"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.