My Garden
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It was the first year that I was able to really get into my garden. The year before I couldn’t do everything that I wanted because of some work training that I had, but this year I was able to really get into it and make it what I want. My garden philosophy is grow what you eat and eat what you grow. With this focus of growing what my family eats helped me stay on task and I was able to grow more than enough. Working in my garden this year, I was able to learn many new things and how to work in my area and the special things I must take into consideration.
My Garden Beds
My garden consists of three garden beds that are 10 feet long by 4 feet wide and 1 foot tall. I built them out of corrugated roofing metal and wood blocks for added strength. I used pvc pipe to create arches to drape my plastic sheeting over more on that later. The beds were filled with horse manure and hay that I have readily available from my wife’s horses. The beds were also filled with native dirt and to top everything off I added some topsoil.
I used black poly pipe to water the garden beds. Tapped into the poly pipe were small drip sprinklers that would water each plant. The plants did well in the beds and were healthy and strong. My garden consisted of vegetables and fruits that do well in southeast Arizona. I planted pepper plants, squash, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumber, melons, and peas.
My Pitfalls
I started my seeds indoors under grow lights that I got from amazon https://amzn.to/3I3d9oP I got to excited and started my seeds way too early in the season and it was way to cold to transfer them outside. That’s where the pvc arches came into play. I used them to drape plastic of the beds to help trap the heat and keep the plants from freezing. This worked for a little bit, but it got way too cold one night and froze my plants killing all of them. This was heartbreaking but I started over and just planted everything into the beds.
Where I live there is always a late freeze. It will warm up and act like spring is here and will continue to warm up but there was one more freeze that killed my plants again. After this happened, I started over again this time making sure it was going to stay warm. After talking to some other gardeners, they said the rule is to start planting seeds after Mother’s Day this normally gets you past that last late freeze. From here on out I will start my planting then and not even bother starting seeds inside. I have a long enough growing season that I don’t need to start seeds indoors. My plants were able to grow, and I had a successful harvest from all my plants.
The other problem I had in my garden this season was the wind. Where I live, we have very strong winds when the season change and just all the time. The wind was blowing my plants over and breaking them off. To remedy this, I bought mesh tarps from amazon https://amzn.to/3WHxVhJ and used them to block the wind. I pounded t-post in the corners and tied bailing twine across them and draped the tarp in half over the twine and tied the bottoms to the post. I put the tarps on two side where the wind would blow from. Putting the tarps up block most of the wind but allowed some to come through to help strengthen the plants. With out adversity the plants can’t grow strong much like us. I have big plans for next year and can’t wait to put into practice what I learned.