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.
This year I tried the new triple sweet corn in my Houston vegetable garden. Triple sweet comes in three varieties: Serendipity (bi-color), Honey Select (yellow) and Avalon (white). I ordered from Park Seed. The three are about the same in everything except color. I planted Serendipity directly in the ground on March 1. Germination was slow because these varieties need 65+ degree soil temperature. Only about 1/2 of the seed came up; but I planted two seed per spot so the stand was ok. I planted Honey Select in a celled flat under the grow light and every seed came up. I transplanted to the garden when the shoot first showed out of the soil. Even though it was planted several days later it was ahead of the Serendipity. I planted the Avalon in flats also about a week later. The result was 3 varieties maturing over about 3 weeks. All were area planted on about 1 foot spacings. I also hand pollinated to ensure that leaves did not block out the silks.
The ears are on the small side (6-8″) but the quality and yield are outstanding. We made a mistake and overcooking the first batch. Store corn usually takes 8-10 minutes of boiling, but these varieties should be cooked no more than 5 minutes. These varieties have more of a “corny” flavor than the super sweet and sugar enhanced varieties, a characteristic that I like.
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.
The tomatoes are busy setting fruit in my Houston vegetable garden. This year I planted all the tomatoes together so I could do a good test on varieties of slicer tomatoes. Previously, I have followed the general recommendation of scattering them around the garden. While good for disease control it limits comparison because of the variability of sunlight and some differences in the soil. I planted Homestead, Merced, Floramerica and Celebrity as well as the cherry/plum tomato Sweet Chelsea (far left in the picture).
Sweet Chelsea is indeterminate to put it mildly and quickly takes over half the garden. The others are determinate, which I generally think are best for growing tomatoes in Houston. Homestead is a heirloom variety that we used to raise commercially when I was a kid growing up in Lavaca County. So far all are doing well, but I think Homestead is moving to the front in terms of production and Celebrity is lagging behind. Merced was the first to set fruit and has the largest tomatoes. I plant to measure production of each variety and do a taste test.
In the background you can see the corn I started indoors in now tasseling. On the left you can the parsley going to seed. I am letting practically everything (arugula, cilantro, bok choi, mustard and lettuce) go to seed. The flowers are good to have to attract beneficial insects and I plan to save the seeds. I planted a couple of the Osaka Purple Mustard seed and they seem to have come up true. Of course, hybrid seed will no come true and is hard to know what will and will not. The butterfly iris in the foreground has been beautiful this spring.
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.
Tomorrow is February 1 and time to start thinking of the spring Houston vegetable garden. I transplanted my tomatoes to large pots today and will set them in the garden later in February with frost cloth around them.
Every lettuce seed I planted in the flat seems to have come up twice. I have set out about 15 plants and reluctantly tossed the rest.
Sugar snaps are growing well. The beets and carrots are being picked. I may be pushed to find spots to plant the beans, corn and tomatoes. Speaking of corn I ordered some triple sweet varieties to plant. Two varieties–Honey Select and Serendipity–are now recommended by the Extension Service. Park Seed offers a 3-fer package of those two plus Revelation, a very early maturing variety. So I will try their three-fer deal. I have not any extra sugar types before but other gardeners have told me that they are difficult here, but I thought I would find out for myself.
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.
Corn ear worms are a annoying pest to the Houston vegetable gardener. It is not that they eat so much of the corn, they just make it look bad. Having members of the carrot/parsley in bloom is supposed to attract a wasp that attacks the moths. I always try to have something blooming in the garden to attract beneficials. At the time the corn is vulnerable, cilantro is blooming everywhere. I usually have more problems with ear worms in the fall than in the spring.
This year I also tried an organic remedy recommended by U. Mass. It involves squirting a small amount of vegetable oil with BT added to it onto the roots of the silks a few days after they appear. I tried it and so far I have not had any ear worms.
The corn did not fill out the ears very well. I don’t think the ear worm treatment is responsible, but I guess it could be. Probably the corn was planted too close together and the leaves interfered with pollination. Often I hand pollinate, but this year I did not.
The first round of beans is finished. The Derby beans are blooming again; the Maxibel are dying off. The next picking will be smaller and of poorer quality but still a picking.
Tomatoes are being picked daily. As usual Sweet Chelsea and Sun Gold are producing massive amounts. The slicers produced very good quality this year but a small yield. Champion made only 3 tomatoes. Merced was better than Bush Celebrity, but unfortunately no more seed are available for it.
Tomorrow we are off the Montana to start a spring garden there. I planted black eye and purple hull peas as a cover crop. Hopefully, some relative will pick some of them, but most people are too busy or too lazy to shell peas these days.
I pulled the last of the winter vegetables this week; sugar snap peas, beets and carrots. The sugar snaps gave a great yield and are one of the most rewarding vegetables to grow here, especially given the price and quality of supermarket offerings. We really enjoy the Kinbi carrots. They are yellow, rather than orange and are really beautiful when cooked. They are also very sweet.
The spring vegetables are coming along fast with the recent warmer weather. The beans are blooming. Corn is about a knee high and ready for a side dressing of cottonseed meal. The Sweet G-90 plants are more hardy than the Butterfruit bi-color; but that is to be expected because G-90 makes a much larger plant. All the tomatoes have small tomatoes on them. The Champion plant is rather anemic; I probably planted it in a bad place, a mistake on my part because I wanted to give Champion one last try. It is rated as good by others for the Houston vegetable garden, but I have had poor results.
Cilantro and parsley are blooming and the cilantro especially is very pretty. I have let it go to seed in the blackberry bed. It and the parsley will reseed next fall. It is best to grow each is a small bed with a lot of plants rather than as specimen plants (not practical of course if you are paying dollars per plant at the nursery). Harvest by cutting off 6″ or so sprigs at the ground. It will keep coming back until it bolts to seed.
It is time to plant the warmer summer vegetables; okra, cowpeas, eggplant and melons. I won’t be planting any because I will be in Montana when they produce. No other family member is dedicated enough to come and pick them.