Fall is here (supposedly)

It's late September and still blazingly hot....predicted high of 106 today. I wish it would cool off; I'm ready to get some serious work done in the garden!

The picture above shows several fairly healthy summer squash we planted in July. None of the bush beans planted at the same time survived. No squash yet; they have just started to bloom and we'll have to wait and see how the pollination goes. We're still picking several Japanese eggplant and Armenian cucumbers each week. This week I planted two trays of snow peas, spinach, and four kinds of lettuce indoors. Maybe by the time they are ready to transplant it will have cooled down enough for them to survive. I also put out some broccoli and cauliflower transplants. This year I'm trying them in the raised beds instead of in our designated garden area. I haven't had too much luck with these in the past, and think it might be that flowering plants don't get enough sun in that area in the winter.

The peach and nectarine trees look terrible; the plum trees look okay, and the pear and apple trees look fine. We lost one of our newly planted peach trees this summer; you can see it in the foreground. I'm more worried about our mature peach tree by the gazebo- I'd hate to lose it. I'm not sure if it is salt burn or an iron deficiency, or a combination of both, but its leaves are really yellow. (Our deciduous trees don't tend to lose their leaves until sometime in December) It's getting deeply watered once a week, which is supposed to mitigate the salt problem. I gave it a dose of liquid iron supplement this weekend.

There's a nice second crop of zinnias that came up from the seeds of the ones that bloomed in June. An orange variety has been blooming nonstop since spring, and there's a fair amount of color from vinca and portulaca. Three of the older hibiscus planted around the pool may not make it, though. I'm not sure, but I think the drip system that goes to them was malfunctioning and I didn't notice they were in distress until it was too late. However, when I started cutting back the dead branches, I found green wood farther down the plant, so it's possible they could come back.

Mike finished installing the French drain and is now in the process of leveling the area where the new patio will go. He's debating about whether it is necessary to take out the dead, thoroughly scalped remnants of Bermuda grass first, or just put the sand base down on top of it. I don't think it will revive, but as it decomposes, it might cause the patio pavers to sink unevenly.

Patio Progress

Most of the Bermuda grass appears to be dead, so Mike has moved onto the next step- putting in a French drain where the patio will meet the extended raised beds.

I moved onto weeding another raised bed, the one nearest the pool where we planted asparagus plus blueberry and blackberry bushes, rose bushes, and assorted annuals. It's a difficult spot to get into as it's bordered on one side by a thevetia hedge, and there is also a fairly large colony of ants that does not like to be disturbed. I haven't attempted to get rid of it, because (a) I don't like putting poison down where there are things growing I plan to eat and (b) according to the insect experts in my Master Gardener class, ants are beneficial for our heavy clay soils. The lecturer (an entomologist from U of A) cited a study of alfalfa fields that were infested with fire ants. The alfalfa plants nearest the anthills were healthier and produced more than the ones in ant-free areas. However, getting several ant bites on my hands and feet every time I attempt to get some of the bermuda grass and spurge out of the bed does not make for a pleasant experience.

I haven't seen the mother hummingbird yet, but now there are three eggs in the nest!

It's fall, although you wouldn't believe it by the temperature

Fall planting season is officially upon us, but we're in the middle of a heat wave (110 yesterday) and it's still too hot to work in the garden for very long. I worked on getting the bermuda grass out of a couple of the raised beds today, and scattered seeds of larkspur and snapdragon. I'm harvesting a lot of Japanese eggplant and Armenian cucumbers, and that's about it. We didn't get one bean from the lovely tent of pole bean vines- I think that I planted them too late. Likewise the corn was a waste of space and water- poor pollination and some kind of giant black mutated kernels. I won't bother trying corn again.

The only fall veggies I have planted to date are yellow squash and bush beans, which according to my Master Gardener chart, should be planted in August. A disappointing number of beans are up, probably because I used an old seed packet, but there are about a dozen squash plants scattered in the raised beds. We'll see how they produce- this is the first time I've actually tried them in the fall.

Home Depot had a good price on flowering hanging baskets, so I replaced three of the baskets hanging from the gazebo, which were looking pretty sad. I decided to leave the fourth one in place, because when I took it down, there was a hummingbird nest with two tiny eggs! I can put up with ratty-looking annuals for a few more weeks.

We're in the middle of another big project....taking out a 10-foot wide section of lawn on the north side of the house and putting in a pavestone patio, and enlarging the raised beds so they abut the patio. You can see the location above delineated by the two-by-fours and dead Bermuda grass. (Killing the grass was the first step) When completed, it should be a nice shady place to enjoy the garden, with a view of the raised beds and pond waterfall. Mike is doing most of the work...too hot for me to stay out there more than 5 minutes at a time! I don't see how he stands it, but he says it doesn't bother him.

Weeds and things

Today's Master Gardener class was on weeds, which was actually quite interesting. For example, I learned that many of our most pervasive and obnoxious weeds are of European origin, and that we can blame the fall of Constantinople in 1453 for their arrival here. Seriously. When the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople and controlled the Black Sea, it became very expensive for Europeans to trade with India, China, and other Asian countries. Enter Christopher Columbus and his search for a western route to the Orient. The wooden ships of the time needed ballast to provide stabilization on the ocean, and if they offloaded cargo on one side of the Atlantic, they needed something to replace its weight. The cheapest and easiest thing to do was to fill barrels with local dirt....and the weed seeds, fungi, bacteria, and other inhabitants of the soil came along for the ride.

I also now can identify and call some weeds by their proper names before attempting to kill them. The tall ones with leaves that look sort of like giant dandelions? Prickly lettuce, also called compass plant because the leaves grow north and south. The low-growing stuff with many small leaves that exudes a sticky sap (which is poisonous, by the way, and could cause eye damage if you rub your eye while weeding) Spurge. The feathery ones that like to hide and grow in shrub plantings, and that have a tap root that goes down to China? Desert broom, which unlike most things that are growing unwanted in my backyard, is actually a native plant.

I'm certain I will have plenty of practice naming weeds in the next few days. We got quite a bit of rain the last few days. Monsoon rains in the desert are always needed and provide a bit of cooling respite from the 100-plus normal temperatures for this time of the year. But, in addition to making our flowers, vegetables, and trees happy, they also cause weed seeds that were hiding dormant in our yard to sprout and proliferate.

It's hot!

The garden is a mess after being neglected while we were on vacation for two weeks. The intense heat and an irrigation malfunction affecting the raised beds did not help matters much. They look pretty sad. The "old" vegetable garden wasn't affected so much as its watering system was on a different line. We picked a bumper crop of tomatoes before we left and have at least that many green ones maturing now. No beans yet but the vines continue to grow up the trellis and look healthy. The volunteer sugar snap peas, not unexpectedly, died from the heat. I also picked a couple of giant Armenian cucumbers.

I'm trying to catch up weeding, deadheading, and pulling out spent annuals in the raised beds. The irrigation malfunction caused water to just seep from the sprayers, so I have a nice healthy crop of bermuda grass and a purslane-type weed growing in some spots, while other things are dead. I cut the allyssum way back and most of it is still green underneath, so it will probably come back. If not, it dropped lots of seeds for new plants. I can't find the Japanese eggplant- maybe it will appear once I get all the weeds and grass out, and remove some zinnias that are past their prime. I think we've lost one of the new fruit trees we planted this spring, a peach. We have really had a difficult time with stone fruits- it is hard to get the watering right with our heavy clay soil.

I was accepted to the Master Gardener program and have been to two classes so far. The first was on basic botany and I was surprised how much I remembered about cellular structure and photosynthesis from my college botany classes, which were in 1970. Fortunately the lecture did not include the Krebs citric acid cycle nor having to draw any three-dimensional chemical formulas. The second was on soil and fertilization and reminded me more of my chemistry classes. We have a huge stack of books with reading assignments each week. Some of it is pretty technical, but it's kind of fun for a geek like me. The most practical thing I have learned so far is that it's OK to put oleander and thevetia leaves in the compost bin....the toxins are broken down by the composting process. Considering how messy those are, that is certainly a good thing to know...both in terms of not sending more trash to the landfill than necessary, and in saving money because the more compost we can make, the less we have to buy!

June Harvest

Today I'm eating nectarines from a dwarf tree we planted a couple of years ago. This is the first edible fruit we've gotten from the tree, and it's pretty good. We picked two bunches of red seedless grapes from the arbor in front of the pool equipment, and they were actually grape-sized rather than the match head sized ones we've gotten from the older vines under the lemon tree. There are lots of tomatoes, but they probably won't last long in the summer heat. We also have several smallish bell peppers. No snapbeans, butterbeans, or corn yet...I probably planted those too late. The snapbeans are about halfway up the trellis now; I'm waiting to post a picture when they reach the top and/or start producing. I cleaned out the withered nasturtiums around the pool today, and found a volunteer leaf lettuce plant that decided to grow there. I'll leave it alone and see what happens, as I am doing with the volunteer snap peas.

The zinnias look really good, and there are a lot of interesting blooms in the "hummingbird and butterfly mix) that I haven't identified. It's always fun to plant a mix like that and see the different things that come up. I pulled up the hollyhocks which are done for the season, and Mike ran them through the new shredder. It's a budget version we found at Harbor Freight tools that was suggested in a Phoenix Permaculture Guild post. We were disappointed in how it did when we tried to shred the pea vines and bolted lettuce, but it did a nice job on the hollyhock canes, and popped all the seeds out of the cases. We're trying to compost yard waste more seriously this year- it seems a shame to send all we produce to a landfill and then go to Home Depot and buy several dozen bags of mulch.

Memorial Day Weekend Project

Here's a photo of our latest project, a raised bed surrounding a grape arbor. We had originally built a small wall of stuccoed cinder blocks to hide the pool equipment. Later we found a bench with a metal arbor that we though would look nice in front of the wall, which was kind of boring to look at. We'd had several plants die in that location because of the heavy clay soil, so we decided to try grapes planted in large wooden boxes with the bottoms cut out, long planter boxes on top of the wall, and a hanging basket at the apex of the arch. The planter boxes and hanging basket were unsuccessful, but the grapes really took off. Since we never used the bench for sitting anyway, we decided to take out the bench, remove the boxes around the grapes, and raise the whole area. We planted a rosebush in the center, with verbena and vinca surrounding it.

I think life is a bit like gardening. There are many things you can't control- like our heavy clay soil and the Arizona summer heat, and there are many things you try that don't work the way you hoped they would. But you work to change the things you can, you learn from your mistakes, and you keep trying new things.