After living here for nearly nine years and talking about it for almost as long, we finally put in a couple permanent raised beds for a garden.
We are studying biology this quarter for homeschool. I thought learning about plants and animals in early spring, when the desert comes to life and people start planting spring gardens, would be perfect. After a lesson about plant reproduction, and kind of on a whim, we went to Home Depot and picked out some vegetable seeds. Within a week of planting them in little peat pellets, they had sprouted and were growing fast!
This accelerated the plans we’d already sort of set in motion to have some hardscaping done in the back yard. In a very short time we went from having packets of seeds but nowhere safe to plant them outside, to having a bunch of seedlings and big raised beds for them to grow. It’s been really fun.
(Aside from the several days of having strangers working in my back yard all day, that is. They got a lot done very quickly, but it was tough for everyone to be confined to the house while they worked.)
As of today, the sugar snap peas are happily starting to climb their trellis, the zucchinis are putting out new leaves daily, and the cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, and peppers all seem to be settling in nicely. The beans are struggling, and I’m not sure if the tomatoes or lettuces will survive transplanting, but it’s all part of the experiment. I’ll be thrilled if we get even a few veggies out of our garden.
Tank, our African spurred tortoise, was pretty stressed out by all the construction and busyness. It didn’t help that his little “cave” had been dismantled so we could use the bricks. The nights were cold and he didn’t really know what to do with himself. He’s doing much better now that things are calm back there again and he knows where he can cozy up under his heat lamp at night.
Aesthetic preferences aside, he is the main reason we couldn’t plant anything until we had raised beds. He’ll trim up the edges of anything green and tender within reach. That or stomp on it. There’s no way we could have grown anything at ground level with him around. Hopefully we’ll have some extra trimmings to toss him within a month or two. Homeboy will be thrilled, I’m sure.
There’s plenty more to do out there: reseed the lawn where it’s patchy, paint the back fence and the garden boxes, install some kind of top brick or fill the holes in so the new walls are smooth, put in some bougainvillea along the new paver path, fine tune all the irrigation… Still, i’s good to see some progress.
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