Week Ending 09/04/12

The harvest has dropped off a good deal in both the row garden and the raised beds.  All we were able to harvest this week was some okra from the row garden and a few eggplants from the raised beds.

The row garden was hit by an infestation of cabbage loopers.  They ate most of the foliage and some of the fruit from the pumpkins and cantaloupes.  We sprayed the plants with spinosad in an attempt to eradicate the little critters, but we may have been too late.  We also weeded the row garden, as we do every week.  The weeds seem to be doing better than some of the veggie plants these days. The wild morning glories are especially bad.

We had insect and fungus problems in the raised beds too.  Aphids have hit the eggplants and peppers. We didn’t treat for them, though, because many of the plants have ladybug pupae on them and we didn’t want to kill them. The fragrant herbs seem to be getting too much water, so we cut back the flow on several of the emitters. Many of the culinary herbs are also having problems.  Some of them seem to be too dry so we adjusted the position of some drip hoses to try to fix that problem.  We sprayed spinosad on those herbs that seemed to have insect problems and trimmed off some of the growth that was affected by a fungus.

Several of the plants in the containers were done producing so we pulled them out.  We also removed several tomato plants from one of the raised beds.

Most of the effort in the raised beds this week was spent in preparing for fall planting.  We amended several beds and converted the ¼-in drip hose on one bed to ½-in.  For the second week in a row we experienced damage to a line which supplies water to two of our beds.  So we put concrete blocks next to the supply lines in an effort to keep them from being damaged.

We aren’t quite finished amending the raised beds yet, but we plan to start planting seeds for the fall garden next week.  We may put in some transplants too, but the majority of them won’t be planted for a couple of weeks in hope that the weather will cool off a bit by that time.

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.