What I have learned about having a successful garden in the desert. Who knew the desert had such great top soil, and how I protect my plants.
Video created using my phone & InShot:https://inshotapp.page.link/YTShare
What I have learned about having a successful garden in the desert. Who knew the desert had such great top soil, and how I protect my plants.
Video created using my phone & InShot:https://inshotapp.page.link/YTShare
47 Comments
Beautiful! Excellent explanation of your process and progress. Making positive changes to the desert. ☮️🙏☯️
Nice garden
Excellent video
Wait, free mulch? Where? We're in Willcox, is it far? And thanks for the info! We have 2 acres and a ton of mesquite trees. We also noticed that our ground isn't extremely compacted, that its almost a little soft which surprised us! We also have some older cow patties on our property which should be nice for our garden. ❤❤❤
April it looks great 👍! On my 5 acre 🫐 farm I have limited area for our garden's. I might suggest investing in some cattle panels they are 4 foot x 16 foot and are very handy for climbing plants and those that need support. I tie twine from the bottom to let them climb up to the panels. You are doing fantastic though. Another thing to consider is the use of plants in addition to marigolds like dill for sacrificial plants and with the combinations you have it will draw them to give you or your little helpers time to get to them prior to causing damage to the crops. I cut 2 black beauty eggplant this week 6 inches in diameter and 10 inches long.- eggplant french fries yummy. I also make squash and zucchini fried chips. Every year we all learn a little more. Most folks have forgotten the old ways of gardening. But y'all are doing very well 🤠. Been raining like crazy here 5 inches week before last, 6 inches last week 20 inches in the last month causing me to have to pick tomatoes early or they burst on the vine. I should give you big atta girl for your work installing the insulation in the house way to assist Red, find a project you could take charge of and make it your own. Anyway, I hope everything is going well with you and Red on the house, the garden and the family. God bless!🙏
April, anything cooked with butter and salt is wonderful. If you have a spice mill, or a mortar & pestle, blend into powder equal parts of baking soda and sugar. Place in an open container that will let the ants and termites have access while keeping the contents dry during rain. Usually an empty glass bottle on its side with the neck pointing down to earth. Ants will bring sugar back to nest to feed queen and nest. Baking soda will keep ants from digesting the sugar and the nest will starve. Mixture is safe for people and pets.
Don’t be too hard on yourself, this video presentation is terrific. Thanks for sharing this summary of your garden experience. Wishing you and Red a blessed week, gentle weather and restful evenings. Peace April
Love that garden👍 glad you guys are back
I wonder April if you might experiment with some heat sensitive species by installing a black nursery shade canopy in a portion of your garden?
April, your garden looks great! Thanks for letting us see it. I like the trellises- might have to steal your design.
Hi April, congratulations on the wonderful garden started basically from rocks and dust looks really good and the harvest is also good by the looks of it, hang in there doing really well and that the desert in Arizona
Your desert garden is awesome 😀
Congratulations on your fruitful harvest of the garden! It's been educational for us as well👍. I wonder how a solarium would do in the winter season out there in the desert🤔? Thanks for sharing 🌝🌞👏👏!
I grew the yard long beans a long time ago. I like the slightly different taste and texture from a regular bean. But my favorite are yellow pole beans. It was an heirloom variety, but don’t remember the name. I grew sweet potato es for the first time. Dug up 3 pounders. The growing tips are edible, very mild. I like how you are observing and learning from experience. Great garden! I got my first rain last week in Phoenix! .08 inches!
hello,we are looking for partener to make a review video on our 4K security camera system,so any chance for us to work together? we willing to sposnor the whole system to your channel.i had DM you the details in ins and waiting for your reply
Very nice garden experience.
Such a beautiful garden. I love how the low aircrete wall looks.
This was so inspiring and full of great information to tweek wherever you live. Enjoy seeing the progress. Thanks for the awesome video.
I just subd to channel.hopefully it will help support your channel 🤙❤️
I'm in Souther AZ on a 40 acre parcel as well, where did you get the mulch from? You said a town with a compost center?
April I am so impressed!! This is I think the nicest desert garden I've seen where folks are planting in the ground using our Northern AZ clay dirt!! Did you all do one of the tests on the soil or add anything to it? I have used the cinder blocks in our garden but I purchased soil…I did plant some lilac bushes in the native soil and those have actually been growing and lived through the winter and everything! I do have to water then when we don't get rain but they're handling it wonderfully! Grow Joy is great for telling you what plants will survive low water, clay soil and certain temps. That helped me pick. If I ever move I'll plant perrenials first for sure! Thanks for sharing and hope you're having a blessed week, neighbor! 😊💗
I thot you had some other compost you added.
be careful with the silt. I know people who have killed their growing ability and had to dig it all out.
I love your garden, specially since I’m in the valley and can learn from you. Please do more garden videos.
Excess nitrogen can attract aphids.
Excellent video! I learned a great deal from your coverage of the first attempts to now. Really amazing how you’ve been able to get such bounty from the native soil. I look forward to seeing next year’s results! Thank you for sharing your experience.
It looks like you did very good for the first two years and a new climate gardening.
What temperature did you plant zucchini in?
Nice – look up how far the taproot of the mesquite goes! That’s the answer for the good soil beneath. It pulls minerals from deep below and when the leaves fall, you get your good soil. 🙂
I'm glad I found this video! We attempted our first garden in the high desert of AZ and it was torn to pieces over and over. I love that you used the soil you had under mesquite trees. We have all juniper where we are and I noticed the soil under them looks rich. I wonder if it can be used…I may have to experiment! This video gives me a lot of hope 😄
Try shade clothes.
I grew up in Tucson growing with natives the trick to keep your veggies from burning is tree cover plant under mesquites palo verdes ironwoods and if you own a property with running water and have water rights you can plant right on the banks of the water and the plants will ignore the 118 degree days in my grandmothers yard there is a willow tree and a pomegranate tree she grows cape gooseberries peppers and summer squash and so on long story short I moved to nor cal to avoid the heat altogether 😒
How did you water your garden?
I am up north from you up in Mohave County in Zone 8B. Have a container and raised bed garden. Did try to put green beans in the soil but it did not work. So, pots, planter boxes, and raised beds with compost/raised bed soil mixture. Working on 2 compost piles with 1 in a 30 gallon trash can with holes drilled in the bottom and 1 old rusty burn barrel that was in the yard when we bought the home. I wish you well. Good work! By the way I try to be very thrifty about water. Bonus is how much rain we had this year so far in Jan. and previous few months. I also will use water crystals in the soil and mulch. I also had great luck with onions, garlic and surprisingly, bush sugar baby watermelons! Honeydew too.
NICE!😍Is your roof over your shipping containers done by you? besides wood, what else did you use? How much cost? where did you bought your solar panels? Thank you very much
Birds cut the seedlings off at the base, they don't eat them nor do they get water from them. I suspect they are looking for bugs underneath the leaf, cutting the stem is the quick way to find them.
Once the plants get larger they cannot cut the stems, but you will find leaves nipped and slashed. Towhees tended to do this in my Arizona garden, Pinwheels around plants you want to protect are excellent deterrents.
Once season I planted out my cucumber seedlings, all but 4 or 5 of the 20 I planted were snipped. I sprouted more and all of them were snipped, not a single survivor. So I went and bought some starts from the store, those starts all survived as they were bigger. Thats when I saw the birds in and amongst the cucumbers hunting. Once I went to the garden and accidently trapped a pigeon between me and the fence, he was feeding on bugs on my plants.
Love this. Please keep on sharing what you are learning about growing in the desert. I went over your channel list of who y'all are following. We share a few. And i am taking inspiration to watch a few more from y'all's list. Thank you!
Chicken wire saved a lot of seedlings from thrashers, doves, and so on. DE in a row keeps away Asian garden cockroaches. Summer, late in the afternoon, it's fun to watch lizards jump at a spot in the mulch and dig like crazy. They jerk back and always have a cutworm or grub. Keeping a pan of water out saves a lot of veggies, too. Quail and so on like that better than juicy plants LOL. Be warned, a very shallow pan is needed when they bring the chicks around. Something they can drink from and not drown.
When putting in the garden beds, we dug deep, below the caliche as Tohono friends said to. The town was built in 1953, so every garden spot has layers of caliche under the soil. Back-fill with logs, brush, weeds, coffee grounds, junk mail and so on, then a foot or 2 of mulch. No planting for 6 months. Ground squirrels moved in to add to the fertility and keep water flowing into the depths. Then Mouser, a rattler, moved in to free the garden of rodents. Then a king snake to keep down the population of Mousers. But, birds love the mulch too much, so chicken wire is a live saver. niio
Great Presentation!!!! Really enjoyed it!!!
Would this be good for grass?
I have caliche dirt. I tried gypsum and bag cow manure. I didnt keep up with maintenance and it dried out quickly.
Consider leaf cutter "ant-farms" planted directly into the ground with whole dragonfruits and miner's lettuce. If you get any poisonous harvester ants though, I'm guessing to release horned toads.
What a great video. I’m new to growing in the Arizona desert too. We lived in Northern Az for 20 years so Im having to learn everything over. I do love the fact that we have a longer growing season and can actually have a winter garden. Thanks for your video. Your garden is great.
Birds, ha! Here I thought it was the little 4 legged critters that were getting after stripping the garden plants! I will plan on following your advice for doing a greenhouse-type enclosure (above and below) for the plants that I want to keep. Thank you for sharing this !
We moved to NW Arizona outside of Kingman in 2021 and I'm learning so much. I've learned that shade cloth, straw mulch, and row cover cloth solves so many issues with birds, chipmunks, and hot sun. Great garden!
I think I have a concussion from slapping my forehead. I live on acres of trees and I’m going to Ace Hardware for soil?
Orange oil works really well for ant piles. Even kills fire ants. Be careful close to the plants though it can burn them. I use orange oil and cinnamon around my raised beds to keep the ants away.
I garden in the same climate and also use the wire cages to protect the seedlings and smaller plants. I recommend the hardware cloth instead of the chicken wire. Birds and squirrrels are the worst but also mice and rabbits eat stuff too but i noticed the rabbits will eat mostly weeds if you let some grow
Very nice! I love the concrete wall kinda giving that old Southwest adobe vibe like in the cowboy shows I grew up watching. One thing I might suggest is to look into growing native Prairie Grasses around the homestead. Big Bluestem, for example, can get up to 8' tall while sending roots down just as far. As a "clump grass" not only does it provide you with a ton of fodder and mulch every year, but it's a fantastic living screen that you can use to create a shady spot block an unsightly view. Being native to the region, the prairie grasses are already designed to handle the conditions, their deep-rooting nature allowing them to not only survive the droughts, but also break up tough soils and pull minerals up from deep down where your veggies can't reach. When you put that mulch on the veggie beds, they get to eat good! Big bluestem, Prairie Dropseed, Sideoats Grama, Compass Plant…. there's a ton of variety that can really help build up your soil while adding beautiful flowers and habitat for the wildlife.