Entry # 6: My Green Thumb Is Itching

Yes it's beautiful, but look the soil is even killing the cactus!

Gardening in Arizona is challenging to say the least. Imagine planting a garden in a sandbox, the top quarter of the box is sand and the rest is filled with clay. Not the ideal environment to grow vegetables. These types of soil are typically low in nutrients, very alkaline and are not very good at absorbing water. The desert soil is as brutal as the desert sun. Over the years I have tried to plant vegetable gardens and failed miserably. In my past attempts I was not dedicated enough to mix in compost and standard topsoil. That’s a ton of work to dig down into the clay, work in the other soil, build a bed then sow the seeds. I’m from the Midwest where gardens are easy. All you do is poke a hole in the ground and drop in the seed, then voila edible plants. 

10 cubic feet of dirty goodness.

Basil

So this time I have done my research and things are turning out pretty well. After watching weeks of videos on YouTube and reading countless gardening websites the decision was made. I was going to plant in raised containers, ditch the terrible desert soil altogether.The most helpful videos I found on YouTube are from a guy that lives here in the Phoenix area, his channel is Vegan Athlete.

Cucumber and zucchini

My go to gardening website turned out to be Old Farmer's Almanac. I did a little more research on raised beds and found that Haxnicks Vigoroot planters work very well in this desert climate.They also aerate the root system promoting healthy plant growth. I have total control of the soil and what nutrients are added. These planters save water by only watering the plant and not the ground surrounding the plant. So I ordered several planters from Amazon and in some crazy form of garden magic, poof!I now have a ten cubic foot garden with Roman lettuce, spinach, three types of tomatoes, basil, cilantro, three types of

Roma tomatoes

carrots, dill, cucumber, zucchini, sweet bell peppers and hot peppers.

Sweet bell peppers and hot pepper

I’m roughly 60 days away from being partially independent from grocery store produce.