Week Ending 07/24/12

The recent rains have caused many of the garden plants to get their “second wind”.  There are lots of new blossoms and most of the plants are doing well.  Unfortunately, the success of the garden has attracted the wrong kind of attention.  This past week half a dozen watermelons disappeared from the row garden.  This sort of thing has happened before but it is a sad thing to see that there are folks in our fair county who are so selfish that they would help themselves to the fruits of someone else’s labor.  A theft from the row garden is an especially despicable act since that is our “God’s Little Acre” where we grow produce to donate to food banks.  So the person or persons who took the watermelons from our row garden literally stole food from the mouths of the indigent children and elderly of Williamson County.

The thieves did leave us some produce, however, and we were able to harvest Southern peas, okra, tomatoes and a few watermelons from the row garden for donation to The Caring Place.  We did some weeding in the row garden this week and tilled between some of the rows.  We also pulled out the corn, which was a disappointment.  We aren’t really sure why it didn’t make, but we realized that it was time for it to go.  On the plus side, the Southern peas are going great guns, some of the tomatoes are still producing, the okra is really coming on strong, the cantaloupes are coming along nicely and several varieties of pumpkins are beginning to make.

We harvested more produce from the raised beds than we had anticipated.  We still have some bush beans that are bearing.  The Kentucky Wonder pole beans look good and have a lot of blossoms right now, but they don’t seem to be making.  Most of the slicing tomatoes have stopped producing, although there are a few green ones on the vines yet.  The cherry tomatoes, especially the Snow Whites, don’t seem to be bothered by the hot nights like the larger tomatoes are.  They are still producing a good crop.  In fact, the Snow Whites produced so much the past week that we included about half the harvest from them in with the donation to The Caring Place.  The peppers and eggplants like this hot weather.  We harvested bell peppers, jalapenos and other hot peppers, and four or five varieties of eggplant.  We also harvested a few cucumbers that are still producing and a bit of okra.  The Malabar spinach is taking off now.  We have it growing on trellises in two beds and on the ground in another.  They are all doing well.

We did some cleanup in the raised beds to get rid of plants that are not producing and to make room to plant some fall tomatoes.  The purple tomatillo had gotten very large, but it didn’t produce a single fruit.  We think that’s because it needs two separate plants to pollinate.  In any case, it went the way of unproductive plants this week.  We also trimmed back the African Blue basil, which we had originally planted in the nightshade beds to draw pollinators.  It did that job well but both plants had become so large that they were badly crowding the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants that surround them.  So we cut them back by about half this week.  Those cuttings, and the tomatillo, will make good green material for the compost bin after we chop them up.

The rain caused the fire ants to raise up some hills in the beds.  We drenched them with Anti-Fuego.  We also sprayed BT on all of the mint, rosemary and thyme plants because of an infestation of webworms.

In the next week or two we will plant fall tomatoes in some of the raised beds.  We are a little bit late for that, but given the warm weather we have had the last several years, we think we will be OK as long as we plant varieties that do not have a long time to harvest.  So we will probably not be planting any heirloom varieties this season.  Next month we will do the planning for the bulk of the fall planting, which will be done in September and October.

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.