Desert Garden

I'm so excited about my garden this year!  The yard is much bigger than our last one, so we have some room to spread out.  We have 3 square foot gardens and hoping for one more, once we get a stubborn stump out.  In this front bed we have tomatoes, cucumbers, a watermelon, lavender sage & some jalapenos.  3 of the jalapenos are not doing well.  They seem to get the brunt of the high winds when they come.  The Lavender sage seems unhappy too. I think it needs more shade so I may have to move it. 

Here we have tomatoes, green peppers, 2 different basil varieties, marigolds and strawberries.  I'm fairly certain I'm crazy to be trying to grow strawberries in the desert but we shall see.

Corn in the back, rosemary, yellow squash, green peppers, parsley, oregano, strawberries and a tomato. 

This bed was all rock, and now we're growing zucchini, calabacita squash, watermelon, sunflowers, nasturtiums and some vine flowers to climb the sunflowers.  I planted cucumbers here too, but I'm not sure they came up. 

This is the 2nd year of our artichoke.  I guess the first year you're supposed to pluck off any artichokes that begin forming.  We didn't have any last year and then it looked like it died over the winter but it came back healthy and is giving us our first artichoke! Now, I have no idea what do with it.  I've never had a whole artichoke. So this will be a learning experience. 

Our wine barrel this year holds a tomato and 5 basil plants. One lemon basil growing very slowly. I'm loving breakfast burritos in the morning with scrambled eggs, a spinach tortilla, tons of fresh basil and a bit of sea salt.  Yum!  Can't wait to add some cherry tomatoes or zucchini to it as well!  I'm such an impatient gardener.  It's at this point of the garden that I think it's never going to grow, I only see it's progress in pictures. 

This is the other side of our backyard and has been devoted as the kid space.  The boys naturally gravitate to the little tree and are always "decorating" it with strings, ribbons and dangling toys.  That's Owen's shovel stuck in the flower bed there. He set it up very precisely and gets hopping mad when it falls over.  We took some of the rocks we pulled from the garden bed and made a little sand box out of the huge sandbox that IS the yard.  Not sure what we'll do about the sand, if anything. Grow food not lawns right? It would take some major work to grow grass in this yard. I'm not up for the challenge at this point, though the kids are missing the grass we had in the old yard.

Some lobelia, mums & peppermint in pots.

Last week my Mom was here visiting from NY and we cleared this outer bed of rocks and planted flowers.  I added mulch on top but the big pine tree adds it's own natural mulch of needles.  I'm collecting all the pine cones here too, Mom's idea, I think it's so pretty.   

(My Mom & Owen)

So how is your garden growing?

Until next time...

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