We got over an inch of rain in the demo garden this week and hope y’all got some of that wet stuff too.
We had some more missing produce this week. Someone took all of the birdhouse gourds. In addition, the row garden thieves hit the watermelon patch again; however, this time they were caught in the act. They were told to put the produce back and not to steal from the garden again. They did put the melons back, but apparently they threw them on the ground because they were all broken. At least we will know who to look for if anymore produce comes up missing.
We spent some time doing maintenance this week. We replaced the watering wand that had come up missing last week and the rain gage, which had been cracked and wasn’t accurately keeping track of rainfall. We also worked on the compost in the 3-bin system. It is starting to work again so we expect to have some homemade compost available for fall planting.
Speaking of fall planting: we pulled out a lot of the summer plants from the raised beds in order to get ready to do maintenance on the irrigation lines and to put in amendments for fall. We also harvested cucumbers, eggplant, peppers and sun gold cherry tomatoes from the raised beds, as well as a few pods of okra, although most of those were too big to use.
The row garden was a little too muddy to do much maintenance this week, but we did manage to harvest tomatoes, okra, cantaloupe and squash to give to The Caring Place.
Our fall tomatoes are doing well in both the row garden and the raised beds. We only have a few of them planted because we want to save room for typical fall veggies. However, so many of our late summer crops, such as eggplant and okra, are still producing well that we’ve decided to leave them in many of the beds until they are done producing and just sort of phase in the cruciferous crops and other fall veggies. The Southern peas seem to be about done, though, so we will probably pull them out as soon as the row garden dries out enough to work it.
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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