Successful Season Jan 2021

 I'm loving our cherry tomatoes, which my little newly 2-year-old son calls "balls" and then pops one in his mouth several times a day. My 7 year-old son loves grazing on basil, cilantro, nasturtium, carrots, tomatoes and even sometimes broccoli leaves. I wonder how many caterpillars he has accidentally eaten in his life.

I prayed for my gardening this past fall as I began planting. I am grateful that we have been able to enjoy the beauty and nutrition from our little garden boxes once again. No prayer is too small.

Gardening Group Meeting #2

We held our second gardening group meeting this past Saturday!

You can view a summary of what we covered HERE.

We detailed several popular crops and you can view the information on planting, nutritional needs, pollinating and watering of tomatoes, green onions, garlic, lettuce, kale, spinach, herbs and zucchini HERE.

And in case you need our desert planting calendar again, you can view that HERE.

A Gusty Spring

I've been really enjoying my growing plants this Spring. It has been really windy the past few days and the weather was a little cooler, which encouraged me to be outdoors trimming and giving other attention to my plants. Here are some photos of our backyard taken a few weeks back. The yard looks so different from when we moved in August of 2015. And I have plenty of dreams for it to look better in the next years, but I'm also practicing patience. It is so rewarding seeing plants grow into what I imagined when in the planning stages. I love how the view out my home windows improves with each season.

Tarocco Blood Orange Tree, planted Feb 2016

Improving view from my kitchen window

2 new hibiscus plants

Young volunteer basil plant I moved from another garden bed.

Flowering Green Onion

Armenian cucumber plants climbing, I supported them with some twisty ties. Compost behind.

Tiny cucumber forming

Luffa Squash seedling. First I soaked the luffa seeds 24 hours with no sprouting. Then I rubbed new seeds with fine sand paper and they sprouted! They required protection from birds.

Pole Green Beans. We'll see if they can share their trellis with the luffa squash plants. I'm anticipating them running out of space.

Yellow Bell Pepper plant, clustered blossoms in the center top of the small plant.

Patio tomato plant growing well in a large pot. I've been more diligent this season with fertilizing my garden, about every 2-3 weeks.

Cantaloupe (muskmelon) plants growing slowly

My beautiful Chaste Tree, growing fast, tripled original size since planting 1 year ago.

Chaste Tree blooms, bees are enjoying them.

Front yard, Young Desert Willow's first blooms this month. Planted Fall 2016, (Free SRP Shade Tree)

Desert Willow

Front yard, Chitalpa Tree, ruffly blooms. Trying to know how to prune this oddly-growing tree. It is growing toward the east side, so is lopsided. May need some staking to straiten it up.

Front yard, First time enjoying blooms (and new bright-green growth) on my wax leaf privet. When we moved in it was in bad health with overspray of herbicides (all the plants in the front yard were really bad looking, almost unrecognizable.)

Wax Leaf Privet

Lilac Vine in Bloom & Sewing Seeds

I love my lilac vine. It's growing great on my south-facing wall near our eucalyptus tree. Low water, fast grower, winter blooms, evergreen, inexpensive.

My husband and I completed 2 additional garden beds (6 foot by 3 foot each) and I've been working in different materials to make up the soil (native soil, composted mulch, steer manure, potting mix I had, etc.) Below is one I get from A&P nursery that I like and I feel like it's a good amount for $6 a bag. Yesterday (Feb 8th) I planted canteloupe in 3 hills in one garden bed.

Today (Feb 9th), my little buddy Hyrum and I planted bell peppers, yellow tomatoes and cherry tomatoes in some little starter containers. I'm hoping that once they are ready to transplant into the garden that I will have harvested the celery to make room for them.

This Winter has been feeling like a perfect Spring the last several weeks. I'm hoping for a long Spring planting and growing season and high harvests!

March Growth

The month of March 2015 was very warm and my garden plants are thriving. The temperatures got too high for the sweet peas so I removed them after a few more peas harvested. The cilantro was going to seed and no longer producing the broad-leaf cilantro I had enjoyed and shared so much throughout the winter, so I dug them out as well. My girls and I planted some sunflowers (the tall variety) and some snapdragons and wild flower mixes in a small section of the garden for fun. Our friend James gave me 4 small sweet potatoes that were sprouting and I planted them today where the cilantro had been. I also planted some zucchini on a mound where I had composted for a while, but nothing has sprouted.

The tomato plants are producing and growing wonderfully. Nothing in the garden makes me quite as happy as my recovered frozen tomato plants, especially the one that seemed the most hopeless at the beginning of February which is now back to it's pre-frozen size and producing cherry tomatoes once again.

These photos were taken on March 17, 2015.

Complete recovery after freeze in January, cherry tomato.

Before removing the sweet pea vines and seeding cilantro.

I had been keeping my eye on a cabbage head that had been growing for a while. When I finally picked it, I was sad to discover that it had started rotting. After removing many of the outer layers, I was able to use the remaining inside small head. That may be the only cabbage I get from the many large plants. The low production could be due to the plants being over-crowded. 

The New Year's Freeze 2015

So late December and surrounding the start of 2015, we had a dip in temperatures. A few garden plants suffered mild freezing the night before the official "freeze warning", but I covered the tender plants during each night of the freeze (air temps below 35-ish). Here's how my garden fared:

Plants that were not damaged:
Lettuces
Cilantro
Sweet Peas
Carrots
Cabbage
Spinach
Green onions

Plants that were damaged but salvageable:
Tomato plants
Marigold flowers

Plants that were killed:
Zucchini
Younger tomato plants
Green Bean
Potato (an experimental planting)

I picked a decent harvest of zucchini before the plants dying off. Tomato plants had not provided many ripened tomatoes, but the cherry tomato had hundreds of green tomatoes. I used them as an experiment and my results were very interesting. The tomatoes continued to ripen off the bush and also a few that were on a low live stem on the bush after trimming away almost all of the plant. New growth is filling the bush in and I still have hope for the plant for this season.

All the fallen green tomatoes off the frozen cherry tomato plant Jan 9, 2015

The same cherry tomatoes several weeks later, many ripened and taste great. Jan 30, 2015

A fraction of a very abundant and enjoyed Sweet Pea harvest

I chose a few plump pods to try drying the peas for planting next year.

The cherry tomato plant after the freeze, Jan 17

The zucchini plants post freeze

The cherry tomato plant after I groomed away all the frozen leaves and branches. Just a glimmer of hope in it living. Jan 17.

Caught a Caterpillar

Lots of holes in the leaves of green bean and cabbage plants. I caught one little caterpillar mid-feast, but I didn't have it in me to kill him after his photo-shoot. So, he was placed in a leafy plant in my yard that grows wild and has plenty to spare. Hope he likes it there.

In the past weeks, I gave the green bean plants two tomato cages to help keep them up. I also had a friend give us some mulch/wood chips and I layered them around the larger plants to help keep in moisture.

Everything is growing so fast.

Green Bean plant eaten by caterpillar

Other green bean plant with first bean

The hungry one

Zucchini and cherry tomato

Compost Cantaloupe

Green Bean Flowers

Zucchini

Carrots

Lettuce Varieties

Cilantro

Snap Peas racing upward

Marigolds

Tiny green onions

Butterfly in flight from citrus tree to citrus tree

First day to see both tortoises out of their hole in a few months