The weather and insects have been taking a toll on the garden. Never-the-less, this week we harvested bush beans, zephyr squash and tomatoes from the row garden and donated them to The Caring Place in Georgetown.
From the raised beds we harvested a few zucchinis and one patty pan squash, four types of bush beans (Contender, yellow wax, Dragon Tongue and burgundy), asparagus and Kentucky Wonder pole beans, pineapple tomatillos, Green Goddess and Rosita eggplant, Sun Gold, Black Cherry and Snow White cherry tomatoes, green sausage tomatoes, red and white onions and two ears of bi-color corn.
We pulled out the last of the parsnips in bed L. The tops were doing well, but they haven’t made any roots. We also harvested two white eggplants from that bed, but they were past their prime and went into the compost bins.
As we do every week, we cut back several of the culinary and fragrant herbs.
Apparently someone inadvertently turned off the water supply to the hose timer in the raised bed area that supplies water to eight of the beds. Judging by the damage to the beds, it had probably been turned off for most of the last week. So we had to cut back a lot of dead foliage. This was an especially bad hit to the squash in those beds as they had already been damaged by squash bugs and squash borers. Most of them still had some blossoms, though, so we covered the part of the vine that had been damaged by borers with some fresh dirt in hopes they might make more roots. The lack of water killed most of the plants in the Three Sisters bed though. We had to pull out all but one stalk of corn and two squash plants. All of the pole beans in that bed died. After we cleaned them up as best we could we watered all eight beds by hand. We also wrapped electrical tape around the valve for the timer in hopes that that would make it clear that that valve is not to be turned off.
The cantelopes are sprouting in the row garden but the row was checked onMonday and it was pretty dry.So we added fifteen minutes of run time to the zone for that row. The watermelon is doing well. We have two small fruits already. Unfortunately, the watermelon plants are growing into the okra row. Only about 50% of the okra sprouts made it, so we pulled the watermelon back from that row in hopes that the okra will get more sun and grow a little faster.
We spent a good bit of time weeding and cultivating in the corn patch in the row garden and fed it with fish emulsion. The corn looks good. It is about knee high right now.
The compost in the three-bin system isn’t making. The heat is probably part of the problem but there is also a lack of green material. We plan to make covers for the three bins so that varmints can’t get into them and then bring green garden refuse from home to try to get things working again.
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