Coyote Bliss

Our first Asian Cucumber

For the first time ever, this summer we attempted to grow vegetables in the corner garden around the pergola. It was a blast this year!

I guess I’ve been prejudiced against growing veggies all of this time. Though I do like to eat my veggies, for years I wondered what was the point to growing your own. You can buy them from a supermarket that you like and then you don’t have to go through the difficulties of tending them.

Flowers are showier so when someone mentioned gardening to me in the past, it was this kind of gardening my mind would imagine. However, after this summer experience, I can honestly say that veggie gardening is much more fun and entertaining than flower gardening. I like both, but I think the former is more exciting where the latter is more subtle.

One good reason to grow your own veggies is that it can be important for kids to see where food comes from; that it is hard work and that it is amazing to see life develop where there was just dirt before. Plus, you get to eat what you worked on! In addition, like many kids, I figured that they would be more likely to eat more vegetables after they were excited by the entire growing process. This ended up proving true.

Another good reason is that as an adult, I found myself just as excited to see the veggies grow and enjoyed eating what we grew with relish. Yes, veggies do taste better fresh from the garden and whatever helps us eat healthier is worth the effort (and fun)!

So here is the rundown of our summer garden, started in late April:

Excited to go into the ground in May

We planted:

Yellow Peas from seed, seeds from Native Seed Search

Asian cucumber from a seedling

Watermelon from a seedling

Yellow Squash from a seedling

An orange and a yellow pepper plant (sweet) from seedlings

A strawberry plant from seedling

A stevia from seedling

A red seedless grape vine next to a column on the pergola

And I did plant 2 flowering plants:

A queen’s wreath next to a column on the pergola

A mum that I bought from the grocery store for Easter I managed to keep alive inside till the summer

How I tended them:

I watered them every morning with a hose on the soak setting for about 2-3 minutes for each plant.

Early Summer

In the beginning it was wonderful to see everything growing up under the sun. If I was late watering, the pepper plants and the squash would look pitiful but I felt so good when they would perk up with the water.

The Young Pepper Plants

We thought the yellow peas would never sprout because it took them a few weeks. But when they did poke up, we all cheered to see the little baby pea plants coming up. Then they started growing tall! I had to put in thin bamboo poles for them to climb. Their flowers were a sweet pink. Lovely.

The Peas with the Pale Pink Flowers

The stevia sprung up as well and got a good foot tall before too long and I also had to give it some bamboo pole support.

The strawberry plant produced strawberries right off the bat. My 2 year old daughter ate them as soon as she saw one turning red. I had to start picking them early if anyone else wanted to have one.

Soon the squash, watermelon and cucumber were flowering. Amazing to see every morning! So cheerful! The grape vine was speeding up the pergola. So cool to see it climb. The squash soon produced little squashes about 3 inches. I ate one but it was too early I guess because it tasted chalky. I left the rest to get bigger. I did the same to the first cucumber.

Flowering Squash

A watermelon grew in about a month and about 5 inches in diameter. We harvested it and it was nice and sweet.

The Watermelon Vine Very Happy With A Spider Tenant

The queens wreath was not doing much and the pepper plants seemed out of sorts. I gave the peppers more water and they got better. But it took them a long time to flower. The queens wreath was just hanging out for the beginning of summer though.

Then I went to Wisconsin for 2 weeks to visit my parents with the kiddos and left Jeremy to water the plants.

Midsummer

Well, when I got back the yellow peas and the squash were toast. So sad! Jeremy’s watering habits were different and the summer sun in Tucson of course was unforgiving. I was able to save the cucumber and we got 4 HUGE cucumbers from the plant.

One of the Huge Cucumbers

The watermelon made 2 more watermelons but they needed longer to grow than the first and I harvested them too early. The strawberry plant stopped producing. The grape vine stayed the same height as when I left.

But the peppers were just getting going! Even though the peppers plants stayed small and grew small peppers, they produced 2 or 3 a week towards the end of summer. My son loved eating the peppers the most of all.

The First Pepper to Grow – Adorable!

One of the Peppers Turning Orange – Beautiful! 

The stevia was also thriving in the heat and kept growing. Towards the end of August it started to flower. It was about 4 feet tall by then.

The queen’s wreath went crazy and climbed all the way up the pergola and grew lovely sweet pink flowers. Very pretty!

The Queen’s Wreath Growing to the Top of the Pergola

End of Summer and Fall

So then harvest time, September and October, which is about now. Well, the cucumber and watermelon passed away in early September. The leaves just stopped soaking up the water and they died. The strawberry plant is still hanging out as is the grape vine.

The peppers are still producing though a little slower. The queen’s wreath is also slowing down and the little link flowers are drying up.

I harvested the entire stevia plant last week. I picked off the nice green leaves and dried them on a sheet in the sun in batches for 3 consecutive days. I would have done it all at once but my mornings do not allow for 2 hours of leaf picking as required with a 2 year old running around and potty training.

Harvesting the Stevia – Evening Photo, Time to Take in the Dried Leaves!

The mum, which I haven’t written much about, is of interest right now. It was a leafy green shrub which was in a sorry state when I planted it from its tiny pot, but got gradually larger over the summer. Now it is plumping up now that the weather is cooler. It has hundreds of buds waiting to burst. Can’t wait to see the flowers. I forgot what color they are, it has been so long.

I feel that we did become personally involved with this garden and it was a good experience. It was a lot of work and I think that I will wait until next summer to have a garden this large again. In Tucson, I COULD start all over with a winter garden. But I need a little break from the excitement. Also, an irrigation system would help motivate me to grow more throughout the year. But we will work on that in 2014.

Until next year, I think this is the end of the gardening posts while I go inside and start my bake-o-palooza for the holidays.

Though I am still a rather ignorant gardener, I have quite a personal relationship with every growing thing in my yard. My mother has chided me from time to time not to take a death of a plant so personally and that is helpful. I think perhaps feeling so personal about my plants gets me into trouble and stops me from taking risks that will help me learn more.

But to tell the truth, I do find my way a lot of fun and am loathe to change anytime soon. Perhaps I will feel less personally attached to my plants when I am more attached to the outcome of my garden. For right now, the plants are still just really interesting to me and I concentrate more on their survival because I do things wrong so often.

I consider our entire backyard our garden with lots of little points of interest for different purposes. From the back of the house the backyard is a rectangle with the long sides parallel to the house. We have a little balcony (very small, so more like a balcon-ette) connected to the master bedroom that shades the exit into the garden. In front of the shade of the balcon-ette is a nice brick patio for the kids to play on trikes and run around. To the left of the balcon-ette there is an area for barbecuing, and to the right there is a patio table for enjoying said barbecue. In front of the barbecuing area there is a sand box. Behind the patio table is the raised bed rose garden and to the right of the patio table there is the jasmine garden. In front of the jasmine garden a bit there is the pomegranate tree. Then, bordering the back corners of our backyard, we have a quarter circle raised bed cactus garden to the right and a square raised bed with pergola mommy’s paradise vegetable garden to the left. Pictures below!

The rose garden behind the patio table (next to the house), jasmine garden to the right of patio table (next to the wall).

Pomegranate tree between jasmine garden and cactus garden, cactus garden in the right corner.

Mommy’s paradise vegetable garden and sand box, the left side of the yard.

The rose garden was the first garden I tended when we moved into the home. It is also the only thing in the backyard that survived us moving in (mostly).

When we moved in, the backyard  consisted of some sort of citrus tree in the back left corner, some sort of short leafy shade tree in the back right corner, a huge patch of mostly dead grass in the middle and the rose garden. The mostly dead grass in the middle was NOT our fault.

See, in Tucson, if you do not have an irrigation system in place and you do not take a hose and water your plants EVERY DAY, most of them die, particularly grass. As there was no irrigation system, the grass was pretty far gone when we moved in. Oh well. Didn’t feel like buying a mower for 10 square feet of grass anyway.

The citrus tree was next though I really tried. When I remembered I would go out and water the citrus tree. I really wanted to know what kind of tree it was! But I never found out. It lost its leaves a few months later in the middle of winter and never regrew them. Sad sad sad. Apparently though, watering a tree means you give them a BIG drink of water, such as 40 gallons at a prescribed frequency, like once a week. Standing with a hose for 30 seconds to wet down the ground is NOT going to give you 40 gallons of water.

The weird leafy shade tree was next. I didn’t really like it so I never watered it.  That was very passive aggressive of me. It was too close to the back wall and it didn’t look like it would produce anything I could eat so I didn’t see its point. But it did not die on its own, we took it out when we decided to put in the cactus garden. Chop chop.

So it was a miracle that the roses survived at all. Originally there were two bushes, one with pink roses and one with white roses. I watered them like the citrus tree, when I remembered. They both lasted about two years. The second year though the white rose bush got really mad at me and up and died. I think this was about the time I had my son, my first baby, so I remembered to water even less frequently than usual. In fact, I can’t tell you when it died as I don’t think I went out into the backyard for a few months there.

But, I thought the pink one was next but LO! It got CRAFTY!

All of the sudden RED roses started coming up to bloom. And these roses looked completely different than the pink ones, with a different scent. When my mother visited, she explained that many commercial rose bushes are grafted on to a “hearty” rose at the roots to make them less likely to die at the hands of irresponsible plant owners like myself. So, when the fancy pink rose started to die, the hearty red rose put up leaves and blooms.

When I started to straighten up and water responsibly, the pink roses came back. I love them! But the red ones are also here to stay. Yay! So I have two different roses blooming from the same bush. I searched my photos and I don’t have any yet. I will take some soon and update this post. It is pretty far out.

In the place of the white rose bush, I’ve put up a blue birdbath with seashells and I put in low flowers from time to time, usually with the seasons, as I still don’t have the knack for flower gardening. However, at least I am a responsible irrigator now.

Right now, there are some yellow desert flowers that look like daisies which are happy, a lavender bush with no purple flowers anymore and a little green bushy sprouty plant that used to have pretty white flowers that all fell off a week after I planted them. Hmmm. But they are still alive and cheer me up when I water them in the morning.

Next post: The Cactus Death Garden