Houston Vegetable Garden – Growing vegetables gardens in Houston

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.

The Contessa onions in my Houston vegetable garden are starting to form bulbs and should be ready in a couple of weeks; hopefully before I leave for Montana.  The photo on the left shows the thriving bed (the super sugar snaps in the background are about finished but have produced an unbelievable amount of peas).  The picture on the right shows that the bulb is forming.

The recent newsletter from Dixondale Farms “onionman” had some interesting observations on onions that bolt prematurely to seed pods.  He says it is due to stress (lack of water, too much water, etc.).  I always have a few that bolt, but it seems rather random.  One will bolt and the plant right next to it will not; hard to explain by the stress theory.  The onionman points out that onions that bolt will not store well.  In fact, when I was preparing some 1015 onions from the store today (hopefully the last I will buy for some time), the central core was turning brown.  I suspect I bought an onion that had bolted.

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.

The sugar snap peas are coming in faster than we can eat them.  Even though it is only a 10′ row, it is supplying 3 families! As advertised, the “super” sugar snaps have not gotten mildew.

I plant some tendergreens (aka mustard-spinach) about a month ago as a test.  I also planted turnips and thought these were turnips until I looked more closely a them.  I picked them and got a basket full from just a few square feet of space.  As the name suggests they are very tender and need to be cooking only a short time, much like spinach.  Broccoli is in full production.  The beans I started indoors are blooming.  The one nipped by the cold weather are now coming along well.

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.

 

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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.

I planted 5 tomatoes in the garden yesterday.  My neighbor down the street, who I always told that he was planting too early, was laughing.  But, I can cover them with 5 gallon pots and freeze cloth.  I saved some and planted them in 1 gallon puts to have a backup plan.

I also planted some turnip, beet, tendergreen and lettuce seed.  These are somewhat experimental because I usually plant these in the fall and not in the spring.  Bugs and worms seem to a problem on these plants in the spring.  This year I am not planting corn so I have a lot of space for experimentation.  I was tempted to plant green beans, but with a cold forecast for next week, I decided to hold off.

A couple of weeks ago I planted some garlic, just supermarket garlic that had sprouted in the kitchen.  It is up and is nice green garlic now.  A rewarding and easy plant to grow.  There is a “garlic guy” in central Texas that sells all kinds of garlic, but he always seems to be sold out.  The supermarket type may not be the best, but fresh garlic is really good in some dishes.  Worth a little space for sure.