Nature's Bounty, At Last

Or so we hope.

It is difficult to garden in the desert. Not only are the summers hot and dry, but there is an abundance of hungry pests. Every night, the cottontail rabbits come out and nibble their way through the garden. You can put up a fence, but that won't stop the round-tailed ground squirrels from getting in and eating your greens. And if that weren't enough, there are the dreaded harvester ants. These ants assiduously remove any foliage within a 5-20 foot radius from their nest. They also dig up seeds and carry them away. The ants have caused more damage to our gardens than the other pests combined.

But finally, after nearly two years of failed gardening attempts, it looks like we'll actually get a decent harvest this year. Allow me to take you on a virtual tour of some of our plots. But, first, I must mention that we use the square foot method of gardening, as described in Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew. This method allows you to fit a lot of plants in a small space, and it drastically reduces the amount of time and effort involved in caring for a garden, compared to traditional rows. I highly recommend this book and the method. All blocks are 4'x4'.

This is the corn block. The corn is much taller than it was last year, and it seems to all be producing pollen at approximately the same time, so hopefully this year the corn will actually have kernels on the cob! Last year we had to go out of town for a week in August, and so the corn only got rainwater that week. It didn't die, but it did end up significantly smaller than this year.

Here is the densely planted bean plot. About three quarters of it wasn't fenced at first, so rabbits ate all of the unprotected plants. But after the plot was fenced, the eaten plants put out fresh leaves. That is why the beans are at two different levels. Also, Corvus finished up several different packets of beans and then raided the pantry when he was planting this plot. There are green beans, wax beans, burgundy beans, Tohono O'odham beans, and pinto beans. We'll be definitely making some strange hybrids, but we don't intend to plant any of our harvest next year so it's not an issue. Behind the beans you can see Corvus' pumpkins.

Corvus is immensely proud of his pumpkin patch. He has four plants in there and they are HUGE. They are starting to produce male flowers. There is no need to fence pumpkins, because rabbits and ground squirrels aren't interested in eating anything in the squash family. At least, they aren't interested in eating the leaves. Last year I had some troubles with something eating the flowers.

That's why I'm training my pumpkins up a fence. This is something I learned from the square foot book. If you train your climbing plants like squash and cucumbers up a trellis, they will be much healthier. And they take up considerably less space! He tested squashes as large as hubbard squash, and found that they had no difficulty supporting their fruit. All of our pumpkins are the small pie variety, so there shouldn't be any problems. And unless rabbits can start climbing fences, I shouldn't have any problems with my flowers this year.

These are cucumbers in Corvus' garden. They are already starting to put out flowers, so soon we will have lots of cucumbers! He planted the Straight Eight variety of slicing cucumbers, while I planted pickling cucumbers between my pumpkins on the fence. They haven't come up yet, so no pictures of them.