Runaway October

Step One: Find a lovely Jicama. One you fully intend on eat­ing. Make sure it’s not irra­di­ated — a Farmer’s Mar­ket of some sort is your best bet.

Step Two: Place Jicama on your counter and con­tem­plate what to do with it. For a few weeks. Begin to worry what to do with it when it starts to sprout vines, kinda like potato eyes.

Step Three: Get creeped out when the vines get long enough to reach out and caress you while you’re cooking.

Step Four: Name it. Her­bert is what I went with.

Step Five: Find a pot, mine still had some old soil in it. Par­tially fill pot with cac­tus soil, after read­ing on the Inter­net that Jicama needs really good drainage. Place the Jicama in pot so it’s top is a cou­ple inches down from the rim. Put more cac­tus soil around the bulb. Real­ize you don’t have enough cac­tus soil and top it off with some com­post mulch. Leave the bulb stick­ing out of a soil because you think it’s pretty.

Step Six: Put it in a sunny loca­tion and water spar­ingly. You don’t want the bulb to rot.

Step Seven: Worry when the vines start to dry up and die and notice that it has no real leaves yet. Decide that all the info that you read on the Inter­net was right and that Jicama is really hard to grow. Give up hope and leave it alone.

Step Eight: Real­ize that it’s start­ing to get really nice leaves. Feel your sense of accom­plish­ment swell.

Step Nine: Allow your green thumb to take full credit of your awe­some Jicama Vine. Decide you’ll worry about replant­ing it later, when it’s not so blast­edly hot in AZ.

Notice: Jicama is highly toxic in most forms. The leaves and vines espe­cially. I find mixed infor­ma­tion on the tox­i­c­ity of the pods. Appar­ently they’re fried and eaten in some cultures.

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Hey guys. Remem­ber me? No? Dan­git. I don’t blame you.

I have lots of excuses, but no real rea­sons. Maybe it’s my short atten­tion span?

Sum­mer is on full blast here in Ari­zona. When I say full blast I mean you walk out the front door and are lit­er­ally blasted with Sum­mer Heat. My poor gar­den has seen bet­ter days.

Today

Con­sid­er­ing we get to plant some­times as much as a whole sea­son ear­lier than other parts of the coun­try, I can’t com­plain. We ended up with more toma­toes then we knew what to do with. We made many batches of salsa and lots and lots of fresh tomato slices. I even exper­i­mented with ketchup, but it turned out way way too sweet and pretty much ined­i­ble. Boo.

The boys wanted in on these pic­tures.

This is one of a few big har­vests. We basi­cally ended up with a lot of squash, jalapeños and tomatoes.

Does this look like a zom­bie ver­sion of that guy from Veg­gi­eTales to you? Me too!

We also planted ONE “hon­ey­dew” plant and ended up with a few good sized mel­ons off of it. It’s still going strong though. It LOVES the heat appar­ently. It takes up a huge amount of space still. It’s not a hon­ey­dew by the way, I’m think­ing maybe a Cren­shaw or Casaba melon.

Those leaves are about hand sized, for ref­er­ence. In the bot­tom right, is my Span­ish laven­der bush. It seems happy to have a lit­tle bit of shade.

The heat is caus­ing the jalapenos to be red and small from the start.

Some strag­gler toma­toes. About 70% of the cherry toma­toes ripen okay, the oth­ers suc­cumb to the sun and shrivel up.

I’d say all in all, the gar­den was totally worth it. There’s noth­ing quite like find­ing your boys nes­tled in your gar­den fill­ing up on tomatoes.

Some things I’ll do dif­fer­ently next spring:

• Space out the toma­toes a smidgen more.
• Cage them imme­di­ately, and con­tinue to sup­port them as they grow.
• Read up on cucum­bers. I think that by the time my pick­ling cucum­bers came up, it was too hot. You can find itty-bitty inch long cum­bers one day and the next they’re shriv­eled and gone.
• Plan for sprawl more. The toma­toes over­took the green beans, dill and car­rots. The one squash plant took out the lemon thyme, cilantro and most of the spearmint.
• Pos­si­bly plant a week or two ear­lier. I don’t have to worry about frost much, but I do have to worry about the sun killing things right as the fruit matures.
• Pos­si­bly some kind of shade cloth over the whole thing too.

So, that was our gar­den this year. Still debat­ing on when to rip things out to pre­pare for the win­ter garden.

How did yours come along?

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Maybe I’ve got a veg­etable jun­gle because of Rowan’s green thumb?

He’s pretty proud of that garden.

Do you have any spe­cial helpers in your garden?

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Remem­ber the planter boxes my oh so accom­mo­dat­ing hus­band built for me? These guys?

And that this is what they looked like when I planted them?

Wanna guess what they look like now? No, really. Think about it.

This is Ari­zona, it’s hot. And as much as I hate to admit it, gar­den­ing is a never-ending ‘craft’. You can’t just plant it and for­get about it, like you can with most of the crafts I do. I’m not so great at ongo­ing projects.

Which is why I’m quite tick­led (and slightly over­whelmed) that they now look like this:

April 23^rd, Box 1

Notice how they’re still pretty much within their beds and you can sort of see all the indi­vid­ual plants.

April 23^rd, Box 2

Yeah.

Not any­more.

May7th

It’s a jungle.

Which is awe­some, but Holey Moley.

How am I ever going to tame this thing?

I’m really hop­ing that we’ll get some veg­gies off of it before the heat makes them go dormant.

Also think­ing about putting some kind of shade over it.

I learned awhile back that if the night temps don’t get low enough, it doesn’t mat­ter what I do, the toma­toes will stop fruit­ing, so hurry hurry lit­tle tomatoes.

Heir­loom Brandy­wine Tomatoes

Sweet 100 Cherry Tomatoes

Roma Toma­toes, pos­si­bly. Hard to tell in there.

Jalapeño

Crook­neck Squash

Green Bush Beans

The cucum­bers and hon­ey­dew are com­ing along nicely.

We picked some radishes the other night. I think they were crowded.

And there’s lot of herbs too. Cilantro, Dill, Lemon Thyme, Spearmint, Ste­via, Choco­late Basil, Choco­late Mint (I can never seem to pass up all the choco­late ones).

There’s car­rots buried in there too.

Maybe next year, I wont pack in so many toma­toes.

How does your gar­den grow this year?

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When we moved in, this lit­tle Brad­ford Pear (I think) was hav­ing a rough go with Cut­ter Bees. While it looked sad it was still healthy. Early early this spring, around Feb­ru­ary, it bloomed out and was just beau­ti­ful. But now it looks sick.

So I ask The Inter­nets for help. And also the Ari­zona Gar­den Web Forum, which is a great source of infor­ma­tion for you local readers.

Click for larger pictures.

Any thoughts? I don’t want to lose this lit­tle tree!

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