We harvested more okra from the row garden this week and took it to The Caring Place. There’s not much left in the raised beds, but we did pick some eggplant.
We spent a good bit of time this week weeding fallow areas of the row garden and tilling in compost to amend them for fall planting. We have several things to plant yet, but we did get some cucumbers in this week. We decided to grow them on remesh cages rather than to let them sprawl on the ground as we had done with some of the other viney plants. Hopefully that will alleviate the problems we had with caterpillars on the pumpkins and cantaloupes.
The raised bed crew was busy this week too as we did a lot of planting in the raised beds and containers. We planted a variety of small (we hope) veggies in the planting table. We planted one of the 4×4 beds with Asian greens, bok choi and similar veggies. We reluctantly pulled out a beautiful clump of marigolds from the Italian vegetable bed to make room for more veggies. Most of the fall veggies we have planted so far have been foliage crops, so we decided to plant mostly root crops in the 4×8 bed. We finished the bean/pea bed prep and planted two kinds of English peas.
We did a good bit of work this week in the beds that had been used for nightshade plants in the spring season. Most of the spring tomato plants were in bad shape, so we have pulled the majority of them out. We have a couple left, though, and they and the new fall tomatoes were being crowded by the African blue basil, which has done really well for us the last two years. It was time to cut the basil way back, though, in order to give the other veggies some room to grow. We did that this week and consigned the clippings to the compost bin. Something attacked the Green Goddess eggplant over the last week or so and it looked bad enough that we decided to take it out. After that we spent some time tying up tomato and pepper plants and building a makeshift support for the remaining eggplants.
When we planted a kale transplant in one of the containers last Tuesday we noticed that the soil had become compacted. So we decided to fill the containers with high-end, moisture-retaining potting soil instead of the mixture that we had used in the last planting season. We had a little debate about whether the moisture-retentive properties of the potting soil would be detrimental to root veggies, such as carrots. The decision we came to was that we should run a little experiment to try to determine the best mixture for the root crops. We filled one container with straight high-end potting soil. Then we filled the other one with a mixture of three parts potting soil to one part of coarse material that we think will increase drainage. We planted both containers with the same varieties of root veggies. Now we are going to watch to see whether the veggies do better in one of the containers. Watch this space to see what happens.
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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