Week Ending 11/13/12

The cold weather kept most folks at home this week, so we did as much as we could with a little smaller crew than usual.

There wasn’t anything to harvest in the row garden, but we did harvest quite a bit of produce from the raised beds. In anticipation of a freeze damaging the few summer veggies that are still hanging on, we picked all of the “eatin’ size” eggplants and peppers. We also harvested the green tomatoes on the vines that were planted last spring and then we pulled most of those plants out. We got just a handful of tomatoes from the Juliet vines that we planted earlier this fall. The broccoli is starting to make and we harvested one nice head of that. In addition we picked some radishes that were already bigger than we should have allowed them to get and we harvested one white kohlrabi and a few beets, mostly to thin the row.

We are worried that the Juliet tomatoes, which are heavily laden with fruit, might get ruined if we have an early frost, so we jury-rigged some row cover over them. They are in a bed with some large eggplants and an African Blue basil. All of those plants have been allowed to become so large that we didn’t have a single piece of row cover big enough to cover the bed. So we did the best we could to patch a couple of pieces over the plants and we are hoping that will be good enough to protect them. Only time will tell.

The BT that we sprayed on the brassicas in both the row garden and raised beds over the last several weeks, combined with the cold spell, seems to have killed off all of the cabbage loopers. We are thankful for that. Now the cabbagey things can start to produce.

Cool weather is a great time to plant winter crops. We have mostly been concentrating on planting in the row garden the last several weeks but this week we planted some spinach and other greens in parts of the raised beds that were previously occupied by summer garden plants. In the row garden we replanted some carrots that weren’t making and we hand-watered the rows several times in the past week. That has seemed to get things started and we have a lot of seedlings coming up. We intend to plant more winter crops in both the row garden and raised beds. We have some heavy weeding to do in the row garden before we can finish planting there. In the raised beds we are just phasing winter veggies in as the summer plants quit producing.

This picture shows the interim results of an experiment we did this fall. We had decided to fill the containers with potting soil because they had had a hard time holding water with the mix we had put in them last spring. However we got into a debate about whether the potting soil was the right thing to use to plant root crops in containers. Some folks were concerned that it would hold too much water and would rot the root crops. So we filled the container in the left foreground with half potting soil and half coarse material intended to allow the pot to drain more quickly. The container on the right was filled with potting soil only. Then we planted exactly the same veggies in each pot. You can see from the picture that the pot that contains only potting soil has produced much larger plants than the one that was cut with the drainage material. We need to thin some of the veggies soon and before long we should be able to tell if there was any effect on the size and quality of the root crops. Stay tuned. We’ll let you know how we make out on this deal.

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.