Week ending 06/20/12

Here’s what we’ve done in the demonstration veggie garden over the past week.

We harvested beans, tomatoes, eggplant and tomatillos from the raised beds and several kinds of tomatoes from the row garden.  We shared some of the produce among the team and the Extension Office personnel and made two deliveries to The Caring Place.

The row garden team has spent much of the week weeding, tilling and fertilizing.  The raised bed folks cut back some dead foliage caused by insects, blight and the watering problem we had the previous week.  We are still experiencing problems with squash bugs, squash borers, cucumber beetles and now stink bugs.  We treated the bugs we could see with our vegetable oil/dish soap mixture, spread some spinosad bait to get rid of an ant hill in one of the beds, and sprayed spinosad on the beds that have been experiencing problems with sucking insects.  We also used a foliar feeding of sea tea on most of the plants in the raised beds.

Some of the tomato plants are still flowering. However tomatoes quit setting fruit when the nighttime temperatures are consistently warmer than sixty degrees and we have reached that point. So the green tomatoes that we have on the plants now are all we will have until the summer heat has passed. This is one of the reasons that many Central Texas gardeners pull the spring tomato plants out in July and replant with new transplants for the fall gardening season. If you do that, however, it is a good idea to shade the transplants for the first week or two until their roots become firmly established.

The southern peas in the row garden like the hot weather and they are flowering quite a bit now. So we expect to have a good crop of peas this season.

We have been kind of mystified about the performance of our tomatillo plants. We have two in the raised beds right now: a low-growing pineapple tomatillo and an upright, bushy purple tomatillo. We have harvested scads of the pineapple tomatillos, but although the purple tomatillo bush has been a vigorous grower and has produced abundant flowers, which have been visited by the bees, it hasn’t produced a single fruit. After a bit of research we think we have discovered the problem. It seems that tomatillo plants are self-incompatible, which basically means that, no matter how many pollinators visit the plant, it will not produce fruit if it is only fertilized with pollen from itself. For some reason this does not seem to be a problem with the pineapple tomatillo, but the purple tomatillo seems to need another plant as a pollinator. If we plant it again next year, we will see what happens if we have two plants of the same variety.

We had a discussion this week about our compost system.  It is not producing right now.  This is probably at least partially because of the heat.  However, we think we might be able to get it going again if we give it an injection of some fresh green materials and feed it with some organic fertilizer or soil conditioner.  So we will soon put covers on the bins to keep varmints out and then add some green garden clippings and kitchen refuse to try to get things started.

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 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.