How Does My Garden Grow?

Blossoms on the Roma tomato plant

So now that Simon and I are staying in one place for a while, we figured we would try our hand at growing some stuff in the little garden plots that had been growing nothing but weeds at our rental house.  Of course it was daunting from the get-go, and I haven't always had the best luck when it comes to keeping plants alive.  Dogs, on the other hand, I seem to have no problem with keeping alive.  Kinda strange when you think about it, but maybe you gardeners can sympathize with my plight of buying one of those basil plants from the grocery store, bringing it home, watering it, giving it sun, and having it die after a few short weeks of life.  Granted, I know that I should have repotted it, as every instruction that ever comes with any of those plants will tell you.  I just didn't want to go through the hassle of buying an entire bag of potting soil for the purpose of repotting one tiny little plant.  I thought maybe they could survive on good vibes and wishful thinking.  So I didn't repot them.  And they always died.  And I was always discouraged.  Even though I knew deep down that it was my fault entirely that the plant didn't survive.  Basil is ridiculous easy to grow if you give it enough soil to root, even here in Arizona.

Surprise ground cover vine that sprouted recently. The blooms open early in the morning and close up shortly after sunrise

Growing plants in Northern Arizona is very different from growing plants in Minnesota.  I think it's the elevation, the late freezes, and the dry air.  And the lack of rain.  And the brutal sunshine.  I guess there are a whole lot of factors going on around here that complicate the gardening process for someone so used to a completely different climate.  And given that I wasn't an accomplished gardener before, the challenges presented here in Arizona have been difficult to overcome.

Sphinx moth perusing one of our flowering bushes

When I owned my little house in Minnesota, the yard came with some day lilies and some hastas.  Having no clue whatsoever what either of these plants were when they started to sprout up in the spring, I sprayed them with Roundup thinking that they were weeds.  And I didn't just spray them, I doused them.  I drowned them in enough herbicide to probably wipe out a 40 acre field.  Okay, so that's an exaggeration, but I'm a little disturbed at how much herbicide I used that day.  And yet, they survived.  The weeds all died, but the hastas and day lilies remained.  It wasn't until a friend of mine came over and told me what was growing in my yard that I began to appreciate their beauty, their taking up of a spot that I didn't have to mow (I loathed mowing my lawn) and their hardiness.  I literally did nothing to those plants (outside of the Roundup) and they flourished.  A friend of mine gave me some leftover annuals from her garden, so I stuck them in the ground, gave them a little water, and they grew like crazy.  And that's how it is in Minnesota…things just seem to grow with minimal effort, at least that was my experience.  Perhaps I just had the luck of growing plants that are basically kill-proof.

One of the annual plants that survived

And then I moved to Arizona and got it into my head that if I could grow plants in Minnesota with minimal effort, then it stood to reason that I could also grow plants here in Flagstaff.  After spending over $100 on plants and potting compost, I figured it was a small price to pay in the event that it was a total bust and everything died.  And everything did almost die.  I had it in my head that perhaps the green-thumb I so envied in my Grandma Ellringer might possibly be genetic, and that maybe if I wished the plants well enough and gave them a little bit of water once a day, that they would just grow on their own.  Ha.  I ended up having to resort to Miracle Grow just to save the majority of them, and even after that there were two casualties.  Although, given that I started out with 3 tomato plants (cherry, san marzano, and roma), 1 jalapeño plant, 1 basil plant, 1 rosemary plant, 2 peonies, 1 bush, 5 ground cover vine things, and 12 individual annuals, two casualties doesn't really seem like that many.

Cherry tomatoes growing! They're going to be yellow and oval shaped when ripe.

Once I figured out that I needed to water them twice a day, and that I needed to water them a lot, they started to grow like crazy.  Well, some of them did.  The roma and cherry tomato plants are out of control.  Both of them have a bunch of little tomatoes on them.  I realize now that I planted them much too close together.  I've never grown tomatoes before, so I had no idea that they would get so massive.  They're literally blocking out the sun for the jalapeño and the san marzano plants.  The jalapeño plant has always been sickly looking.  It's got a bunch of blossoms on it, but it's still pretty much the same size as it was when I brought it home from the store, and the leaves are all brown along the edges.  Maybe that's just what they look like…I don't know.  I'm too lazy to do much research...and I wonder why my garden almost died…hahaha!

Another one of the annuals

The annuals are doing better.  They're so pretty.  I don't remember the name of them, but they're all different colors and on the days that I'm not sleeping all day to prepare for a night shift, I actually get to see them and enjoy them.  They add a nice pop of color to the yard. They close up nice and tight the minute any shade hits them though, so my viewing time is very limited.  The peonies are doing all right.  In the little bit of research that I did on peonies, I'm not expecting any blooms this year.  And it stands to reason that there might not be any blooms next year either.  But I hope there are.  Peonies remind me of my Grandma Ellringer, who I miss dearly, so I'm really hoping that the peonies produce some blooms for me.

Female humming bird on our feeder

The bushes and the ground cover…meh…they don't excite me much.  I just wanted something to fill in the space in the yard.  What our yard could really use is a big tree in the front, but I'm not about to take on the task of paying for and keeping alive a tree.  I could see that being a disaster.  Although, I was at Walmart the other day (I hate Walmart, but oddly enough, I couldn't find a watering can anywhere else in town), and they had Japanese Maple trees, which were growing all over the place in California when Simon and I were out there.  They're such beautiful trees, but I question their ability to actually grow here in Flagstaff, as I've never seen a single one here.  And given that they were selling them at Walmart, I highly doubt they put a whole lot of thought into what plants are regionally sound to grow in our climate.  I asked Simon if we could get one to have as an indoor plant.  He said no.  Typical…haha.  So no Japanese Maple for me.  We do have a bush that came with the house, and it's got these really pretty little purple flowers on it.  It's been a haven for honey bees during the day and sphinx moths during the evening.  It's so fun to watch the little buggers flit from blossom to blossom.  Our little pollinators.  :)

So yeah…all in all, the gardening is actually going quite well.  I haven't used the Miracle Grow in a few weeks, and the plants continue to get bigger and bigger, to get more and more blooms.  It's kinda cool to see results from a project that I knew little to nothing about before beginning.  I'm glad it's turned out as well as it has, and I'm really looking forward to eating some homegrown tomatoes in the next month or two!  Maybe next year I'll be a little more ambitious and actually do some research, and take on growing some different plants.

Cherry tomato blooms