Central Texas is a great place to be a gardener. You can grow a huge variety of trees, shrubs, veggies, fruits, etc. However, gardening in this part of Texas can also be quite challenging. Many parts of Central Texas don’t necessarily have the best soils. This means that you’ll probably have to work you soil with compost to get your soil to perform.
July 9th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Hi,
I just moved to West Tx and started my first garden. I wanted to grow vegies for my family so I planted a small test garden for this first year. I put in two rows of corn, tomatoes, yellow crook neck squash, cucumbers, pinto beans, green beans, radishes peppers, potatoes, and carrots. Well, it seems to be a wash and I have a feeling that challenging Texas soil is the culpret.
The potatoes produced small plants above ground but no potatoes below, the carrots never came up at all, the peppers, beans, cucumbers all produced flowers but not vegies at all, the corn did a really strange thing, they grew into bushes about 3 feet tall produced silk at the end of what looked like a cluster of leaves not a cob like you would expect and once we pulled the leaves back there were tiny little, partially developed cobs with very tiny little kernals of corn, the radishes grew mostly on top of the ground and they were very very hot, the tomatoes produced great but all the tomatoes were split on top where they connect to the plant or they had black rotted spots on the very bottom, the winner was the yellow crook neck squash, they produced great and tasted great.
I figured the potates, corn, and carrots didn’t do well because we planted them in the hard clay, we did mix in a little potting soil but not much; however the rest of the plants were planted in the ground after we added about 4 inches of topsoil/potting soil mix and a little of the clay soil. We watered twice a day (morning and evening) and kept after the weeds.
Anyone have any idea what happened or have any advice for my next attempt?
I would like to maybe start a winter garden? But I’m not sure now what to plant or when or how…..good god it’s a good think I’m not the giving up type!!