Week Ending 07/03/12

The cloudy weather made it a little bit easier to work in the garden today, even though the temperature was in the 90s.

We harvested tomatoes, squash and southern peas from the row garden and took them to The Caring Place.

While we were harvesting tomatoes we discovered what we think is a mocking bird nest in one of the vines with a green egg in it. No wonder the mocking birds have been feasting on our tomatoes. We still have a leak in the row garden irrigation system so we worked on that some more this morning. In addition we pulled out the Contender green beans, which are no longer bearing, and prepared the row to plant something new in the near future.

We harvested a variety of veggies from the raised beds and containers including squash, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, some asparagus beans and one lonely Spicemaster bush cucumber from one of the containers. We also did some cleanup, removing the pineapple tomatillo, which had died, and trimming the dead foliage back from the tomatoes.

The extra irrigation line that we added to the culinary herb bed seems to have brought the herbs back around. The oregano, which had looked dead last week, is doing well now. The irrigation changes we made to the end of the tomato bed where we are growing Malabar spinach also seems to have fixed the problem with that veggie.

Unfortunately, we are still having insect problems. We used BT to treat the herbs of the mint family (peppermint, pennyroyal and lemon balm) in the fragrant herb bed because some sort of web-spinning insect has infected them and has nearly destroyed the pennyroyal in the last week. We still have an infestation of cucumber beetles as well. Both the spotted and striped varieties are in the garden. We think they are one of the reasons that our cucumbers and gourds have many blossoms but have not borne fruit. The beetles are turning out to be very hard to treat. We are going to have to do some research to see if there is a way to at least cut back on their numbers.

We finished the work on the compost bin lids and used a mower to chop up the coarser compostable material, including the beans that we pulled from the row garden today. Then we loaded the first bin with the chopped up compost, in layers, and mixed in some cottonseed meal and blood meal to try to get things working.

We discussed the work items that we need to do before fall planting and decided that we will have a team meeting to work out the bed contents before we plant them this fall. In addition we made plans to obtain enough of the new expanding potting soil that Scott’s has developed in conjunction with A&M so that we can use it in the planting table and put it in one of the 5×10 raised beds so that we can run a test to see if it works as claimed. We also discussed replacing the quarter-inch drip lines with either half-inch drip lines or solid supply lines with micro-sprinkler heads and repairing one bed which is starting to come apart.

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.