Parameter name: request
Translate Request has too much data
Parameter name: request
If there's a gardening gene, Renee Studebaker has got it. How else to explain her ongoing (and often compulsive) efforts to turn every square inch of her overgrown Central Austin yard (one block from Interstate 35) into something more habitable and sustainable for wildlife (and humans)? It's not her first Austin garden, but hopefully it will be her best. Upload your garden photos here. View the gallery.
If you use an RSS reader, here is feed for Renee's Roots: .
Learn more about RSS.
The entry titled "Garden update: Making room for fall vegetables in the summer garden."
Home > Renee's Roots > Archives > 2010 > September > 12 > Entry By Renee Studebaker | Sunday, September 12, 2010, 08:38 AM{Update: Added links to Texas AgriLife office and previous post on SVBs}
Earlier this week, I had pretty much decided it was time to say goodbye to most of the tired vegetables of the late summer garden. I was ready to make space for cool weather crops.
But that was before the remnants of Hermine smashed through Central Texas. And now, a few days after the big rains, the whole garden is glowing with renewed life. Even the underachieving okra, the stressed out eggplant, and the formerly fruitless lima bean plants are putting on new growth and blooming again. The pepper plants are perking up, and the basil looks happy too. So I’m in no hurry now to uproot these summer survivors.
But no matter how much rain we get this month, there’s no hope for my cucumber, melon and squash plants. They were damaged early on by squash vine borers, and then aphids and spider mites piled on later to finish them off. In the photo below, even a supposedly SVB resistant butternut squash plant is suffering. I only managed to harvest three little butternuts from this vine before the plant finally gave up the fight.
OK, enough about SVBs. Now back to happier thoughts of fall: With the recent rain and the slightly cooler weather I’m feeling renewed too — and ready to get busy. I don’t mind sweating through a few 95-degree weekends in order to get my fall garden in. But please please, no more soul-frying, triple-digit days like we had in August. With all those 105 degree days, I was in no mood to follow the planting guidelines on this Travis County planting guide. According to this handy guide, August is a good time to plant carrots.
Maybe so, but from my experience it only works if you keep the seedbed moist, which during some Augusts is much easier said than done. Frequent light watering several times a day helps. And so does keeping the bed shaded and covered with wet burlap (or an old wet sweater) until the seeds sprout. After they sprout, remove the wet covering and keep up the frequent light waterings until the seedlings establish roots. It’s a lot of trouble, but if your soil contains enough moisture-holding organic materials (chopped dead leaves are great!) and if you’re diligent about watering, it works. I’ve also had success planting carrots and winter greens in late August in little pots of seed-starting mix. Keep them in shade until they sprout, and then move them to a morning-sun-only spot. Transplant them into your garden beds in late September or early October.
(For a good report on August-planted carrot and kale seeds, visit this recent post by Austin garden blogger Iris at Society Garlic.)
The planting times recommended on the Austin Organic Gardeners’ calendar also call for planting carrots in August. Actually, this guide, which also takes into account moon phases, recommends planting carrots in late July, all through August, and into early September. So according to this guide, I’m too late to plant carrots.
So thank goodness for the Vegetable Garden Planting Guide created by Travis County Extension Director Skip Richter and Master Gardener Patty Leander. Their guide recommends waiting until late September and October to plant carrots. I’m right on schedule with their guide.
Oh, and just to keep things interesting, I’m going to try taking my soil’s temperature this weekend so I can factor in yet another guide: the soil temperature/seed germination rate planting guide, before I decide whether to plant carrots now or later. (I haven’t taken my soil’s temperature before, but doesn’t it sound like a fun garden-geeky thing to do?)
I have been wondering for some time why there are two Travis County planting guides, and why they’re different, especially when they both originated in the Texas AgriLife office. In response to my emailed question, here’s what Richter said about the guides: “(The Travis County guide) was put up on behalf of our office long before I came to town (15 years ago) and from what I can tell is based on some generic regional planting estimations. I was working with the county to have them put the guide Patty and I did in its place, but our office flooding and relocation has put such stuff on the back burner for now. The TC guide will be taken down in the near future when I can get back on that project again.”
So if you like the TC guide, better save a copy now, because it won’t be there for much longer.
Here’s some of what Leander had to say about the different planting times in the two guides: “I would never plant beets in May like they (the TC guide) recommend; too much heartache. That is too late, plus I need the space for other warm-season crops by then. Of course all of these planting dates are approximate, since we have no crystal ball, so all I can tell you is that Skip and I put a lot of thought and research into giving dates that would help folks be most successful in their gardens. We did the first update a few years ago and I consulted regional publications and interviewed several successful, long-time gardeners and experts from the area (Carol Ann and Larry at Boggy Creek Farm, Roger Igo at Natural Gardener and others). That said, I visited with Dorsey Barger at Eastside Cafe recently and she said she uses the calendar on the Travis County site — mainly because she likes the format — and has had success with most of the dates. However, she is out (in the garden) every day, with helpers, so she can monitor and manage any problems that do arise in a timely manner. Home gardeners might not have that kind of time …”
I haven’t yet consulted with the Austin Organic Gardeners to get the whys and why nots of their planting guide recommendations. When I do, I’ll update this post. In the meantime, if you’re in that group please feel free to leave a comment that explains the rationale for your guide.
The way I see it, planting guides, like just about everything else in life, are never as black and white as we might like them to be. Sometimes you get great results from following one set of rules. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes choosing one of the overlapping areas that all the guides agree on works great. Sometime it doesn’t. Random acts of nature can always turn the perfect planting time into the worst planting time ever. So, as a backup, be sure to take weather conditions into account, including micro-climates, and trust your own intuition and your own experience. If you don’t have much gardening experience to draw from, ask a good gardener in your neighborhood to tell you about their favorite planting times.
And now, back to what’s going on in my garden: I actually got a good start on the fall garden last week when I decided to say goodbye to most of the two-year-old red Swiss chard in the front garden. It was a sad moment. The big knobby growing bulbs at the base of the plants had been sprouting and resprouting big beautiful leaves for the last two years. But it was time to let them go. I added some homemade compost and planted sugar snap peas in the former chard bed and fresh chard seeds in one of the former tomato beds. (I did keep a couple of knobby green chard plants to provide me with a few cooking greens until the new chard comes in.)
Oh, and before I sign off, I must say something about my mighty Pink German heirloom — the biggest, thickest stemmed, heaviest producing heirloom tomato plant I’ve ever grown. This spring was my first time to try it, but I’m already adding it to my favorite-tomatoes-to-grow list. Even though it was attacked non-stop from late May until August by hordes of stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs and spider mites, this tough tomato managed to survive. And while under attack, it kept sending out long healthy vines that snaked several feet away from the bug-ridden main plant and then set more fruit. Those long sucker vines still had fruit on them in late June. And it was good tasting fruit too. Not as strong as a Brandywine or a Cherokee Purple, but definitely good enough flavor to make me want to plant this Pink German again. In the photo below, one of my Pink Germans is on the left, and the two on the right are Purple Cherokees.
Last month, instead of composting the big German guy, I pressed two of his long healthy suckers into the soil and then covered them with a mix of soil and compost. Then I pruned the primary part of the plant to get rid of worn out, spider-mite-infested limbs. The big guy looks kinda scrawny now, but I have high hopes for more tomatoes later in the fall. (But just in case, I saved seed from one of the biggest, tastiest fruits I picked in late May.)
And, finally, I did something this week that I’ve been wanting to do for some time. I started a truck garden. So far I’m really loving driving around with a little garden in my truck bed. More about the truck garden — with more photos — in my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment