HoustonVegetableGarden.com

The traditional spring crops are in harvest and some are winding down in my Houston vegetable garden.  I have picked a few tomatoes and have a lot more just about ready.  As usual Merced is the earliest and most productive—too bad the seed are no longer available—followed closely by Celebrity and Homestead.  Early Girl has lived up to its name but is a rather wild indeterminate with fruit of only average quality.  Next year I will drop it and Floramerica and add the recommended Merced replacement mentioned in a previous post.

The green beans are through the first picking.  The Contenders may give a small repeat crop and I expect Derby will give a good repeat.

Sugar snaps are finished are on the compost pile.  Onions and leeks not quite ready.  Beets and carrots remaining need to be harvested.

I planted a few Suyo long cucumbers on the fence and some okra seed.  That will be about it for the summer while I am gone.

Picked the first of the Derby beans from my Houston vegetable garden; 2 1/4 pounds from about 20 square feet.  These are the beans that got "burned" rather badly from the late cold weather.  They recovered beautifully.  Last year my first beans also came on May 2.  I also picked a tomato on May 2 last year, although it was a small outlier that ripened well before the others.  The tomatoes look really good, but none are anywhere near ripe.

The Contender beans are about finished.  I will leave them in and see if they repeat, but I do not expect them to repeat the way Derby beans do.  The two beans are side by side and the Derby plants (left) are about twice as big.  Note the flexible green wire fence to keep Esme the golden doddle out.

I picked the first mess of green beans from the Houston vegetable garden on April 17, about 2 weeks earlier than last year.  I started 24 Contender plants under the grow light in deep 6-pack pots.  They really got a jump start on the plants from seeds planted directly.  However, beans from the direct sown plants should be available next week.

Tomatoes are doing well but are still a long way from picking.  The sugar snaps are through; plants are still healthy (no mildew), but no more blooms.  Broccoli production continues from the side shoots.  Packman broccoli is particularly good at producing a continuing yield of side shoots.  Onions are getting thicker, but have not really made bulbs yet.  The late sown lettuce is ready to pick and will probably bolt soon.  Lots of blooms from cilantro and arugula to feed the good bugs.

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.

The green beans I planted I planted around October 1 (much later than recommended) are now producing very well.  The Contender beans came in about a week before Derby, a plus for late fall plantings.  It will be interesting to see if the Contenders produce multiple waves of crops as Derby does.  Of course, weather may interrupt this experiment because of the late planting. This year I planted beans in my best bed and the crop is much better.  I am not really sure why this bed is best, but it is probably because it gets the most sun.  As the days get shorter and the shadows of building and trees get longer, locations good in the spring may not get enough sun.  Last year I planted them on the most southern bed that starts getting some shade from the house in the fall.  I made a crop but not nearly as much as this year.  Of course, the weather has also been ideal.  It is hard to run gardening experiments because of too many uncontrollable variables.

Lettuce is being picked and the white turnips are ready–the purple tops still have a ways to go.  Beets are just beginning to form bulbs.  We have been eating bok choi and pak choi for a couple of weeks also. (I can’t tell the difference between them; maybe it is just different spelling translations from Chinese)  Mustard greens are also ready to be harvested.  I won’t be buying very much at the Urban Harvest Farmers Market for a while.

My Contessa onion order will be shipped on December 15; the leeks in early January.  I saved plenty of room for them.  Sugar snap peas will be planted in mid December.  I may try to get some “super” sugar snaps.  They are supposed to be more mildew resistant.  I always lose the plants to mildew, but usually they are about through producing anyhow.

I picked my first tomato today, a smallish Merced.  As a reader observed, the Sweet Chelsea tomato takes over the garden, but it is loaded with fruit.  I have been pruning the ends of some of the wilder stalks.  Next year I plan to do some early pruning on it. It would grow best in a tall cage maybe 3′ in diameter with the side branches trimmed to force it to grow up instead of out.  I think the determinate varieties have stopped setting fruit.  Night time temperatures in the 70s are not conducive to setting fruit.

The first bean crop from my Houston vegetable garden was picked today, about 62 days from when I planted the seed.  Beans are advertised to be ready in fewer days than that, but it was quite cool when I planted them on March 1 and germination was slow, but good.  The plants for very healthy and loaded with beans.  We picked almost 3 pounds from a garden space of 28 square feet;  a lot of food from a very small piece of land.  Derby beans so outperform all the other varieties I have tried that I no longer experiment.  I had beets planted in the location is the winter garden. 

The earlier corn is tasseling and silking.  I have been doing some hand pollination.  One disadvantage of area planting (which I use for everything) is that leaves of the corn can shield the silks.

Onions have all been harvested and are on shelves in the garage.  I had good luck keeping them for some time last year.  I continue to pick leeks and still have quite a few left.  Also, a lot of collards, but everyone is tired of greens.  The fennel that I cut off at ground line has put out nice new shoots and will be ready in a couple of weeks.

I pulled out the sugar snaps today.  It was a record crop, but mildew had about finished the plants.  They were about finished anyhow and were putting too much shade on the corn.  I have not found an acceptable way to control mildew on sugar snaps.

We have a threat of frost tonight, but I think we will be ok in the central area.  The temperature is still in the 50s at 10 pm and the wind is blowing.  I watered well but did not put the frost cloth back on–what a year of weather.

Quite a few little tomatoes.  Merced set fruit first but the others are not far behind.  Plants look really good.  Corn is also doing well.  Cilantro, arugula and parsley are all blooming and bringing in beneficial insects.  Tomorrow I will mulch the blackberries with newspapers and some hay I brought back from the ranch.  Beans did germinate well in spite of the cold spell when I planted them

The wonderful Contessa onions and the leeks are now ready.  We had a salad tonight of the onions with avocados and cherry tomatoes–wonderful.  The avocado from Costco are great, but they need a few days to ripen.

Time to get rid of the last of the winter vegetables in your Houston vegetable garden and plant the spring crop.  Last week I planted the tomatoes from pots into the ground and yesterday put frost cloth around them for the cold weekend. See previous post on how to do this ( http://www.houstonvegetablegarden.com/index.php/2008/02/07/growing-tomatoes-in-houston-cont/)  I planted some corn in the garden and some under the grow light.  I hope the warm weather last week was sufficient to germinate the triple sweet varieties which require soil temperatures of at least 65.  The seed under the light came up almost at once with 100% germination.  They need to be put in the garden but I will wait until it warms up a bit tomorrow.  Corn develops large roots fast so the starter flat gets overwhelmed rather quickly.

I still have some beets and carrots to pull before I plant the beans.  They should go in next week sometime.

Still overwhelmed with lettuce–having been giving it to anyone in sight.  Sugar snap peas should be ready this week.

Parsley and cilantro are started to bloom and seed.  Their blooms attract beneficial insects as well provide the seed for next years crop.  They will reseed indefinitely, but be careful not to over mulch after the seed have fallen.

My corn stand was not very good but the quality of the produce was excellent.  I hand pollinated because of the sparse stand.  To hand pollinate take the seed like pollen from the tassels and put it on the silk.  It helps both with sparse and thick plantings.  Last spring I got some poor pollination because the leaves hid the silks in the thick plantings.  I will plant sugar snap peas where the corn grew, probably about mid-December.

The Derby green beans are about finished, but production has been excellent.  With the corn and beans gone, I now refer to it as a Houston winter vegetable garden, rather than a fall garden.  We ate the lone kohl rabi; we used it in a salad much like jimaca.  Bob Randall calls it the most under utilized vegetable in Houston.  If you close your eys and ignore texture, it tastes like cabbage.  We never raised it on our farm growing up, but the neighboring Czechs always planted it.  The purple mustard greens are now being harvested and are excellent; perhaps a little milder than traditional mustard greens.

Beets are growing nicely.  I plant beets outside, rather than under the grow lamp.  Each beet seed will produce about 5 plants; each nodule is an independent seed.  Somewhat surprisingly they transplant rather easily.  The carrots are a reasonable stand.  I just broadcast the seeds.  Perhaps I would get better germination by being more careful with the planting.

I also planted some “bright lights” Swiss Chard; it will be a landscape plant, but we will eventually eat it.

All the vegetables started under the grow lamp are now planted in the garden; lettuce, collards and bok choi.  They are doing nicely but it will be a while before harvest.

We had some great potatoes from the Bayou City Farmers Market this week also.  I may try potatoes again.  Previously, they had nematodes or some fungus disease.

I have been away on a long trip to Australia and have been lagging on postings.

When I was in Houston over Labor Day I planted corn (Silver Queen) and Derby green beans.  I also broadcast some turnip seed.  Corn is a good fall crop.  It ripens slower in the cool October/November weather so the it can be picked over a longer period.  In the spring it ripens in late May and all of it must be eaten in only a few days.  Worms are often worse in the fall, however.

Before I left everything was coming up.  Corn needs to be started by early September.  Beans can wait until as late as early October.  As our winters have become warmer and warmer I have found best results are obtained by planting later than the historical weather based recommendations.  Except for Ike, the September has been exceptionally nice; perhaps an omen of a colder winter.  In most recent years it has been so hot in September that fall crops just cannot get started.

All of the cooler weather crops can wait until October and some to November.  About mid October I will plant mustard greens, broccoli, lettuce, arugula, carrots, beets and fennel.  I count on parsley and cilantro to reseed every year. All can be seeded directly in the garden but I often start broccoli, lettuce and fennel indoors under the plant light. (see instructions on Main Panel on right).  I may plant some more exotic vegetables such as kohlrabi also. More on those planting in a week or two.