Gardening - Spring 2021
Gardening is my favorite topic and something I take very seriously at my home as you’ll see throughout this blog and others!!! Continue reading below if you’re ready to get your garden started this spring and for tips and tricks about how to make the most of your already growing garden.
When you’re a beginner gardener, we’re all unconsciously incompetent about it - you don’t know what you don’t know. But you do your own research or get help from a friend and you get your garden started and now you’re consciously incompetent because you know there’s so much more you need to learn in order to make a beautifully flourishing garden.
When I got to this phase of my gardening journey, I realized how much I still needed to learn so I reached out to Lee, a professor of botany at Arizona State University. She came to our home and walked with me through my garden, giving me so many amazing tips that I would have never known - her consultation alone was so worth it!
Some of her tips included:
when you plant your tomatoes, another vegetable that compliments the tomatoes in terms of it’s nutrients, are carrots
if you have corn growing, the stocks are actually great places to start growing your sweet peas because the vines can climb the stocks - HOW COOL!
if you have fruit trees, make sure they are not too close together
if you have rocks at the base of your fruit trees, this will be the death of them as they attract and give off so much heat, especially with this Arizona sun we have here
fruit trees must have drip lines, not sprinklers as sprinklers dissipate and you’re actually wasting water because the water needs to soak down deep into the roots of fruit trees
ALL of these things… I was doing WRONG!!! But hey, nobody’s perfect.
So - I replanted my carrots to pair with my tomatoes and planted my sweet pees at the base of my corn. My fruit trees were way too close together and I had to move about ten of them to another location. Thank you Professor Lee!!!
We love fruit trees here at my home.
As I talked about above, we had to move 10 or so of my fruit trees because they were too close together - what else needed to change in order for me to get the most from my fruit tree harvests?
Professor Lee explained that our first instinct when planting new baby trees is to put a stake in next to the new growing tree (exactly what I was doing, our stakes were taped way too tight to our new trees) when in reality out in nature, the trees don’t ever have anything to hold them up like that while they’re growing. When planting a new tree, the stakes need to let the tree be able to move about 1 1/2 to 2 inches in the wind - if they don’t move in the wind the roots never grow out and strong… and if the trees are not able to move in the wind, the first storm we have, all of the trees would just fall over because the roots have not grown out.
I lost a gorgeous fig tree because we didn’t allow it to naturally sway in the wind and we had it tied way too tight.
I would recommend immediately cutting all of the tape or ties and removing the stakes, replanting the trees so that they are spaced apart correctly, and giving the ones that need a little support enough room when tied to their stakes so that they can sway. This way, your fruit tree grove flourishes and you aren’t wasting your time. This knowledge has saved an immense amount of my trees that could have potentially died and I truly thank professor Lee for all of her knowledge.
If you have a soft ego, you’re not going to be able to make your garden thrive!! As asking for help from a friend or a professional is always the best idea if you don’t seem to have that green thumb quite yet.
Next to come will probably be our vineyards for our grapevines! We have done a fairly good job with those but there are always lessons learned.