Chop, drop, and grow

April 27, 2016

One of my favorite permaculture gardening techniques is "chop and drop". Instead of digging spent plants out by the roots, cut them off at ground level. Leave the roots to compost in place, and chop up the leaves and stems and drop them wherever you like.

This has several advantages, not the least of which is I am a rather lazy gardener and it doesn't take a lot of time or effort. It doesn't disturb the layers of beneficial microbes, bugs, and worms; you're less likely to damage the roots of desirable plants; it recycles nutrients back into the soil so that less fertilizer is needed; and it provides a cooling, moisture-conserving barrier that is very helpful in our summer heat.

Sometimes I chop-and-drop in place, but often I take plants I've allowed to go to seed from one place, and chop and drop them somewhere else in the garden. For example, here is some assorted lettuces that I allowed to go to seed...

Lettuce and larkspur

 ....and here is one of the places I decided to chop-and-drop them, at the edge of the side patio. I think that would be a nice place to find lettuce growing once it cools off in the fall.

Chopped-and-dropped lettuce

Part of the fun of gardening for me is finding surprises, and letting things go to seed, followed by chopping, dropping, and scattering usually creates the conditions for many future surprises. Rather like the proverbial box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get.

Today's harvest: tomatoes, zucchini, beans

February: Hard Labor

February 5, 2016

Here's a panoramic taken from our side patio. Mike completed the raised bed/patio paver redo necessary for our pergola plans, and we're waiting on HOA approval on those. Since the weather has begun to warm up a little in the afternoons, we've been working on clearing Bermuda grass and other unwanted invaders from the raised beds, redoing the wells around the fruit trees and rosesbushes, working on rejuvenative pruning of frost-damaged and overgrown bushes and vines, and other labor-intensive tasks. Today Mike is working on the pond and streambed, which has again been overwhelmed by cloverlike plants with thick matted roots. He also found that iris roots had grown up into the pond pump, and is cutting those back along with doing some root pruning. I've been working on the raised beds and tree wells, and found several nice-sized sweet potatoes as a reward for my labors.

We're harvesting lots of broccoli, which is peaking now, along with lettuce, spinach, and citrus. Too bad my mother isn't here to enjoy the grapefruit. We can't even donate the extra to a food bank. Although we haven't had any problems, concerns about the pest which spreads citrus greening disease have caused a quarantine for citrus in the West Valley. There are lots of blossoms on the pea plants, but no peas yet.

Broccoli

Snap pea blossoms

Assorted lettuces

Grapefruit

More salad fixins

Various lettuces (and other things)

Spinach

Even if the tomatoes take a hit, we should have plenty of salad greens by Christmas. I'm not sure which kinds of lettuces are coming up in the picture to the left, but in addition to the ubiquitous nasturtiums, I see several tomato seedlings and I think a potato growing in their midst. Because spinach doesn't sprout very readily, at least for me, I started seedlings in peat pots a few weeks ago and moved them outside once they sprouted. Now that true leaves are appearing, it looks like I will actually have some spinach this year.

This little mandarin orange tree is loaded with fruit. In the winter months, when we generally don't have tomatoes, I like to use citrus sections in green salads. We should have plenty from this tree!

The resurrection of the artichokes and the genesis of the peas

We've gotten some rain the last few days, which is helping new plantings and making weeding a bit easier. Of course, it also brings out ants, which makes attempts at weeding somewhat unpleasant. I cleared out a lot of mint and Mexican primrose from the area lining the streambed, and discovered that our oldest artichoke has already started to come back. There's no sign of the one I planted last year yet; we'll have to wait to see if it shows up.

The sugar snap and snow peas are beginning to break through the soil. I planted heavily because I didn't know how old the seeds were, but they're coming up pretty thickly. Nasturtiums and hollyhocks are popping up everywhere too. Perhaps this year will be the one I manage to keep them under control. The nasturtiums aren't as much of a problem as the hollyhocks as they are low growing (and edible) but the hollyhocks will crowd out everything else if I don't aggressively go after them.

Here's a line of lettuces (along with more nasturtiums) sprouting along the drip line where they were planted. As with the peas, I threw everything I had left over out there- a mixture of romaine, leaf, buttercrunch, and who knows what all else. Because I haven't had much luck with spinach germination, I'm attempting to start that inside in peat pots rather than sowing directly into the ground.

In other gardening news: I spent several hours Sunday afternoon precooking eggplant for parmigiana and freezing it, and now I need to pick eggplant again. I gave up on the tomatillos and honeydew as the vines were dying back, and pulled them out so they'd stop blocking the sun from the pepper plants, which are beginning to produce. And I noticed a young citrus tree growing behind the waterfall that I'm guessing came from a key lime seed, but who knows what it might turn out to be? Most citrus is grafted onto sour orange or lemon rootstock; it doesn't do well when grown from seed.

Fall Plantings 1

We've been working this week in the southeast corner of our yard, in an area which gets a fair amount of shade from a lemon tree. We cleared out the area of weeds and spent-plant debris, and enlarged the berm around the lemon tree so we can deep water it more efficiently. It has four high-capacity drip lines which run for several hours at a time (weekly in summer, monthly in the cooler seasons) and seems healthy and productive, but the water doesn't soak down three feet as it should with a tree of this size. We also gave it a final application of fertilizer for the year, which we should have done around Labor Day and as a result some of its leaves are looking rather chlorotic. After watering in the fertilizer, I'll sprinkle nasturtium seeds under the tree out to its dripline, and mulch with pine straw.

Because this area doesn't get much sunlight, especially in the winter, we have to be selective about what we plant here. Root and leaf crops work best, although I have successfully grown edible-pod peas. This year, I made two parallel trenches about a foot apart following the curve of the raised bed, and ran 6-inch drip emitter lines down the trenches. In the outermost trench, I planted several varieties of lettuce, and in the inner trench I planted snow and sugar snap peas. Behind the row of peas, we put up some trellis netting. The trellis netting is a new experiment this year; we've tried other methods of corralling pea vines and met with limited success. I haven't seen trellis netting in stores, but ordered this from Amazon.

And now we wait!

Cherries, take two

The cherry trees we planted last year got scalded and died in the summer heat. We're trying them again in a new location, an area between the gazebo and the upper pond which gets some afternoon shade. The peach tree that was in this area finally died, and we took it out to make room for the cherry trees. These came from the Urban Farm and are on a rootstock that is hopefully more tolerant of desert soil and heat. We dug a trench around the trees and mulched it heavily, per Greg's instructions. We planted an apricot tree, also from the Urban Farm tree sale, on the other side of the pond where we tried the cherry trees last year. When Mike dug up that area for the tree, he found about a dozen more sweet potatoes I'd missed when I harvested them in November. I expect to see sweet potato vines return again in the hot weather as there are probably still more of them we didn't find.

We're continuing with general cleanup and soil preparation for spring planting. I jumped the gun a little this year and planted Blue Lake bush beans and nasturtiums a couple of weeks earlier than usual, because rain was predicted and I wanted to take advantage of that. This year's winter was rather mild; temperatures dropped into the 30s for a few days in December, but we never got a hard freeze. Hopefully we won't get a late freeze in February, which has happened before.


We're continuing to harvest citrus, lettuce, and Swiss chard, and enjoyed the first of the broccoli for dinner last night. The artichoke has returned, but no sign of any asparagus yet.

January overview

I've been rather neglectful in terms of posting for a while, as it's not a particularly photogenic time in our garden. So much for my intent to publish the bad as well as the good!

Most of what we've  been doing involves getting ready for spring planting, which we usually do around Valentine's Day. We had a December frost which killed off the zinnias, so I've been pulling those up and scattering their seeds in several new locations. About the only color in the garden now is from the still-blooming 99-cent Home Depot Black Friday poinsettias, which I moved here from the front yard.

We are harvesting and enjoying salads made from Swiss chard and Romaine, Bibb, and leaf lettuces, and will be harvesting broccoli soon. We're also harvesting lots of citrus. I like to put orange or tangerine sections in winter salads instead of tomatoes.  It's especially good with poppyseed dressing, and tastes much better than store-bought cardboard-tasting tomatoes. I'll wait for my own, thank you.I'm also freezing lemon juice from our very prolific lemon tree so we can enjoy homemade lemonade all year long.

Today I planted red potatoes in the bed in front of the upper pond. Last year I tried them for the first time in another area, and I think this one will be better. While planting them, I found several large sweet potatoes I'd missed when we dug up the bed in November, so I expect sweet potatoe vines will show up here eventually too.  I'm also going to take a chance and plant nasturtium seeds around its border, although if we get another frost they won't make it.

November gardening

I've been enjoying watching butterflies enjoying the zinnias...

...digging up sweet potatoes...

...and planting broccoli and several different lettuces in the bed formerly occupied by melons and butternut squash.

August overview

We've spent most of July clearing out the raised beds for fall planting. Summers here are like winters elsewhere...not much fun and not much success in the garden. Serious gardeners extend the growing season by putting up shadescreen over their vegetable beds, but we usually don't; we just give everything a rest.

An unexpected consequence of our conversion of the grass pathways to gravel was the loss of several more trees in the summer heat. In addition to the apple tree, a plum and a fig tree started showing signs of severe decline. My theory is that the tree roots were shallow and spread out because of the grass watering pattern, and couldn't adapt to a drip irrigation system.

If you're wondering what to plant in August, here's a list: We planted beans, carrots, lettuce, and summer squash in the smaller bed nearest the house and are going to try corn (again) in the larger bed by the streambed.

Nasturtiums in unusual places

One of the things I enjoy the most about or garden is taking a stroll and seeing what's new or surprising. I tend to be somewhat of a guided laissez-faire, serendipitous gardener. I let plants go to seed, wait to see where they come up, remove the ones that aren't where I want them, and fill in the bare spots with things I think will be attractive in those spots. 

Since I've been doing this for several years now, I often find plants growing in areas where I didn't plant them. This morning I spotted nasturtiums growing up a trellis intended for a snail vine, and nasturtiums springing from the rocks surrounding one of our ponds.

Nasturtiums and hollyhocks are the most prolific of my "let it be" plants, but this time of year I also find larkspur and lettuce in various locations. My most unusual discovery was a viola growing in the nonplanted, nonwatered gravel pathways.

Broccoli sidecars

These late-planted broccoli plants produced disappointingly small main heads. I cut them off, and I think I will harvest more broccoli from the side shoots than the main stalk.

This picture also shows the surviving romaine lettuce transplants. Something caused the other plants to wilt overnight and die, but these seem healthy.

A disappointment of broccoli

I'm disappointed in the results of the second planting of broccoli. We set these transplants out in January, and the small heads are already beginning to flower. It seems to do much better when planted in the fall and allowed to grow slowly through the winter. There just isn't enough leafy growth to support big heads of broccoli in these plants, and I assume the flowering is a function of day length and temperature.

The romaine lettuce transplants I set out at the same time have not done so well either. I bought transplants because of all the salad greens I planted in the fall, only arugula came up. About half the transplants have succumbed suddenly to an unknown problem. One day they appear healthy; the next morning they are wilted and limp.

Early November overview

Most of the deciduous fruit trees have lost their leaves, but the citrus is beginning to show signs of ripening.

Round 2 of the zinnias are still growing strong and attract dozens of butterflies; the petunia transplants are doing well, and most of the nasturtiums have come up. Roses are beginning to recover from their summer slump and are flowering again.

The broccoli plants and sugar snap peas are strongly established, but of the salad greens I planted, only arugula came up. Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are still setting fruit. I dug up the sweet potato bed and we've been working on preparing it for new plantings. We'll probably try strawberries in that location, this time with a fall rather than spring planting.

Most of the garlic cloves have sent up shoots, and the basil plant is still healthy; cilantro is also coming up in several places and this time I know what it is.

We're in the process of taking out the grass pathways among the raised beds and will replace them with crushed granite. Hopefully that will cut down on the continuing battle we've had with Bermuda grass invading the raised beds, as well as decrease our overall water usage. We had mixed feelings about doing that, because the grass is attractive and soft to walk on barefoot, but it really has been a problem to keep out of places we don't want it.

Companion Plantings

End of September/beginning of October overview

We're continuing weeding and fall planting this week. The sugar snap peas and a few lettuces are beginning to come up in the center bed, and I planted garlic in front of the roses in the bed in the foreground. The roses look pretty sad right now but should produce another flush of blooms and leaves in the next couple of months.

Here's a link to an interesting article I found on companion planting. This is the first time I've tried growing garlic, and I knew it was a good companion plant for roses, but wasn't sure how it would affect the broccoli which is also in this bed this year. The article also talks about the beneficial effects of nasturtiums, which are one of my favorite plants to line the perimeter of the raised beds. They are colorful, low growing, easily reseed themselves, and you can eat them too! It's always a trick (and a bit of a gamble) to plant them at the right time. A hard frost will kill them, as well a lesser frost if they aren't big enough, and they also die off in the summer heat.

Fall plantings

We finished clearing out this bed, except for the Survivor Tomato and a plumbago that we'll move elsewhere this winter. The recent rain was helpful in watering in the sulfur and ammonium phosphate that we added prior to planting. I planted romaine, buttercrunch, and Salad Bowl lettuces, arugula, and Oregon Sugar Pod II peas in here, along with a few cilantro and bunching green onion seeds that were left over from a "salsa pack", and topped it all off with a light dusting of mulch.

The irrigation setup for this bed is a combination of 6 inch and 12 inch drip tubing. The 6 inch tubing runs around the perimeter of the bed and the 12 inch tubing is laid out in a grid pattern about a foot apart. The seeds are planted directly under each drip emitter. I planted several seeds in each planting hole because these are all leftover seeds and I'm not sure about the germination percentage.

For design purposes, I usually like to plant flowers around the edges of the raised beds, particularly this one which is right next to a sitting area on the patio. The last two years I planted nasturtiums here, only to see them destroyed by frost. I may try petunias this year, but I'll wait a few weeks before planting them...it's still over 100 degrees on a regular basis here!

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.

Lettuce alone (not)

The frost cloth worked fairly well to protect lettuce and spinach seedlings. You can see some of the drip tubing grid in this picture. Because the seeds were so small, I sprinkled them along each drip line rather than trying to put two or three seeds at each drip emitter. I thought the ones that weren't in close proximity to the drips wouldn't germinate. I was wrong, which means at some point I should do some thinning here.

My fall planting of lettuce and spinach in another location didn't do so well. I planted it in an area where I had done a spring planting of pepper transplants. The peppers had struggled all summer and I thought I'd leave them there a while longer, so that their scrawny skeletons would give a bit of shade to the germinating seeds. The good news is that the peppers really took off after it cooled off, and turned into nice bushy plants with many peppers. The bad news is that they completely crowded out the lettuce and spinach seedlings, so I've had to actually buy lettuce for salads this winter.

We got a little bit of rain today, which was nice. That's something we don't get very often here.

Surveying the damage

It's a balmy 71 degrees outside today, and the freeze warning is over, so we took down the spotlights and frost cloth today. I was pleased to see that the lettuce and spinach seedlings (foreground bed) and strawberries (middle bed) survived. The hibiscus and tecoma (along the fence in the background) have turned crispy and brown, as well as thevetia and bougainvillea elsewhere in the yard. Most of the nasturtiums were destroyed, along with a Sweet 100 tomato that came up as a volunteer. Most of the citrus trees look pretty good, with only a few areas of damaged leaves visible, but we won't know the extent of the damage until later. The last time we had a freeze like this, the lemon and Key lime trees didn't produce any fruit the following season, and a tangerine was taken over by its sour orange rootstock. This time we wrapped the bases of our three youngest citrus trees in blankets, covered the smallest one entirely in frost cloth, and aimed spotlights at the graft union areas on their trunks.

The caulifower plants show no signs of being affected by the cold weather, and one is beginning to head. Although the broccoli plants also appear to be undamaged, they did not produce a second growth of florets from side shoots after the main heads were removed. The kale and Swiss chard were only mildly affected (but the Swiss chard was in a bed where we put a spotlight in order to aim it at a tangerine tree). The banana plant is mush, but it should come back from the ground, and I hope the same happens with the calla lilies. Surprisingly, the vining snow peas seem to have fallen down from their trellis. I think that possibly they were pulled down because they had some tendrils wrapped around nasturtiums which collapsed.

We're still squeezing lemons. I did manage to give away quite a few lemons, oranges, and grapefruit, though.

Summer update, and some recipes

I'm back in the garden again, having gotten a green light from my chiropractor to resume (cautiously) my regular activities. I find there's nothing quite like digging out the Bermuda grass from the raised beds supposedly reserved for vegetables and flowers, to channel feeling of stress into something productive. I haven't been able to do that for a while, and I'm enjoying it- albeit in five minute intervals, because the temperatures here are above 100 degrees most of the time.

My current project involves planting things in the bare spaces left when I pulled out the broccoli, lettuce, spinach, nasturtiums, and larkspur. I seeded a border of sweet allysum around the perimeter of a couple of the raised beds, and I finally found some honeydew plants at Summer Winds nursery. It's rather late to plant them, even as transplants, but I thought I'd give it a shot. I'm trying a new planting method I observed in San Diego in a community garden...digging wells around the plants rather than planting them in the traditional mounds. Theoretically, that ought to help keep moisture around the plant's roots, which is always a challenge with new plantings in hot weather. I did mound up the soil a bit right around the stem of the plant, so water won't collect next to it. (not that there is much risk of that this time of year!)

We picked the last of the apricots and early peaches, and several varieties of tomatoes are doing very nicely. Our old standbys of cherry, Roma, and Early Girl tomatoes are already bearing, and some of the new ones we're trying this year have nice-sized green fruit. I found a delicious recipe for fish with roasted cherry tomatoes here and served it with roasted broccoli (my favorite recipe for that here) For dessert we had apricots in orange juice (recipe I used here) As you may guess, I enjoy trying new ways to prepare the food that comes out of our backyard as much as I enjoy experimenting with new things to grow and different ways to grow them.

Spring has sprung!

Now blooming in Arizona Backyard Eden:

Nasturtiums, Bachelor's Button, Larkspur, California Poppy, Gaillardia, Snapdragon, Allysum, Roses, Gladiola, Nectarine, Apple, Apricot, Pear, Plum. Cilantro

Now eating: Lettuce, Spinach, Sugar snap peas, Asparagus, Broccoli, Oranges, Grapefruit, Lemons

Now planting:Yellow squash, Zucchini ,Eggplant, Armenian cucumber. I've planted some directly in the ground, and some in peat pots to be transplanted later wherever I find room. No seedlings spotted yet.

We should have a bumper crop of peaches this year as we didn't get a late frost like we did last year; right now they are marble-size, so we're busy thinning them out. We're trying a couple of kinds of heirloom tomatoes this year in addition to the Roma, Early Girl, and cherry tomato staples. The other main garden task this year is trying to stay ahead of the weeds.