Winter Gardening Pays Off (Saturday, March 31st, 2018)

We have enjoyed our garden throughout the winter, harvesting tomatoes, chives and jalapenos as they ripened, but as the weather is heating up, the garden is really taking off!  

If I counted right, this little jalapeno plant has 29 peppers on it!

The tomatoes are going crazy too!  We have about 3 ripening each day right now. They are really tasty!

It's so much fun to see a garden do so well in the desert!  

Colder Weather (Monday, February 19th, 2017)

We have had the most beautiful weather this winter!  My garden has thrived, and we have neglected all of the things we need to do around the house because the outdoors has been calling us.  

But today, and for the next few days we are supposed to get pretty cold.  In fact, we are supposed to come close to freezing the next few nights.  I am not ready to let my garden go, it is just coming on so well, so tonight Steve helped me move it inside.  I hope no one comes by unexpectedly, because my house is full of plants, but I am so grateful to Steve for letting me be a crazy garden lady.  

I'm sure that at this point Steve is thankful that I only have six pots.  I just couldn't let them freeze!

Homegrown Tomatoes in February (Thursday, February 15th, 2017)

I still can't get used to gardening in Arizona.  Gardening in the winter instead of the summer is crazy, and the plants actually produce.  I planted my tomatoes last October, and they have been slowly producing little tomatoes all winter, but now that the weather is warming up a little bit, they are really taking off.

I have two plants, both in pots, and they are both doing great!

These are the tomatoes that I picked after we returned from our dune trip.  

I am so excited to have home grown tomatoes, especially in February!

December Gardening Update (Thursday, December 15th, 2017)

I planted by self watering garden about 2 months ago, some with nursery plants and some with seed.  I really had no idea how to do winter gardening, but wanted to give it a try.

This is my chives and lemon grass.  I ordered the lemon grass off the internet and was supposed to get two small bare root plants, but they ended up sending me three, which was great!  And they are all doing well!

My jalapenos are also doing well, but you can see that the cilantro that was next to the jalapenos croaked while we were away over Thanksgiving.  They were from seed and needed more water than the rest of the plants.

The kale is doing well.

And two varieties of tomatoes.  This one is a normal patio tomato.

This one was called a goliath, but is also a variety of patio tomato.  The shadows make it hard to see, but there are a lot of small green tomatoes on this one.

Even though the soil I used said that it had enough nutrients for 6 months, I have had to start fertilizing.  My plants were starving for nutrition, but they are doing much better now.  I'm still loving my winter garden.  It is a lot of fun and brings some "green" into our lives.

Gardening Update (Monday, September 18th, 2017)

It has been 7 days since I planted my self watering pot.  There is water in the bottom of it, but other than that I haven't watered it at all.  It is just wicking the water from the bottom of the pot up into the soil.

According to my moisture meter, the moisture in the soil is perfect about 2 inches down.  The further I put the moisture meter in the soil, the more moist it gets. I'm so excited to see that this is working!  I'll watch it a little longer before I make more self watering pots, but it is certainly looking promising.  

I planted a few Thai basil seeds in this same pot on Saturday, so we'll see if they come up.  We watered it again today through the watering hole.  It took 3/4 of a gallon to refill the reservoir.

A Gardening Project (Monday, September 11th, 2017)

I have always enjoyed gardening in Colorado, and I really missed it this summer, so I've started researching how to garden in the desert. I think the biggest difference is that you don't garden in the summer here, you plant in the fall and garden through the winter.  Also, the ground is incredibly rocky and hard in Arizona, making it virtually impossible to dig, so most gardens are in raised beds or pots.

Since we like to travel, I was afraid to plant my vegetables in pots because they require constant water in this dry climate, but pots seemed like a much better option to me than putting a lot of work into a raised bed, only to have my gardening undertaking fail.  So I started researching self watering gardens.

There are so many videos on the internet about self watering gardens and they all use a slightly different technique.  So we took a little bit of advice from each of them and constructed our own self watering pot.  I wanted something pretty, but still functional.

The technique we decided to use creates a platform in the pot.  The soil will sit on the platform and the water will be beneath it.  We used a lid from an old rubber maid container to make our platform, then drilled holes for our wicking bottles.

You can see our platform in the pot with the wicking bottles in place.  It isn't ready yet, but it gives you an idea of how it will look under the soil.

We drilled some holes in the bottles so that the water in the bottom of the planter would fill them.

Then we cut off the tops of the bottles so we could fill them with soil.

Here it is again.  The bottles now have holes in the bottoms of them and the tops are cut off.  We then drilled a hole in the pot just below the platform.  This will allow any extra water to drain out so it can't drown the plants even with heavy rains.

We then soaked potting mix (not potting soil) and packed it into our bottles.  These bottles will wick the water from the bottom of the pot up through the packed soil, and into the soil in the pot.

We placed the bottles back under the platform and filled the top of the pot with damp potting mix and planted our basil and chives.

If everything works as planned, the soil in the bottles will continue to wick the water up from the bottom and keep the soil moist.