Here are some photos of the status of my spring Houston Vegetable Garden. I have comments on each photo. You can open the album in a new page by holding the control key. I used Windows Live to do this page; I like it better than the standard WordPress writer.
The past several days have been quite warm; the first really warm days since November. The plants love it. The tomatoes have good color and are growing. I planted them from gallon pots so they had a good deep root system. The beans are coming up quite well. Even the ones I planted early and were slow in germinating produced a good stand.
Now harvesting fennel, beets, lettuce, arugula and carrots. The beets and carrots were really slow developing because of all the cold weather. Normally, they would all be finished by now. For the same reason, the sugar snaps are still not blooming; also very late.
The Houston Azaleas Trail kept getting moved forward because the azaleas were finished by mid March. The trail is this weekend and the azaleas are not even thinking about blooming!
With some warm days ahead it is time to plant beans, corn and other seed that require warmer temperatures for germination. I started 36 bean plants in the “6-pack” plant containers. They are now transplanted. The ones I planted earlier outside still have not come up and will probably give a poor stand when they do.
The lettuce, turnips and beets all germinated well and are up and going.
The tomatoes are all in and well mulched. I can cover the cages if Jack Frost threatens again.
I have been experimenting with some native mulches for my Houston vegetable garden as well as for landscape plants. Native mulch is (or should be) made from tree trimmings of non-coniferous trees. Some less scrupulous sellers may try to pass off ground bark as native mulch. Stay away from pine bark mulches in your vegetable garden. Native mulch is natural mulch the forests use to regenerate themselves and is the best for your garden. Mulch is the fuel that feeds the chain of micro organisms and it is important to continually renew the supply. If it is fully decayed it can be blended into the soil, but I just use it as a top dressing. Now that most of my garden is up and going, I have been mulching all the plants.
The best mulch I have found is Nature’s Way. It is well composted and ground to 1″ mesh. Berings currently has it on sale for $5 for a two cubic foot bag, still rather expensive. Houston Garden Centers sells a native mulch for $2.40 for the same size bag. It has some relatively large chunks in it and is not as well composted. However, it works well for landscape plants or any application that allows it to stay on the top. A good, low priced and environmentally sound mulch is the Houston Mulch made from tree trimmings that the garbage man picks up. It is made by Living Earth Technologies and is available in bags at Lowe’s for $2.63 for the two cubic foot bag. It is better than the HGC mulch but fairly similar with same larger uncomposted chunks.
I have also bought some bulk native mulch from Action Soils, a bulk yard at about TX 288 and Beltway 8. It is good quality and sells for $22 per yard (equivalent to $1.63 for a 2 cubic foot bag). They will deliver for 4 yards or more for $30 to the Med Center area. The bags are more expensive but convenient unless you are mulching all the landscape. Usually I just need a bag or two at a time.
Of course, I make my own compost, but it is never enough.
