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.

Another run to Home Depot

It's getting hot already....96 degrees and it isn't even noon yet. This morning I planted some vinca (Home Depot had another 89-cent sale on six-packs) under the thinned-out orange tree. I bought 10 six packs and probably should have gotten three times that number. Oh well, what is a day without a run to Home Depot? I think we have some Home Depot stock, or at least I hope we do.

Summer changes in the garden

I pruned the orange tree today...removed some of the lower limbs which were hanging down to the ground. It looks more like a tree than a giant bush now, I should be able to plant something under it (haven't decided what yet) and we should still get plenty of oranges. The grapefruit tree looks like a bush too, but I am more reluctant to prune it as it seems more fragile than the other citrus trees and I would hate to accidentally kill it since my mother enjoys grapefruit so much. She still takes a big boxful back on the airplane, even though she has to pay extra to do so.

The first zinnia opened up today, and the orange daylily has also started blooming. The Confederate Jasmine behind the patio pond is still blooming, and the two Carolina Jessamine have started to come back, even the one I thought was probably dead. The birds have pretty well finished off the last of the peaches, but I enjoyed the first apricot a few days ago. There is apparently one plum this year at the very top of our Santa Rosa plum tree, which is wedged in between two rosebushes. Whose bright idea was that? Although we have had the tree for several years, we have never seen any plums. It may have helped that we put in another plum this year which will help pollinate it.

We are still struggling to the get the irrigation system right. There was a big puddle in one spot this morning, and other places aren't getting enough. I thought one day without watering had killed the parsley and mint I planted under the almond tree, but it seemed to bounce back after getting watered. I changed the system to come on every day. Supposedly you are not supposed to do that, but I haven't found any other way to keep things alive.

More garden wanderings

Pole beans are coming up nicely. We're trying a different support system this year- an A-frame trellis that will hopefully be sturdier than the rebar-and-string supports we tried with the snap peas. Speaking of which, there are about a dozen volunteer snap pea plants coming up. It isn't the right time of the year for them, but I'm leaving them alone to see what they will do. There are also melon seedlings coming up under the lemon tree, and lots of green tomatoes. The nasturtium border looks pretty ratty, but I decided to leave it in place and see if it works to shade the landscaping bricks so that the tomatoes and other vegetables don't suffer as much from reflected heat. (This was a tip I learned in a gardening seminar we took through Phoenix Permaculture Association)

I pulled out the sweet peas that were under the peach tree yesterday, which have pretty well stopped blooming and are dying back anyway. These are volunteers that have self-seeded every spring for several years, and it isn't even the best place for them. There isn't much for them to climb on, other than the peach tree, and they block the entrance to the gazebo. I think I'll save some of the seeds and put them in the pots under the old gazebo off our back patio- see if they will grow up the metal supports.

The grape vines on the arch behind the pool have really taken off...one of the vines has reached the top of the arbor already. They seem to be doing much better than the older vines along the fence behind the lemon tree, perhaps because they get more sun.