We got more than three inches of rain in the demo garden over the last week. On the plus side, we needed the water because we’ve begun our fall planting and the seedlings and transplants need to be kept moist until their roots are established. On the down side, we had to cancel last Friday’s work day and the row garden was too wet to work in on Tuesday.
We did manage to harvest some okra from the row garden and took it to The Caring Place. We harvested some okra from the raised beds too, along with some peppers and eggplant. We lost about a dozen yellow bell peppers because something or someone broke off a large branch of the plant that was loaded with peppers. We will have to be more careful about supporting the pepper plants as they are all going into fall production after slowing down in late summer.
Most of Tuesday’s work day was spent planting transplants and seeds, mostly in the two 5×10 beds we had prepared over the last couple of weeks. We had two large clumps of garlic chives in one of those beds, so we divided one of them and moved some of it to a 4×4 bed where we intend to grow Italian veggies this season. In the two bigger beds we put in several different varieties of cauliflower transplants: Snow Crop (white), Graffiti (purple) and Chedder (yellow-orange). We also planted broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards, lettuce and arugula. We planted some broccoli raab from seed in one of the beds as well. Then we planted broccoli raab, arugula and radicchio from seed in the Italian veggie bed as well as transplants of arugula and Tuscan Kale. In another of the 4×4 beds we put in some bunching onions. These are perennial onions that can be divided like any other bulbs. So every once in a while you dig them up, eat a few and transplant the rest. We have decided to go with mostly smaller plants in the ADA-enabled planting table this year, so we put a couple of red lettuce transplants in there this week. We will fill the rest of that table with various greens and green-like things such as bok choy. We had a couple of containers with some space available so we put a Tuscan kale transplant in one of them.
While some of the team worked on planting, other folks harvested the raised beds, pulled out some more spent tomato plants and trimmed back a couple of tomatoes that look as though they might want to go into production again. In addition, we started preparing the bean/pea bed for planting next month. We changed the ¼-in drip hose to ½-in and then added some fresh compost. Next week we will put some agricultural molasses in that bed, turn the amendments under and plant our English peas.
We are all glad to get some seeds and plants in the ground and we will probably be working on that over the next several weeks. Another week or two should complete the raised bed and container planting for this fall, but we haven’t even started yet on the fall planting in the row garden. So we will have lots of work to do in the garden for some time to come.
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 and Friday 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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