It is March and now it is time to really get busy in the veggie garden. If you took time off in the garden during the last few months, now is the time for action. Most days the temperature is right, there are few or no bugs or mosquitoes, and most plants need to mature and produce before the summer heat hits. That means most seeds and transplants must go in this month. Too late for potatoes and onions, but just the right time for tomatoes, peppers, squash, eggplant, cucumbers, and beans.
Tomatoes
Let’s talk about tomatoes first. It is very important, that fair-sized transplants go into the ground in the next couple weeks. Normally they will not set fruit after night-time temperatures go above 75 degrees. Be prepared to pay up to $3.99 or more for decent transplants this year. At that price you want to give them lots of good care. I hear the Houston Garden Center has tomatoes and other transplants for $1.49. They are small. Gone are our days of having a “ton” of almost free transplants from Jo Sanders. She has moved from her house/farm in Huffman to the Woodlands area. We miss you already, Jo! However, Eric Vogl has stepped up and plans to become the tomato specialist for the school gardens. He already has planted about a dozen and will be planting more with the students this week.
Tomatoes are planted with compost, MicroLife 6-2-4, Rocket Fuel, cotton seed meal, and rainwater. We mulch around the plant with composted cotton Burr. We try to water with rainwater we collect, and then use a liquid spray fertilizer like Ocean Harvest on the leaves every few weeks. We support them in a tall cage. Hopefully, we will have lots of tomatoes for the kids and then more after school is out for processing into salsa and other goodies.
Peppers, Eggplant, Okra
Peppers and Eggplant transplants should be in the ground by late March. We use pretty much the same planting techniques for these crops. Bean seeds, squash seeds and cucumber seeds can all be planted now, too. Prepare the bed with some added compost, add some general organic fertilizer like MicroLife 6-2-4, and plant at the proper depth and distance between seeds. A week after the seeds break the surface, give them a dose of a liquid fertilizer. Make sure to keep the cucumbers well irrigated. They love lots of water and can’t stand drying out. Finally, towards the end of March, you can seed okra if you have room. Remember those plants will get to be taller than you (much taller) and if not planted in the right spot may shade out your other plants.
Potato update
A quick update on the potatoes I wrote about last month. About January 31st we planted seed potatoes at OFE and at my house. Normally in about two weeks they begin to sprout. Thank goodness they were a few days slower than some years as a killing freeze happened just two weeks after planting. But, nothing deterred, they kept themselves safely underground until this past week when they began to peek out. Time will tell if this late start causes any harm. Our other early planting, the Texas 1015 onions were doing so well when the freeze hit. The school volunteers worked hard covering them with mulched leaves, a wire frame, and several layers of frost cloth. All this was held down with discarded fence boards and steel fence posts. Not only was the temperature down to the low teens for an extended period-of-time but freezing temperature and wind chill lasted for almost a week. We think we saved them, but they are not the proud looking lot they were before the freeze. A great job by the volunteers with all hands pitching in! Unfortunately, we lost most of our lettuce, radishes, sugar snap peas, and cole crops, but some have already been replanted. It was a hard month but a good lesson in how hard it is for the farm industry to keep us all fed!
Thank you, for all the MicroLife orders. The huge truck is almost full! Deadline for ordering and having your payment to me is March 10th. Anne has placed the order form on the web site with all the details. Your support of this fundraiser is not only a good deal for you, but also a vital help for the OFE Growers to keep the gardening program going at the school.