Pineapple Princess

Okay--honest confession here: I do not garden in the summer. Mainly because nothing says DOOM more than weeding when it's 115 in the shade. So, the garden is sorts of left to its own devices during the hot months. Mea culpa, poor little plants.





But, now it's beautiful again, and I love being outside and seeing all the fabulous things that have survived the Arizona "tough love" program. One of my favorites is this:






If you're not well-traveled in Hawaii or other tropical regions, you may not recognize these. They are in fact pineapple plants. And they are EASY to grow. (So easy that I can grow them in the summer. That's beyond the realm of easy and edging into ludicrously simple territory, that is.)



If you'd like your own pineapple plantation:

• Take a nice fresh pineapple from your local produce market. (Nothing that's been chilled, because that may prevent growth.)

• Go ahead and prepare and eat the pineapple. No waste and yummy dessert: the best of both worlds.

• Take the crown--the leafy, spiky top that you cut off to eat the fruit--and remove any fruit or peel that may remain on it. You only want the spiky bit, and anything else on it will just rot and make a mess.

• Take the crown and put it into a bowl of water--a cereal bowl will do.

• Set the bowl in a nice sunny spot and keep it watered.

• Within a couple of weeks roots should start to form. You can then take the new plant and pot it or put it into the garden. (All of ours--we have four now--were started in pots and transplanted.) If you put them outside, remember to give them a little shade if you live in an intensely hot area--like us--and no matter where you live you will have to protect them from freeze and frost damage during the winter. Kept indoors in a large pot, in a northern-lighted room, one will produce fruit (one pineapple--this is not a high-yield plant!) in two years. Outside? Well, I'll let you know if it ever gets that far. But in the meantime I have some interesting plants and the hope of a taste of paradise.
  

Happy growing!

I'm ready for war!

So I have this weed everywhere in my raised beds and in areas not yet planted:

Not the rosemary--I like that, and it isn't the poor, struggling oregano which was a beautiful large oregano plant before it wasn't watered all last summer. (Totally NOT MY FAULT!)

It's the horrible low-growing weedy stuff creeping over the brick edging. here's a better shot of it trying to choke out my thyme and parsley.

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!

I looked it up and it's called spurge--and apparently it's a real pain to get rid of. It forms dense mats of intertwined weed stems, and can choke areas of lawns and gardens. I hate this weed! It gets into all my garden beds. The problem with eradicating spurge is that it sows so many seeds--thousands of them per plant, and just spraying weed killer on the plant doesn't kill the weeds, because it leaves a whole generation behind yo carry on its nefarious work of ruining my herb beds.

So, according to the Master Gardener site for Maricopa County says that they have to be sprayed with Roundup or a similar weed spray, then pulled after the spray has taken effect, and then the whole area has to be treated with a pre-emergent weed killer to kill any seeds left behind. That's a lot of work; it's no wonder that I haven't been successful up yo now in my war with the dreaded spurge--I was using the wrong weapons and fighting the battle incorrectly. Now I'm properly armed and ready to kill me some mangy weeds!

Die, spurge, die!

Plum perfect

It's summer here in the Arizona low desert. That's not unusual--it's summer here half the year. My mom, who is a transplant from a far milder climate, hates this time of year. She hates the heat, the dust, the absolute insanity of attempting to do anything when it's 115 in the shade and your skin feels like it's on fire. My dad is a native and is used to it. It helps that he grew up in the "old Arizona''--the Arizona before air-conditioning was wide-spread and when everyone farmed or ranched. (He learned to drive a cotton tractor when he was seven. Apparently kids were better drivers then, because I have raised seven-year-olds, and there is NO WAY I would let one of them near heavy operable machinery!) He is used to the heat. Guess which side I take after?



So summer for me here is sort of like the winter for people in more Northern places--they hibernate from October to May, I hibernate from May until October. Although last year it was November before we saw any relief. I've heard of people who endure long periods of deep cold looking for signs of hope: the first robin, the first crocus (Ha! none of those here!), etc. I do the same thing--sort of. I look for desert-adapted signs that somehow we will make it through all this and there will be something good waiting for us at the other end of this oven-like experience.



Here's the sign I found Saturday:

That, friends, is a tiny little plum growing on a small tree in the backyard. That single plum represents the triumph of hope over despair. The plum tree in question was a gift from my mother when we bought the house. She had fond memories of making plum jam with me in our tiny basement student apartment, and she thought a plum tree would keep the good times rolling. Slight problem: there are no other plums trees within a pollination-feasible radius of our tree, so the poor thing remained unfulfilled.

My sweet husband, reaching for the dream, bought another plum tree to pollinate the first. It looked to me like a stick stuck in the garden. Apparently our dog thought similarly, and in a fit of either pique or playfulness, she gnawed it down to the ground. Tragedy! We scolded the dog, watered the tree, fenced it off with chicken wire, and prayed for the best. It survived and started putting out shoots. We thought it had become sufficiently large to deter the dog,and eventually removed the wire, which was adding nothing to the overall appearance of the garden.

The dog was undeterable and ate the tree again. Twice.

Same shtick all over--scold, water, fence, pray. We left the fence up for two years--appearances are secondary when you have a tree-eating pooch. The poor tree was so traumatized it refused to spread out, refused to bud, to bloom, and to do the thing for which it was brought into our lives: pollinate. No plums!

We have waited four years for this one tiny miracle plum. When we harvest it I don't know if we'll allow someone to eat it, or if we'll preserve it in resin for all eternity. Maybe I'll make the smallest batch of plum jam in history and take it to my mom.

Sounds like something to look forward to.

The Gnome is online!

My mom used to have a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens--the ultimate real-life American lifestyle magazine in my opinion--and I used to pore over the pages, scrutinizing the gardens and the plants and wondering why my mother never took their planting advice. Our garden certainly never looked like the ones on the glossy pages. It didn't make sense then, and it took me years to understand (I was a little distracted by other things like school, college, boys, etc--otherwise I would have caught on sooner, I like to think!) that we don't live in anyplace "typically American." Arizona IS in the US, but it's a whole 'nother world compared to Des Moines, Iowa--which is where Better Homes and Gardens is based. A few statistics to prove my point:

average yearly rainfall:
Iowa: 34.72 inches ***Arizona's low desert: between 7 and 9 inches (depending on who you ask)

average high summer temperature of hottest month:
Iowa: 86 degrees ***Arizona's low desert: well over 100 degrees (no matter how hard we try to deny it!)

days of sunshine per year:
Iowa:199 ***Arizona's low desert: 300


Arizona's low desert is NOT LIKE THE PLACES THE GLOSSY MAGAZINES COME FROM! Heck, even Sunset--my personal favorite of regional magazines--is written and edited in California, although they have a low desert edition. No wonder I--and my mother--have always been frustrated by our gardens, or lack thereof. When everyone else in America is enjoying their Fourth of July tomato harvest, we're sizzling and our gardens are filled with bare brown stems. Those beautiful, sculptural Japanese maples that all the books and magazine recommend don't grow here, neither do hydrangeas, elephant's ear, hostas, nor ferns. For gardeners with a Midwest training, this is terra incognita, and we natives get baffled, too.

In my search to create some beauty in the caliche-ridden, clay-bound, weed-infested soil that my house sits on, I've read endless books (most of which were confusing to someone with no training), pored over magazine articles (see the top of the post for the results of that activity), and even took--and passed!--the Maricopa County Master Gardeners' course. (I'm a lapsed MG, so I can't sling around any credentials. I will never call myself one, and I don't aspire to the heights that those great people have ascended. Seriously, Master Gardeners are the best people out there. They are amazing, and dedicated, and kind, and knowledgeable, and I would have remained one had not a birth and the loss of an hour-reporting sheet intervened. I hope one day to atone for my mistakes and rejoin their ranks. I hope there is forgiveness for a lowly gardening sinner such as I.)

In that search I've learned quite a few interesting things--mainly where to go for REAL, and HELPFUL information--and I'm willing to share freely with other misplaced garden gnomes like myself. I'll be sharing the info I find and showing off the results (good and catastrophic) so you can see what really happens when I follow my own advice.

Good luck and happy gardening!