Monsoon plantings

I haven't posted for a while because in general I consider summer gardening in Arizona to be roughly equivalent to winter gardening in more temperate locations: the weather is not conducive to growing much of anything, and it's unpleasant to be outside for long. However, although it still regularly tops 100 degrees in September, the month marks the beginning of fall planting season.

We actually have three planting seasons here: spring, monsoon, and fall. I planted melons, beans, squash, and okra in midsummer. The beans never came up and the squash is struggling, but the melons and okra are doing very well. The basil that I planted this spring, along with some volunteers I didn't plant, is thriving. I only planted one Japanese eggplant this year because I still have eggplant from last year's bumper crop in the freezer, and I have several volunteer Black Beauty plants as well. They haven't produced much yet, but I expect them to take off later this month.

I actually began my fall planting about a week ago with a row of bush beans, and saw the first plant emerge from the soil today. I'll begin planting peas soon. My plan this year for the peas and beans is to space out the plantings a week or so apart. That works well to space out the harvests, and is also easier on me because it's still very hot, and I don't tolerate heat very well. About fifteen minutes at a time in the summer is about all I can handle!

Here's a link to the vegetable planting calendar for the low desert, and here's a link to a basil pesto recipe I made in our Vitamix. I used pecans instead of pine nuts, and it turned out pretty tasty.

Honeydew melon

Bush beans- planted about a week ago

Basil

Armenian cucumber (really a melon, but tastes like cucumber)

Red okra

Gardening is like a box of chocolates

Gardening is like a box of chocolates...you never know what you're going to get.

What is all this? I don't know yet. When seeds first come up, they all look pretty much alike. All seed plants produce either one (monocots, including corn and other grasslike plants) or two (dicots, including most other vegetables and flowers) embryonic leaves. It's not until the plant's first true leaves appear that you can begin to guess what the plant is, and that might be several days or even a couple of weeks.

When the true leaves appear, I'll be able to distinguish the smooth oval leaves of zinnias from the feathery leaves of larkspur. Telling a marigold from a tomato seeding, or a squash from a melon seedling, might take a little longer.

Knowing what was in this bed last year, I'm guessing that a fair number of these seedlings will turn out to be zinnias which I'll need to thin aggressively. There's some larkspur in this mix, too, and there are likely to be tomatoes considering how many wound up composting where they fell. And somewhere in there is the red okra I planted a couple of weeks ago.

Part of the fun for me is seeing what I wind up getting, and then trying to incorporate it into an attractive whole.