Herbs and things

Lowe's had a sale on vegetable and herb pots, so I thought it would be a good time to clean out the Swiss chard and Chinese greens from this area and plant a herb garden in front of the roses in this bed. I planted oregano, parsley, basil, cilantro, and catnip. I thought this would be a good location for these as it is convenient to the kitchen, and will make an attractive foreground planting for the roses. There are also three tomato plants in this bed, and asparagus behind the roses.

The thevetia hedge between this bed and the pool area still hasn't started to leaf out after it took heavy frost damage this winter, so we may have to trim it back further. It's still alive, though, because when scratched with a fingernail we can see green wood.

The tomatoes in this bed look fine, but something happened to to the three I put in a different location. They turned black and wilted overnight...they look like they have been sprayed with Roundup, but we haven't used any in this area.

February overview

Here's an overview of several of the raised beds in late February. A couple of  (yum!) asparagus shoots have come up, and there are now blossoms on the nectarine and apricot trees as well as the peach. The apple tree is beginning to leaf out, there are buds on the fig tree, and I even spotted a couple of buds on the two new bare-root peach trees we planted earlier this month.

Today's gardening tasks included planting more strawberries and spreading several bags of mulch over new plantings of tomato transplants, asparagus, beans, and squash. We are still harvesting several kinds of lettuce, Swiss chard, and snow peas.

Planting, interrupted

We've completed clearing out the raised beds, for the most part and for now. The grass may fade and the flower wither, but Mexican primrose is forever. Once it warms up, we will also be battling Bermuda grass invasions. We got some of our spring plantings completed before we were interrupted by rain, which is always nice, but it would have been nicer if it had waited until we'd finished planting and mulching. Some areas of the Valley actually got a light dusting of snow and/or hail, but not here. It really didn't get that cold, which is also a good thing.

The bed in the foreground, which adjoins a pavestone patio, will contain mostly flowers. Coreopsis, larkspur, and snapdragon seedlings are already coming up, and I added petunia transplants as a border on the patio side. I also planted one hill of yellow squash and one hill of zucchini in this bed.

I planted tomato transplants and bush beans in the left rear bed, and plan to border it with marigolds. In addition to my favorite Early Girl, Roma and Yellow Pear tomatoes, we're trying some new varieties that are supposed to be more heat tolerant- Phoenix, Solar Fire, and Summer Set. The new asparagus trench is in the rear of this bed. The right rear bed contains strawberries and a small fig tree.

For now, I'm waiting for things to dry out a little bit so that I can get back to planting!

Valentine's Day in the garden

 "A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted...."

Valentine's Day marks the beginning of the spring gardening season here since normally "all danger of frost" has passed. We're finally allowed to prune frost damaged plants such as hibiscus, bougainvillea, lantana, and tecoma. We can plant transplants of tomatoes, peppers, and other warm weather crops. (If you don't get a head start on tomatoes here by planting as early as possible, you won't get any this summer. They won't set fruit once the temperatures are in the 100s.) It is also time to fertilize fruit trees. So we'll be busy over the next few days!

Today we worked on clearing out the raised bed in which we grew kale, cauliflower, and snow peas this winter. I harvested these Veronica romanesco cauliflower heads today, which look like whorled seashells in shades of yellow and green. Once we removed the cauliflower, we dug a trench in the rear of the bed to plant more asparagus. According to Greg Peterson of Root Phoenix, the best way to plant asparagus is to dig a trench, half fill it with compost, lay the asparagus roots down in the trench, and cover with more compost, so that's the method we're trying this year. We have two producing asparagus plants in a different location, but would enjoy more. I love fresh asparagus, especially roasted with olive oil and drizzled with basalmic vinegar, but it is so expensive. As a bonus, we think the lacy foliage will provide a nice backdrop to the raised bed.

I started pruning the frost damaged wood from one of the hibiscus plants lining the fence behind the area where we planted the asparagus, and it looks likely that it has been killed off to the ground. I haven't cut into green wood yet. It's likely that they will eventually come back from the roots, but I'm considering giving up on them and digging them up. In the area where we lived before moving here, we had beautiful hibiscus that were rarely touched by frost, but this area is apparently in a colder pocket of the Valley because it happens at least every other year here.

Work day

"The laborer is worthy of his hire."

Reciting this verse was a family tradition when our sons were younger. It usually meant going out for lunch as a reward for spending a Saturday morning doing household chores. At some point, when we felt we'd done enough, and were getting hungry and tired, someone would quote the passage, and that was the signal that it was quitting time.

I thought about this today, as we spent most of the day working in the garden. It was a lovely day to do so, with near-perfect temperatures, and we got quite a bit done. Most of what we're doing now involves getting the raised beds ready for spring planting- weeding, leveling, and checking the drip irrigation. Here's what we accomplished today:

1.Added a layer of retaining-wall bricks to one of our raised beds,
2. Improved the berm around a pear tree and mulched it as well as the two new ones.
3. Transplanted a plumbago to a different location. When we originally created the raised beds, we planned to grow trees, shrubs, and flowers in them. They've since morphed into vegetable-growing areas, and the shrubs are really in the way.
4.Cut back all the cattails in the pond. Besides containing a lot of brown spikes that needed to be removed, there are way too many of them and they are crowding out the water lilies. (And the water lilies are sending out shoots already!)
5. Created a decorative pattern on a block wall with the smaller recycled pieces of an old metal gazebo.
6. Harvested the last of the broccoli and removed the plants.
7. Cut down the remains of an orchid tree that fell victim to a combination of a drip irrigation malfunction and last summer's intense heat.

We don't need to motivate ourselves to work in the garden with an external reward. Enjoying the beauty our labors create is reward enough. But we'll probably go out to dinner anyway!

New trees

Here are our two new bare-root peach trees in their circular berms. The recently pruned roses are beginning to leaf out, and of course the weeds are thriving. The large tree in the background is a Key lime which took quite a hit during the cold weather last month.

First peach blossom of the year!

 The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.  He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.  He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”

It's always exciting to see the first peach blossom of the year, and I was particularly pleased to see this one on our oldest peach tree. Peach trees have a short lifespan in the desert...maybe ten years or so, and we've already lost several limbs on this one. This blossom arose from a large limb that I thought was dead as it lost all its leaves late last summer. We'd considered removing it then, but decided to wait and see what happened in the spring. And as you can see, what I thought was dead has come back to life!

I'm not sure what kind of peach tree this is, but it both flowers and fruits very early, and produces small, but very tasty cling peaches.  Sometimes we can pick the first peach in April, with the bulk of the crop ripening in May.

We planted two new bare-root peach trees this year, a Mid Pride yellow and a Tropic Snow white, that we bought from Root Phoenix. This is the first time we've attempted planting bare root fruit trees rather than potted ones from the nursery or big-box stores. They look like dead sticks now, but so did the peach tree in this photo only a few days ago. Appearances can be deceiving.

"You can do anything for 15 minutes"

One of my favorite "Flylady" motivational quotes is "You can do anything for 15 minutes." I really do not enjoy the digging part of gardening, but this bed was particularly overrun by Mexican primrose (see Things I Wish I Hadn't Planted" here). It's a nice day here, sunny with temperatures in the high sixties, the ground still has enough moisture in it to be worked easily, and our prime spring planting season begins in mid-February. So I set my timer for 15 minutes and went to work and as you can see, I was able to get quite a bit of the bed dug up. The timer is a great motivator for overcoming inertia; I tell myself I can quit after 15 minutes and that usually gets me up from my nice comfortable chair in front of the computer.

The tree in front of the bed is a young Comice pear we planted when we put in the raised beds a couple of years ago which so far has not produced any fruit.  When we originally put in the raised beds, we had just taken a class from the Phoenix Permaculture Guild where the instructor suggested that some shade is helpful in the summer for vegetable plants here, and we thought that deciduous fruit trees would be a nice option as they would lose their leaves in the winter when more sun was desirable. Since then I have heard from at least three other instructors from the Master Gardener Program, Phoenix Permaculture Guild, and Urban Farm that it isn't a good idea to plant fruit trees where you grow grass, vegetables, or flowers because the watering needs are too different. This may be why we lost several trees this summer. For now this one seems healthy, so we are leaving it where it is.

Behind the tree are kale and Veronica romanesco cauliflower plants. This is the first time we've planted kale, and it did rather well, but neither one of us particularly likes kale so we probably won't plant it again. I tried this recipe for kale chips and it was okay, but I was the only one who ate them. The cauliflower are heading and should be ready to harvest soon, but they are really strange looking with kind of a seashell pattern of growth to the florets.

As you can see, the hibiscus plants lining the block wall have significant frost damage. They are unsightly to see, but we have to leave them this way for another month or so. Frost-damaged plants should not be pruned until new growth resumes in the spring.