Survivor- Phoenix style!

Yesterday set a record high in our area, with an official high temperature of 119 in Glendale. One of our backyard thermometers read 123 in the shade at one point in the afternoon, and one placed on a slate patio table in the sun reached 149 degrees. Today is supposed to be even hotter.

So far, our newly planted sweet potato slips have survived. Each slip is planted under a drip emitter and heavily mulched.  The drip comes on every three days for an hour to encourage deep rooting, but I have also been giving them supplemental water twice a day by running a hose sprinkler for 5 minutes at a time.

I left the potato that produced these slips in water, and it produced more shoots! So I will be repeating this process in a different location in a few days.

Apple-picking time

There are a few varieties of apples which have very low chilling requirements and can be grown here. This is an Ein Shemer apple tree, which is an Israeli cultivar The fruit is yellowish green and similar in taste to a Golden Delicious. We've had this tree for about eight years....it's one of the first non-citrus trees we planted that lived to tell the tale. It's a smallish tree, which we prefer because it's easier to harvest the fruit, and because small trees allow us to have many different kinds in our tract-home-size backyard.

I thinned this tree heavily in the spring, but apparently not heavily enough. Since the fruit seems to be ripening earlier than usual this year, we'll take some of the tension off the branches by picking and eating apples! Stay tuned...I may try making apple butter this year!

Sweet potato slips

Inspired by seeing how well ornamental sweet potato vines grow in our hot summers, I decided to try growing edible sweet potatoes this year. As I understand, ornamental and edible sweet potato plants are the same species...just different varieties. The ornamental vines are bred for attractive leaves, and the edible ones for tasty roots. I looked for sweet potato slips several places and was unable to find them, so I eventually decided to try growing my own from a sweet potato I'd gotten at the grocery store. I'd read some warnings that grocery store potatoes might be treated to prevent sprouting, but this one sprouted just fine. I followed these directions.

After the slips sprouted roots, I put them outside in potting soil in this old aquarium on our back patio. I've found the aquarium works better than the plastic mini-greenhouse peat pot kits for starting seeds, because I don't have to worry about leakage and I think it helps keep the humidity up a bit once the cover comes off. We also have a cat that will  eat anything vegetative growing in the house, so I can't keep seedlings inside. This cat once ate a miniature rosebush we'd been given, thorns and all

The slips have gotten to a size now where I really need to plant them in the ground. Unfortunately, we're in the middle of a heat wave and expecting record high temperatures this week. I'm going to try planting them at dusk and then mulch heavily, keep them moist, and hope for the best. And next year I will start this process earlier in the spring!

A little bit of Hawaii in Arizona

Beginning when our children were in preschool, we started taking summer road trips, and by the time they were in high school, we had visited all 48 contiguous U.S. states. We didn't make it to Alaska and Hawaii until they were in college, and I will never forget the fragrances that greeted my nose when we first got off the plane in Maui. During our week there, I took great delight in learning about the flowers that contributed to those fragrances, one of which is plumeria, also known as frangipani.  Plumeria is often used to make leis, and to me, it smells like Hawaii.

We tried bringing back some cuttings, but were unsuccessful in rooting them. Several years later, our local Lowe's started selling small plants, and so far, we've managed to keep them alive. We have four plants in three different colors, and keep them in big pots in an area that receives partial shade during the hottest part of the day. We move the pots into the garage whenever their is danger of frost, which doesn't bother them since they drop their leaves and go dormant in the winter anyway. They start putting out leaves in late spring, followed by clusters of fragrant blossoms like these.

It may smell like Hawaii in this part of our backyard, but the heat tells another story. It's supposed to hit 117 degrees this week...ugh!

Pond plants

As you can see, the small clump of watercress we got from Paul, the Pond Gnome, has been fruitful and multiplied. The pickerel weed he gave us has also put up a spike of blue flowers.

The large bush is a potato bush, which has attractive blue flowers, but is not the right plant for this location. It's a good plant for our area which does well in hot weather, but it's too large and we need to keep pruning it back so that it doesn't block the view of the waterfall. It would be better suited to the area behind the waterfall, where it can grow to its full size and function as an attractive screen for the concrete block wall.

Plants that grow well in the heat (2)

This is gaillardia, or blanket flower, which is in the sunflower family. It reseeds easily and will come up every summer, producing loads of colorful blossoms in shades of maroon and gold. (ASU colors!) Once the petals drop off, puffy round balls remain which are rather attractive by themselves and will eventually become dandelion-like clusters of windblown seeds. It doesn't wilt, even on the hottest days, and will bloom until we get a fairly heavy frost.

I managed to do about five minutes of weeding around the perimeter of this bed today. Bermuda grass also thrives in the heat! I also completed step two of this year's sweet-potato growing experiment, which thankfully is an inside job. I love sweet potatoes, and they supposedly do well in our summer heat.

Plants that can take the heat

There are a few plants that can take our summer heat. Zinnias are one of them, and I can usually get two "crops" before frost sets in by scattering the seeds while deadheading. The green bean originally planted in this bed have been totally eclipsed by the zinnias, but I'm letting the zinnias have their way for now. We added flagstones to this bed for interior access, and I actually waded into this jungle on a bean hunt. The plants are still there, but not surprisingly, beanless at this time. When temperatures get this hot, most vegetables won't set fruit anyway, so we might as well enjoy the flowers. 

And the heat goes on...

Our outside thermometer reads 112 this afternoon, and most plants are showing the stress of our insanely hot summers. One plant that is apparently oblivious to high temperatures is sweet potato vine. I planted two plants in this area along the pond last year, which died back in the winter. A friend told me they wouldn't come back, so I planted another one this spring, The "dead" plants underwent a resurrection of sorts, and now I have three plants.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

We returned from a weekend in cool San Diego to find that the Phoenix summer heat has set in in earnest. 110 degrees, according to our outdoor thermometer. There's not much that can be done in the garden this time of year, other than try to keep things alive.

We're still getting lots of tomatoes from fruit that set before the heat arrived. The new varieties seem to be a definite "go", with larger tomatoes and less evidence of fruit splitting, blossom end rot. Cilantro is dead, but basil is healthy. The zucchini, yellow, and winter squash plants, as well as the melon plants, are still disappointing small for this late in the season. None of the eggplants I attempted to start from seed have survived. but the lone Japanese eggplant planted as a transplant is fruiting prolifically. I'm not too bothered, because I still have eggplant and squash in the freezer from last year's bumper crop. The Armenian cucumber, yardlong beans, and the few zipper cream pea vines that came up look fairly comfortable in their semi-shady location under the lemon tree. Nectarines are beginning to ripen, although the fruits are rather small, and watercress has virtually taken over the streambed between ponds. Zinnias and coreopsis are seemingly unaffected and look great; the marigolds are wilting a bit.

At this time of year, I garden in five-minute intervals. I used the time today to cut down hollyhocks that had ceased to bloom and set the plants aside to dry and become flower mulch. This year we had one deep-red plant that I hope will appear again next year.