until they are able to get by on the water from the drip system.

The blackberries are still making and we harvested them again this week.

In the row garden:

• We harvested beans, zephyr squash and a few tomatoes and donated them to The Caring Place.
• We planted cantelope.

In the raised beds:

• Much of the squash has been damaged by both squash bugs and squash borers.  We are still getting some production, but we had to pull some of the squash out.  In addition we pulled out some cucumber plants that have suffered both from insects and inconsistent watering as we tweaked the drip systems.  We also harvested the remaining root crops because they do not like our hot Texas summers.
• Most of the herbs in the culinary and scented herb beds like our hot, dry weather, so we have had to cut them back weekly to keep them under control.  We have also had to dead-head some of them.  The caraway had gone to seed so we pulled it out.  The lime scented geranium is not looking good.  If the watering changes we made this week don’t bring it around we will probably pull it out next week.
• We harvested: quite a few tomatoes (both cherry and slicing), pineapple tomatillos, several varieties of eggplant, several varieties of squash, most of the remaining onions, bush beans, and asparagus beans.
• As always we pulled weeds and trimmed off dead leaves in all the beds.

The asparagus beans, which are also called yard-long beans or snake beans, are an interesting crop that we have not grown before this year.  They are basically pole beans similar to the more familiar varieties such as Kentucky Wonder, however they do not get very thick but they do get up to a yard long.  They are best harvested when they are still fairly thin and between 12 and 20 inches long.  They can be used in stir-fry dishes and are good when paired with peppers or other spicy ingredients.  They will easily climb a trellis, so they don’t take up a lot of space and are not finicky as far as soil is concerned.  If you have never tried asparagus beans, this might be a good time to do it.