Worth a thousand words

Our soon-to-be raised garden

 A few weeks ago, we had 11 tons of rock hauled out of the backyard. There is still more rock, but it was at least a good start. The morons who owned our house previously had put a new layer of rock over an older layer of rock... leaving us with a lot o' rock!! And, naturally, where all the rock lived was the perfect spot for our garden. Naturally. The rock that is left is bigger river rock, so we'll just have to hand-pick it as we go. We're hoping to have two raised beds, in addition to the Garden O' Buckets that we started last year. I still want a couple of fruit trees, but we have to figure out where to plant them. We may have to wait until next year though, as its already getting warm, and our next month of so of weekends is super busy.

Red Cabbage!

 So far, in our gardening experiments, the duck-ponic garden has been the most successful. We only harvested a handful of puny radishes and a few dozen cherry tomatoes last year from the Garden O' Buckets. I think we need to water them more. We're going to adjust the watering schedule for the spring and see how the new rounds of seedlings do. The plants in the duck-ponic garden (broccoli, red cabbage, lettuce and spinach) are HUGE. We harvested a lot of broccoli, and finally just let the last of it go to blossom. The bees seem to really love the little, delicate looking, yellow broccoli flowers.

Broccoli gone wild

 Thats some crazy looking broccoli for sure. The stuff in front is the jungle of spinach. The red cabbage is kind of behind the crazy looking broccoli. The gardening thing has been a learning experience for us so far - and I am sure we will continue to learn lots more! One of the things that I have learned is that I have very little idea of what my food actually looks like before I buy it at the grocery. If I was out and about and spotted something like the picture above, I would not have thought "Oh, broccoli!" before, I would have thought "Oh, pretty wildflowers!"

Grow, tiny potato, grow!

 

 Of course, we're heading into summer... we tend to have very short springs here in the Great State of Arizona. The blazing hot temperatures of summer have been our biggest obstacle each year. The heat just fries everything, and it doesn't seem to matter how much we water. We have new ideas for this year, and we learned a few things last summer.... still though, the thought of summer is not a pleasant one for our garden. We will just have to do the best that we can, and try to learn more for next year.