A Frozen Tucson Garden and a Friendly Garden Fort

Tucson was hit with freezing temperatures in late February, 2011, the likes of which this and the previous generation of Tucson gardeners have never experienced. In the Tucson Mountains, where our desert garden dwells, the temp dropped to 16 degrees - unbelievable. The potted flowering cactus to your left froze to the ground, as did many others in my garden and our region. Fortunately, the Sonoran Desert surrounding the Tucson area abounds with cactus of all types that did make it and we will survive. Generally you will find many articles in the paper this time of year by master gardeners instructing you on how to prune and rejuvenate plants that were damaged by frost. Not so this year. The most popular recommendations have been to replace your damaged plants with new ones and not bother with the severe pruning (and unsightliness) of trying to bring back a struggling survivor. I'll be replacing most of my potted plants (goodbye hibiscus) as well as several varieties of desert plants in my garden beds. My Turks Cap, which have been going great guns for several years now, DID survive, while other more hearty plants bit the dust (rhuelia, cassia, acacia and tacoma stans). No worries though, and I am looking forward to meeting the new plants I will be bringing into my garden this spring.

My granddaughters in front of their "fort" that I put together to entertain them last summer. It is made from inexpensive materials and was based on the vine trellis structures for my backyard raised bed vegetable garden (see my raised bed gardening posts in the index) Basically all you need is re bar, 1/2"metal electric conduit and pole connectors, reed fencing, plastic vine ties, clamps and shade cloth. I added some garden posts in the front to give it that rustic island look. The re bar is pounded into the ground and the hollow conduit is slipped over it to provide the frame - just like the shade structure of a raised bed garden. Reed fencing is then attached via the plastic vine ties to the frame and shade cloth draped over the top and attached with the same clamps used to keep the shade cloth in place over your raised bed. We poured sand on the floor which my youngest granddaughter uses as a sandbox. All of these materials you can get at Home Depot. The nice thing about this fort is it blends in with your garden. The fencing behind the fort is made from the branches of the ocotillo cactus and will be a topic for a later post. Saguaro later and Tanque Verde much!

Saguaro Tales

Ah, what a spring! Record breaking rains since November have changed the look and feel of the Sonora Desert in Southern Arizona. Saguaros and prickly pear are plump, weeds abound and everything looks good. So good, in fact, the Arizona Daily Star warned in this morning's paper to brace ourselves for a big wildfire season. My desert and oasis garden plots are happy and quite oblivious of the approaching summer heat.

I have included two photos of Aunt Judith (saguaro cactus) and me for comparison purposes to illustrate how fast Saguaros grow. The first photo was taken about 5 years ago and the second 5 days ago. As you can see, a saguaro is a slow grower, but can reach a height of 40 to 60 feet in the Tucson Mountains where I live. Saguaros can live to be 150 years old and its growth rate is dependent on rainfall.

Strawberries in my 3 fiberglass whisky barrels are producing faster than I can eat them. I now have completely protected them with chicken wire to keep the birds and other critters from gnawing on them. I must admit that strawberries are so cheap right now (99 cents a basket at Sunflower Market) I sometimes question my sanity. The store bought strawberries, however, are not as sweet as mine and perish quickly in the refrigerator.

I have elected not to plant a spring vegetable garden in my two raised beds this year. One, I am busier now during the week, but most of all I am not up to the challenge of fighting the oncoming heat wave that blasts Tucson in June. I find the late summer monsoon and fall growing season is much more satisfying and less frenetic than fighting to squeeze a spring garden in.

Hot air balloons greet us in the cooler spring months and the one below has become a pleasant reminder of the beautiful weather we are enjoying now. The photo below captured my wife and 5 year old grand daughter Alison wrapped in a blanket and listening to the "whoosh whoosh" sounds coming from the gas burner in frantic attempts for the pilot to keep it aloft.

In closing I have added a photo of my Mother's "Tombstone Rose" for my brothers to see. This incredible plant was planted by my Father several decades ago and continues to amaze us when it forms hundreds of blossoms in the spring. The world's longest rose bush is just down the road in Tombstone, Arizona and has a trunk 12 feet in diameter and covers over 8,000 square feet. Each spring it produces over 1 million tiny white blossoms. They say it grew from a root of a White Lady Banksia rose brought over from Scotland in 1885.

Raised Vegetable Bed Protection Update

The wire cages I manufactured to protect my vegetable garden have worked out great!  They are very light and easy to lift off my raised beds.  I can now report with confidence that they are also effective in preventing chipmunks and gophers from ravaging your harvest.  The pvc handles on top are a must for easy removal and replacement.  See my September 2009 posts for more information on these cages and their purpose.

I added a third irrigation tube in the center of the bed to better distribute the water.  Prior to that I was hand watering my new vegetable seedlings to get complete coverage.  All of my raised beds and fiberglass barrels are now on timed irrigation and it has been working beautifully.  We have been enjoying radishes, romaine lettuce and spinach for the past two weeks. I have been picking off the larger leafs for our evening salads which seems to promote speedy growth of the remaining smaller leaves.  I did this last fall and was able to keep ourselves in salad fixings for months.    

Tomatoes are just now starting to ripen. I had 5 plants before the chipmunk invasion but am now down to one.  Still, there are plenty growing and they will liven up our salads for several more weeks.

This is my third attempt to grow snap peas in the desert.  So far, so good, but I am bracing myself for the worst.  I am hoping that consistent watering provided by my make-shift irrigation system (see prior blog posts for construction and layout) will make a difference this time.  My wife loves snap peas so I have to get this right!

Mexican Sunflower - a love-hate relationship

Mexican Sunflower (tithonia fruticosa) is one of my favorite desert plants.  It has a commanding presence in the summer garden with its tall leggy stems, large green leaves and bright yellow sunflowers.  A profuse bloomer when watered, it attracts hummingbirds, butterflies and bees.  Birds also love to eat the spent dry flowers, so be sure to dead head them and leave on the ground.   But, in winter, Mexican Sunflower is not a pleasant sight to behold.  It no longer flowers and the large leaves turn wrinkled and brown. If it is a featured plant, like my two were, it becomes a blight on your winter garden.

 

So, last winter, I dug up one of them, divided the clump, and planted two pieces in an area that would become a back drop to my oasis garden.  I didn't have the heart to dig up the other one, so I severly pruned it back and waited for new, fresher growth in the summer.  Well, even after much attention the clumps never produced.  So I began calling the various nurserys in town only to learn Desert Survivors was the only one who carried the tithonia fruticosa variety.  Unfortunately their plants were still in the greenhouse and wouldn't be ready until fall.   I had to wait.

Then, one morning when watering I noticed a very small plant growing among a patch of salvia leucantha that looked like Mexican Sunflower.  A seed must have been carried by a bird or blown over and dropped there.  I gently dug it out and planted it in the hole that previously housed the clump and surrounded it with chicken wire.  It grew!  A miracle according to some who told me you can't transplant Mexican Sunflower.  I will be diligent in my efforts to keep it healthy until next summer when I am hoping it will shoot upwards and blossom.

The 1/2 inch wire mesh cages I described in my last post have worked well in protecting one of my raised vegetable beds from small critters.  The handles work great, making them easy to lift off the bed while I water and putz about.                               

So right now life is good.  I'll keep you posted. 

Critter Protection

In my prior post I discussed the challenges of protecting a vegetable garden in the Tucson region.  I have chain link around the garden area, but small critters such as chipmunks, ground squirrels, rabbits, mice, birds etc. can easily come in and set up shop.  Mel Bartholomew, author of Square Foot Gardening (see link on side bar) recommends constructing a cage out of chicken wire that is easy to lift and place over a raised bed garden.  Materials used are chicken wire and 1"X2" select pine boards.  Mel uses less expensive chicken wire with larger 1" or 2" openings, but it won't keep smaller pests such as chipmunks from squeezing in and gobbling up your tender plantings .  I purchased a heavier wire with smaller 1/2" openings which takes more time bending to shape but is still light enough to easily lift off your bed when tending/watering the garden.

I built two 4'X4' cages to fit on top of one of my 4' X 8' beds.  I found I could cut a piece of  4' wide wire 7' long and bend, with the help of a straight edge (see photo to the right), 2 even creases 18" from each end to form 2 of the 4 sides.  That left only two 18" by 48" pieces to cut for the remaining two sides.  The base of the wire was then stapled to the 4'X4' frames and the two single sides attached with those nifty plastic awning lock ties you can get at Home Depot.  To easily lift off and replace the cages on top of the beds I created a 12" long plastic handles out of left over pvc pipe and wire and attached one to the top of each cage in the very center.  For step-by-step directions for building these cages see Mel Bartholomew's New Square Foot Gardening book.  Having completed the cages, I planted seed of lettece, bunching onions, radish, spinach and snap peas with hopes that the resulting harvest will now be protected.

For my remaining raised bed and fiberglass barrels I have removed the bird netting (effective, but awful stuff to work around and a lizard strangler).  Since these plantings are mature (tomatoes, strawberries and herbs) I am taking my chances they will survive most attacks.  If not, I plan to set out a small Havahart critter trap that will be used to humanely capture the rodents and remove them far from my property.  I've heard peanut butter works well.  Before replanting the remaining bed, I will build two more 4'X4' cages to protect it as well.  I will share the results of these endeavors to protect my garden in future posts.  

Just a side note for Amber Rose, our 9 year old grand daughter.  Your strawberries planted in the gray sink had babies!  Tendrils from your plant crawled over to the sink next to it and rooted. I'ved transplanted several of your baby plants to another barrel so there will be more strawberries to pick when you visit.

Summer Garden "Issues"

The photo above was taken on our Pacific coastal vacation towards summers end after our grand daughters returned to Missouri. But more of that later. This post is to explain my absence this summer and what has been happening in the vegetable garden. My spring vegetable garden efforts were thwarted at every turn this year. No sooner had a seed sprouted or transplant put in they were gone within a few days. As you can see in my earlier photos I use raised beds and large containers to grow vegetables. My early conclusion was a wily rabbit who had figured out a way to get by my chain link fence. This proved to be true to a certain extent. One morning I witnessed a small one that was able to wiggle underneath the fence. But it would take one great hopper to jump into my fiberglass barrels. Thinking I had solved the mystery I covered everything with chicken wire and re-planted. And waited.

A week went by with incident and then it happened again. Everything stripped to the ground. At this point I was considering cutter bees, but nothing of the plant was left over. Surly if it had been bees there would have been large pieces left. I increased my observation efforts throughout the day. Then, finally, I observed two very small ground squirrels frolicking among my beds and pots. We had noticed in increase in ground squirrels in the neighborhood, but had thought nothing of it. Ground squirrels have no problem fitting through the openings of a chain link fence.

So, I begin covering everything in bird netting and re-planted. A real pain. But it did the trick for about 48 hours. But then it happened again - everything except a few mature plants were gone. At this point it was funny and I pretty much gave up. This was hard as my two grand daughters would be staying with us for a couple of months this summer and they expected to help me in the garden. Only a few days before they arrived I witnessed the same 2 ground squirrels I had seen earlier inside the bird netting. When they saw me they quickly escaped through what I later discovered to be tiny folds of loose netting that hadn't been secured down. At this point I was left with 3 tomato plants, some squash and a couple of barrels on strawberries. I turned my attention towards other goings on at this point.

As it turned out, our grand daughters kept us running this summer and there was little time to garden. After they returned to Missouri Chu and I headed for the coast and slowly moved north to keep cool. Incredible scenery and, compared to desert fauna, all plants are on steroids. Our favorite spots were the small towns of Elk (20 minutes south of Mendocino, CA) and Yachats, OR. You can see photos and videos of the trip on my Facebook. Both were fabulous coastal areas surrounded by beautiful national forests.

So, now I turn my attention to the fall garden. And better ways of protecting my vegetables from desert creatures.

Strawberries in the Desert

When Amber Rose, my granddaughter, asked me if we could grow strawberries last Fall I reluctantly purchased some small sad looking plants from a local nursery. Growing strawberries in the desert just didn't sound like a good idea to me. I planted them in a large fiberglass whisky barrel (Home Depot), which I've learned lasts much longer than one made of wood in Tucson's hot and dry climate.

So here we are in March enjoying delicious strawberries. What a kick! To protect the fruit from birds it is necessary to lay a piece of rabbit wire over the top of the barrel. I now have 5 barrels and two thick porcelin sinks in addition to my two 4' X 8' raised beds and find them excellent containers for growing beans, cucumbers, peas and tomatoes.
It has been a very mild winter and spring is already poised to turn to summer. This season I have put in snap peas, yellow squash, zucchini, cucumbers, egg plant and two varieties of cherry tomatoes (large beefsteak tomatoes are tough to grow in Tucson). When my niece from Sweden, Sarah, visited in January she introduced us to a wonderful concoction called ratatouille, which uses copious amounts of zucchini, eggplant and tomato. It can be eaten cold, hot, in spaghetti sauce, on toast - the list is endless. It also lasts well in the fridge and can be frozen. My hope is we can successfully grow enough of these vegetables to keep an ongoing supply of ratatouille in our fridge throughout the summer.