Garden Woes

My garden is one of the greatest joys of the summer. I love planning it and I start doing so in January. I love going out in the freshly plowed dirt while barefoot and feeling just connected to the earth. I feel alive when I'm working in the garden, getting dirty and sweaty and hot. It is my favorite outside activity.

When we lived in Idaho the dirt was amazing. You could throw seed out into the dirt and it seemed like they grew overnight. But I live in a desert now, and my dirt.....well it does leave much to be desired. Most people with amazing gardens around here have the dirt trucked in from the mountains. But we don't have a truck...or the money to so such a thing, so we started when we moved in with just composting in the area we wanted to garden in. For 4 years we composted and then last year we planted. It wasn't the greatest garden. Most everything died, except the zucchini, one bean plant, a couple of cucumber plants and some lettuce. Everything else died in the Sun....and the alkaline filled clay we have for dirt. So when the season was over, we a had landscaping company dump as many leaves in our garden as he possibly could. It was nearly 8 inches deep in leaves by the time winter hit....with more on the way. They composted down nicely and by this spring the garden was in much better condition.

We also needed to tackle the problem of our extremely hot summer sun. The garden lays at the end of our yard next to the alley, there are no trees to shade it there and as a result it gets the worst of the sun....all day long. So my husband built the most amazing garden shelter that covers most of the garden in shade by the time the hottest sun hits. Inside the shelter the temperature drops almost 20 degrees in the heat of the day. And it looks amazing! He even put a plastic owl on the top to discourage the birds.

So with that done we now planted our garden. It has been a struggle to keep things alive, we have lost most of our beans, they just don't like were we put them. Out of 18 pickling cucumber plants we have 7 left. All of the salad cucumbers died as did the pumpkin and cantaloupe plants. We replaced the cantaloupe and salad cucumbers plants with starts from the nursery and have been working to fertilize the soil. So far things seem to be growing and trying hard. We are even getting blossoms on plants the bloom. I am encouraged by the success we have had so far.

But we're only in June, and it has been a cool summer so far. The real test of the plants, and the husbands shelter will be in July when we normally have 100+ degrees for days on end. I hope the plants will be big enough and strong enough to survive if we get those temperatures this year.

So now we wait, and water, and weed and see what nature, and Heavenly Father provide for us!