Prepping it, Digging it...and so are the dogs!

Yesterday, we spent most of the day prepping the garden. Paul and I built a trellis out of re-bar and chicken wire for our snow peas and pole beans. Then we dug out river rocks along the side of the house where we plan to plant our tomatoes this year. We are raising the tomato beds using a cinder block enclosure. We theorize that the thermal mass of the cinder blocks and the brick of the house will create a more temperate climate for our heat loving tomatoes. We still plan to use walls of water around the tomato starts, that is, once we transplant the seedlings in mid-May. Hopefully the new home for our tomatoes will create the perfect micro-climate for an earlier yield and a longer growing season. I will report later in the season if this is the case.

Oh, yeah...we forgot to lock the latch on the gate to our garden last night. Our dogs got in. Now we have a nice big hole where I planted the lettuce a week ago. Can you classify dogs as garden pests? Hmph!

Soak it up

Four years ago Paul installed a soaker hose system in our vegetable garden. That was our best growing season by far. However, the last three growing seasons we did not reinstall our soaker hose system, which in my humble opinion has been the demise of our exceptional yields.

It goes something like this (information shared by Paul via master gardening program). Water your garden as if you are watering an inverted cone-like sponge. The idea here is that you saturate the wide opening of the upside down cone until it reaches the point of the cone (the spot near the base of the plant). If the cone is well-saturated then plants will be able to access the water even in very windy, dry, sunny days - a regular occurrence in Flagstaff. So what the soaker hose does is allows the water to slowly soak into the inverted cone. Surface watering evaporates too quickly and if you hand water you will not spend us much time on each plant letting the water soak the conical sponge.

Mulching the surface of your garden will also prevent the soil surface from dehydrating too quickly.

So this year, we are going to reinstall soaker hoses in combination with mulching. I will report later in the season if my revisted approach is correct.


Soaker Hose Image Courtesy of http://grow.ars-informatica.ca/grow_topic.php?subject=wat0

The 70's show

Flagstaff meteorologist, Lee Born, reports on this season's winter wrap up.

Winter Weather Wrap-Up With Flagstaff Meteorologist Lee Born
Gillian Ferris Kohl
FLAGSTAFF, AZ (2009-04-17) Though it's been nearly a month since winter was officially declared over...the snow has still been flying across northern Arizona. To give us a winter weather wrap-up and a preview of spring and summer conditions, Arizona Public Radio's Gillian Ferris Kohl spoke with Flagstaff meteorologist, Lee Born.

Lee Born announces that 70 degrees will be arriving next week. Finally!

It starts with a seed

My husband started seed trays in our laundry room, our makeshift greenhouse. We planted tomato, basil, and other seeds over 3 weeks ago. The seeds have already sprouted their first leaves. This is a huge feat since the weather has been less than ideal for starting seedlings in the garden.

Flagstaff's Banana Belt

We live in the Banana Belt of Flagstaff, located south of Mount Elden. The reason why this area is called the Banana Belt is because Mount Elden acts as a thermal mass trapping the sun from the day and tempering the cold air at night. During years gone by, this area was one of the few places where settlers could actually grow edible vegetation. In fact, our backyard is an old played out potato field, which unfortunately turned our soil into fine dusty dirt with little resemblance to healthy soil - yet another gardening challenge. Despite the banana belt effect, it is not unusual to see temperatures dip 40 degrees between daytime and nighttime even in this temperate area. Areas north, west, and east of Flagstaff can experience temperature differences up to 50 degrees between night and day. So the Banana Belt offers a promise, albeit a slight promise, to the otherwise frustrated Flagstaff gardener.