planthappiness

So far, not so good at this blogging thing.  It pains me, because I know this is something I should be good at.  It’s something I want to be good at.  And so I am going to try again. 

I am still interested in working in my garden.  I’ve even had some moderate success.  But I don’t love it quite enough to blog about it all the time.  Then it occurred to me that the reason the title “Plant Happiness” resonated so much with me is that it is exactly what I am trying to figure out in my life in general.  I’m trying to plant happiness.  It just turns out that it is a verb not a noun. 

As I was coming to this realization, I stumbled upon a book that articulates this exact thing I have been trying to achieve.  The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin.  It is all about attempting to increase your overall happiness by making small, incremental conscious changes in your everyday life.  Small changes, like starting an organic garden to improve the quality of your family’s food, perhaps??

So, in the New Year’s Day spirit of turning over new leaves and making resolutions, in 2012 I am broadening the scope of this little, neglected blog.  I am going to be intentional and explicit about the things that I am going to try to change for the better in my life, and then hold myself accountable to making those changes. 

Hopefully along the way I will end up planting a little happiness, both for myself and for others.  Oh, and some ripe, red tomatoes wouldn’t hurt either.

I know, I know I’ve been MIA.  I fled the heat for a few weeks to visit family in the Midwest, and now have been caught up with all the happenings of the new school year.  Besides, not much has been going on lately in my dusty, dried up garden (remember that dilemma I was having about whether or not to try to save the tomatoes through the rest of the scorching heat?  The heat won).

But as the evenings are finally starting to cool down and be a bit bearable again, I know that fall planting season is almost here! And in the meantime, I’m gathering up a few resources to help my planning, and thought I would share:

• The Maricopa County Coop Extension has a wonderful month by month calendar of garden to-dos, as well as dozens of papers on ways to deal with various specific gardening issues.
• Here a link to an awesome site I stumbled upon for the Urban Farm.  You can download a free desert planting calendar here.
• If you are overwhelmed and/or don’t have the time to plant your own garden, here‘s a neat local company that will do it for you.  They’ll even come over and water your plants for you!

See my “Gardening Resources” page for more ideas on places to look for help.

Happy garden planning!

As the weather is heating up, I’ve been having some issues with my tomatoes and peppers.  Things seem like they’re going just fine, everything is growing well, and then one day I go out to water and bam – the bottom half of the tomato / pepper is brown and mushy.  Quick Googling of the issue brings up hundreds of results (for example here) showing pictures of my exact issue – Blossom End Rot.  Yay - at least I’m not the only one.  Small victory.

Long story short apparently this is a result of a calcium deficiency in the soil, which is exacerbated by uneven watering.  So, once again sounds like I need to get started digging that trench to put in my watering system.

In the meantime, I’ve MacGyver-ed my own little solution to the problem which seems to be not hurting  helping things.  As soon as a tomato started to turn the tiniest shade of yellow/orange/anything other than green, I pluck it from the vine and bring it inside to finish ripening indoors.  It doesn’t seem to affect the taste, as far as my fairly easy to please brood is concerned.  This also seems to help with other tomato issues like splitting and sun scald which are becoming bigger problems for me as the temperatures rise here in AZ.

Unfortunately this method doesn’t help for the peppers.  I’m shelving that to figure out again next spring.

My tomato plants at the end of June

It’s pretty insanely hot here in Phoenix this week.  115 degrees hot.  The pool doesn’t even feel refreshing – it is more like a lukewarm bathtub.  Luckily, just two more weeks until the kids and I pack up and head back to the Midwest for the rest of the summer to spend some time with the grandparents.  Thank goodness.

In the meantime, I need to figure out what I’m supposed to do with the garden now that the sun is scorching everything and the season is winding down a bit.  All in all I think we did okay for our first try.  We are swimming in tomatoes – anyone have any good, new recipes??

Not so bad for a first attempt, right??

I pruned back my Better Boy tomato plant yesterday.  I’m still on the fence about whether or not I’m going to try to keep it going for the fall (which I believe would require putting up a shade cloth ASAP) or whether I’ll pull it out and start fresh at the end of August.  Either way, I took off about 50% of the branches yesterday and cleaned it up a bit.  I read here (this AZ Gardening Forum is awesome, BTW) that cutting the plant back now will stimulate new growth for the fall.  We shall see…

Pruning back the Better Boy

My peppers are pretty much done, with the remaining fruit burning up on the plants.

Peppers with sun scald

Next year I will definitely put up a shade cloth to protect these guys.  I also will hopefully have my irrigation system in place (this requires digging a not-so-fun 30 ft long trench to get to the water source – Dear Husband, pretty please???), which will hopefully help with the blossom end rot that I fought against a little bit with both the peppers and the tomatoes.

All in all, this first year of growing in AZ has been a huge learning experience.  Now is the time to regroup a bit and start planning for the fall.  Oh, and to start digging that trench.