We had an inch and a quarter of rain at the demo garden over the last 24 hours. Apparently there was some high wind as well because several plants were blown over and some of the insect traps were blown off their supports.
The row garden was so wet and muddy that we couldn’t do any work in it, although we did walk around it to do an inspection. Most of the corn was blown nearly flat to the ground and the ears don’t seem to be filling out too well yet. Much of the silk is gone. We aren’t sure whether that is because the ears are mature or because insects have eaten it. We will know more when we can inspect a few ears to see if all of the kernels are developed. Some of the watermelon look as though they might be ripe but it was too wet to pick one for a test. There are a lot of ripe southern peas but, again, we couldn’t harvest them because of the soft ground.
Most of the raised beds that still have plants in them looked good. The BT that we used to treat the herbs of the mint family in the fragrant herb bed seems to have saved the peppermint and lemon balm, but the insects have destroyed most of the penneyroyal. The Malabar spinach at the end of the tomato bed is coming back nicely now. It isn’t big enough to start climbing the trellis, but it is big enough that we will probably have to thin it next week.
We had a small crew show up this week so we confined our efforts to cleaning up one of the raised beds that had become badly overgrown with weeds. The weeds were hiding a large fire ant hill and after several of us received bites we doused it with the last of the Anti-Fuego and some orange oil. Then we spread some Amdro around the outside of the bed to finish the hill off.
We needed the rain and were glad to get it, but we hope to be able to do more work and to harvest the row garden next week.
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.
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