We finally had a week with no missing produce. On the down side we did have some damage to our irrigation system this week. It’s not clear if it was accidental, malicious or just caused by thirsty critters, but we repaired it and will keep an eye on the system in the future.
School started in our area this week and the Junior Master Gardeners (JMG) group which is using the pizza garden cleaned out last season’s plants, amended the soil with compost and planted new veggies from seed. This year they added a couple of trellises to grow pole beans and gourds. A couple of the Veggie Garden Irregulars helped out and made some modifications to the irrigation system to accommodate some containers that were added to the pizza garden this year.
In the row garden we harvested okra, tomatoes and squash to donate to The Caring Place. Like many other folks in the area we have had problems with aphids this week, so we spent some time washing them off the plants with a strong spray of water. We fertilized most of the plants with liquid seaweed. On the squash we used fish emulsion because that has seemed to work well on squash this year. As always, we spent some time weeding between the rows.
We harvested some sun gold tomatoes from the raised beds as well as several types of eggplant. Most of the work in the raised beds this week was focused on getting the beds ready for fall planting. We pulled out the Kentucky Wonder pole beans, which hadn’t done well for us this year, and also some asparagus bean volunteers. We removed the mulch and much of the planting medium from the planting table and replaced the planting medium with organic compost and commercial potting soil with water retention materials mixed in. Then we changed the drip hoses from ¼-inch to ½-inch. We made similar changes to one of the other raised beds. In addition to that work we replaced the damaged irrigation lines.
As usual we cut back the herbs and in the process we noticed that the scented herbs were dying back. At first we thought it was lack of water because the top of the mulch was dry. However, when we checked with a moisture gage we discovered that it was the opposite problem The scented herbs are in one half of a 5×20 foot bed that contains veggies in the other half. When we decided to put the herbs in one half of that bed we didn’t alter the irrigation system. So now, in order to water long enough to make the veggies happy, we are delivering too much water to the herbs. So we will have to rework the irrigation system in that bed.
Most of the summer veggies are gone from the raised beds now. We tried some new varieties this year and learned a few things. Of all the tomato varieties we grew, Sun Gold was the overwhelming favorite with the veggie garden crew. Snow White came in a close second, followed by Chocolate Cherry. All of those are cherry tomatoes. We didn’t grow a lot of peppers this year, but we did discover that Holy Mole, which we got at the Sunshine Gardens spring plant sale, is one powerful pepper. If you like hot peppers, that one might be for you. We had great luck with our pineapple tomatillo plant. It was prolific and even people who claim they don’t like husk tomatoes liked that one. On the other hand, our purple tomatillo didn’t produce a single fruit. We are pretty sure that we needed two plants instead of one. All of the eggplants we grew did well. We got good production from Snow White, Green Goddess, Pingtung Long and Prospero. Everybody liked the Lemon cucumbers that we grew in several beds. Usually when cucumbers get yellow they are really bitter, but the Lemon variety is still sweet when it turns yellow.
For the first time this year we grew several veggies in containers to demonstrate that you can have a veggie garden even on a patio. We used varieties that were bushy rather than rangy and for the most part they were almost dwarfs. Our Fairy Tale eggplant did especially well. We even grew a New Big Dwarf and a Sprite tomato plant in a bag of compost. Both did well.
We are looking forward to planting our fall veggies and seeing which varieties work best for us. We’ll let you know how things work out.
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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