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Gardening

Winter garden y-cumin’ in!

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Daytime temps are still in the nineties and hundreds here in lovely downtown Phoenix, but evenings and mornings are delightfully cool. It’s time to get ready for winter gardening, lhudly sing huzzah!

Accordingly, I spent large swaths of Friday and Saturday pulling out dead plants (quite a few fricasseed during this summer’s unrelenting heat) and then digging compost into the flowerbed by the pool. The only two survivors there are a venerable thyme plant and the rose. A blue plumbago volunteered just on the other side of the planter’s border, and since it’s a pretty plant, I’ve let it grow. It made it through the summer, singed but unbowed. To some degree, it may have protected the rose by growing into and over it. I had to cut back a fair amount of plumbago to disentangle the rose plant.

For this fall, I decided to dispense with most of the pots. The whole idea of gardening in pots has morphed into a gigantic hassle, one that had me dragging water hoses around a third of an acre every single day, allllll summer long! Enough with that! I’m going to keep one pot for some bush peas, but otherwise, no more misguided efforts to grow vegetables in pots.

The magnificent, hardy Swiss chard I grew last winter, which didn’t bolt to seed until well after the hot weather arrived, was an heirloom variety that I’d picked up on a whim at Whole Foods. It’s way up there among the most successful veggie crops I’ve every tried to grow. So, as unlikely as Whole Foods seems as a gardening supply shop, I decided to drive back up there in search of more chard seeds and this time to look more seriously at their offerings.

They had a lot of interesting seeds. Some of the most intriguing were sold out. Fortunately, I did manage to find the beloved chard and so bought a couple of packets. I found some red romaine, which looks very pretty but which may be frost-sensitive. We’ll find out, come December. They also had some radicchio, which I enjoy but usually can’t afford at the grocery store.

The peas are an heirloom variety. The packet says they need no staking and that you’re supposed to plant them two inches apart…and “do not thin.” That’s rather amazing. Because the planting bed is so tiny and the soil isn’t very good, my plan is to salvage one of the large pots from this summer’s failed experiment, put it next to the poolside bed where I can easily reach it with the hose, and use that for the peas. And probably put a few seeds in the ground, too.

There’s still so much gravel in that flowerbed that I decided to forego the root crops this year. Much as I enjoy beets (especially) and carrots, the dirt is so rocky and poor they just don’t grow very well. And they don’t seem to like growing in pots, either. Every time I try to cultivate that garden, I dig out more of the damned stones that Satan and Proserpine dumped in there, but every year more of them work their way to the surface. Leafy plants seem to do OK there, but anything that needs to grow plump underground…forget it!

Much work remains to be done. I need to find a way to prop up the Meyer lemon’s limbs, which once again are so laden with fruit they bend to the ground. Realized this could be done with lashed-together tripods made of wood scraps; this will require me to disassemble an aging trellis and saw the sticks to size. Good exercise…

Then I need to get rid of the two roses that have never thrived in their place on the north side of the backyard wall. It’s too shady there for them in the winter and too hot in the summer. A hibiscus presently occupying a pot can go there…one more pot disappeared!

Yes. The pots are going to get gone. The little westside deck is overrun with potted plants, all of which also have to be watered every single day, all summer long. What I think I’d like to do is make a single arrangement around one especially nice plant, sort of a set piece, and then get rid of all the rest of them. Same for the tangle of plants outside the back door.

That’s not all that needs to exit.

Then I’ve got to get an arborist in here. The trees in front have run amok, despite my determination not to put much water on the xeric numbers. They need to be pruned by someone who knows what he’s doing. Most of the yard guys want to turn them into basketballs, which ruins them.

The big palo brea, in its drive to take over the planet, has become a menace to navigation. Some woman showed up at my door a few weeks ago offering to trim it herself and drag the cuttings into the alley. She said her dog had pulled her into the thorny overhanging brush and scratched up her face. So I had to get Gerardo to try to cut it back, in the process of which he gouged off a big limb and left a huge open wound on the even bigger limb to which it was attached. I’m sure it’s weakened that part of the tree, leaving about a quarter of the canopy vulnerable to snapping off in next summer’s monsoon winds.

Even though it’s a beautiful tree, I may have to have it removed. In the effort to build a screen between my front window and Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, Richard (landscaper) planted way too many trees and bushes that have grown way too large. Inside the courtyard, the Swan Hill olive tree has now grown plenty big enough to suffice for a frontyard specimen tree. Without the palo brea, the huge vitex could fill out better and be just fine for the area outside the wall. It makes beautiful blue flowers, and it has no thorns with which to take out the eyes of passing dog walkers.

Richard said he would remove the dead ash tree at large expense, but so far no sign of the guy. He wants a thousand bucks to do that and relandscape the area that will be destroyed by the loss of the tree. I really can’t afford that at this juncture, but neither can I leave a dead tree snag out there. Besides looking awful, sooner or later it’s likely to break and fall onto the house. If the neighbors don’t get the city after me first.

So these projects are really going to eat into my survival fund, damn it. I don’t know what I can do myself, though. The pruning is a bigger job than I can even begin to do, and the front is hideously overgrown. I can’t afford a lawsuit from some passerby who gets poked in the face by that palo brea, nor the increase in homeowner’s insurance if the dead ash tree breaks off and trashes the house. Ugh! The joys of homeownership.

Well… If I sold the house I’d net about $250,000 (if I’m lucky…one of La Maya’s neighbors has put his house on the market for about $100 a square foot, which would depress the sale value of my house to about $186,000—or less, since she’s in a higher-priced part of the neighborhood). Investing $250,000 and taking a 4 percent drawdown would give me a munificent $833 a month to cover rent payments. And that sure wouldn’t buy much! Eight hundred bucks will buy you a hole in a rabbit warren around here, so solidly built that you can hear the upstairs neighbor widdle every time he goes to the bathroom. Amazingly, apartment buildings around here don’t even have fire walls—recently a fire started in one upscale Scottsdale rabbit hutch and gutted eight adjoining apartments.

Probably having the palo brea removed, as painful as that would be, is the better part of valor: one fewer thing to have to take care of. The vitex can run amok without doing much harm, and with just the olive, the desert willow, the Texas ebony, the two weeping acacias, and the paloverde to get pruned… Uhm… “Just”? How on earth am I ever going to afford to live in this place without a $65,000 income? Social Security just isn’t going to cut it. LOL! Literally!!

Ohh well. At least this winter the backyard will be full of oranges and lemons, and there’ll be so much chard by the pool I won’t have to buy groceries.

RIP $64 butternut squash

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{sigh} The amazing, struggling $64 butternut squash plant finally croaked over.

Yesterday it was looking a little yellow, the season being August. When it’s hotter than a three-dollar cookstove around here (the norm for the low-desert climate from May or June through mid-October), plants living in pots have to be watered every. single. day, no exceptions. And they need to be watered early in the morning, before the sun starts its daily baking process.

But…in August we get some humidity. This means that not all the water evaporates out of some pots, so plants that don’t like wet feet can show symptoms of overwatering. Like, for example, yellowing leaves.

So I decided to hold off watering the squash for a day, though left the shade cloth over it.

This morning—twenty-four hours later—it is stone dead. A stiff squash. A squash that has gone to meet its maker.

A couple of its viney arms were still clinging to life, having rooted in the sandy quarter-minus crushed granite that is my yard’s desert landscaping. Briefly I considered snipping those free from the dead mother plant and just continuing to water them. But really: what for? The original point of this exercise was to see whether seeds from a particularly delicious grocery-store butternut would grow in the back yard.

Welp…now we know the answer to that one!

😛

Is a vegetable garden cost-effective?

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Most frugalists and gardening enthusiasts seem to feel that growing vegetables in the backyard (or on your apartment balcony) is a good cost-saving strategy. But I wonder.

After having tried to grow vegetables, with moderate success, for the past three years, I’m beginning to think the cost of preparing not-very-fertile soil (or of buying big pots and filling them with commercial soil, or a combination of commercial soil, clayey dirt, and compost), fertilizing, composting, and watering outweighs—maybe even far outweighs—the cost of buying organic vegetables in an upscale grocery store.

Consider: before the great bee fiasco of aught-eight, I had a composter given to me some years ago by La Bethulia. The price of this doughty contraption at Gaiam, where she bought it, is around $200. You can get something very similar at Amazon.com for $123. This was what got me started trying to grow veggies in the backyard. I once had a very successful organic garden, back when I was a young thing. But that was in another time and another place.

Gifted with the Gaiam composter, I decided to try again. And again. And again.

A small, rocky flowerbed by the pool has served to grow a few hardy herbs, chard, some puny carrots and beets. Except for the thyme and the chard, few of the plants thrived. A previous owner filled the bed with gravel, which I shoveled out and carried away…but no amount of shoveling has ever gotten rid of all the stones. As the weeks pass, more pebbles work their way to the surface, so at no time is this old planting bed free of rocks. Digging compost and commercial soil into the dirt doesn’t help significantly. Tomatoes absolutely will not grow there. Nor will they grow in any of the other four flowerbeds in the backyard. Within weeks of being introduced to this spot, pea vines poked their little green heads out of the ground, looked around, and then keeled over and died. The chard, though, did very well.

So did the water company: $128 at this time last year; $108 last month; $80 bills during the (very wet!) winter.

Knowing this spot was too small for the butternut squash I’d decided to grow from seeds scavenged out of a grocery-store specimen, in the spring I bought a big plastic pot at Costco—price was $21.65, according to Quicken. At Home Depot, I spent $18.33 for another pot and dirt to accommodate some cantaloupe seeds. Couple weeks later, another $3.98 covered some hose connectors. I had fertilizer, hoses, and sprinklers on hand.

Not counting the last three items, we’re into the squash and cantaloupe for $43.96, plus the cost of the water, which I expect by now has come to around $30 or so. These plants have to be watered every. single. day if they are to survive 115-degree heat. Even if we figure a more conservative $20 for the water, the squash, the cantaloupe, and some nearby potted tomatoes (whose fruit fried on the vine), chives, onions (dead as onion-flavored doornails), parsley (gone to seed), and basil (the only plant that’s really thrived—also by dint of once- or twice-daily watering) have run up a bill of $63.96.

So far, the squash has set two infant fruits, one of which withered and died on a day when I didn’t get outside to water before noon. One five-inch-long butternut squash survives. The plant still makes big, nifty yellow flowers, but none of them come to anything. The cantaloupe has brought forth nary a melon. The tomatoes set some fruit, but they turned to tomato soup on the vine as soon as the weather heated up. I harvested two of these, neither of which was very good to eat. Onions cooked in the pot. Chives are hanging in there, just. The basil, as basil is wont to do here, has run amok, and that’s nice. But…uhm…how much basil, really, can you eat?

What we have here, folks, is a $64 butternut squash.

One, count it, one (1) squash
One, count it, one (1) squash

IMHO, you could buy a heckuva lot of fancy organic squash at Whole Foods for sixty-four buckolas.

Well, don’t take my word for it. Let’s examine the experience of more gifted gardeners living in a balmier climate. I recently came across The Boston Food Garden, the chronicle of a gardening couple who, by the looks of it, have had good success with their project.

By May 26, they’ve spent $208 on this summer’s garden. These are evidently experienced gardeners who probably have learned the most efficient ways to plant, likely already have prepared their own compost, and who probably own a collection of gardening tools. A little over a month later, on June 19, they harvest $25 worth of vegetables.  They’re beautiful—nay, enviable veggies. They’re organic. They’re a real accomplishment. And it will take our couple 8.32 such harvests to recoup their $208.

Will they get eight and a third harvests during a Massachusetts growing season? Sure, if the garden yields about four harvests a month, assuming a New England September brings an end to veggie lifetimes. It might produce that much; maybe even more. But meanwhile, they’ve put in an enormous amount of work…and again, we don’t know what they’ll spend on water, fertilizer, composting, and various organic schemes to beat back marauding insects. Nor do we know how much time they will spend in the garden, or the potential earning value of that time. All those things will add significantly to the initial $208 investment.

Okay, okay! I concede that in addition to the satisfaction of growing your own (which is worth a lot) and the opportunity to grow some unusual and heirloom varieties unavailable at even the swellest of Whole Foods or farmer’s markets, the home gardener does her part to save the planet by cutting the amount of diesel and airline fuel needed to haul food to market. And that also is worth a great deal.

But still. From a purely selfish point of view—how much it costs you as an individual to buy food at a store vs. how much it costs to grow it in the backyard—you could buy an awful lot of organic butternut squash for $64, and an awful lot of fresh strawberries, peas, and greens for $208.

Unholy water bill

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Thought this was gunna happen. Yesterday the City’s water department sent me a second bill for this month, bringing the total hit to $214.

Cute.

Earlier this month I learned that someone had turned off the water service to my house and restarted it in their name. The CSR at the water dept thought I was a new tenant in the house. I explained that I’ve lived here for five years and have no intention of moving soon. She said they’d fix it.

So last week along came a bill for $130. That’s about normal: though it’s the highest bill I’ve ever had in this house, it’s only five bucks more than last July’s, and the water rates have gone up twice over the past year. Yesterday—Saturday, of course, when no one’s in their business office—I got a bill on a different account number with the same read date, dinging me for another $87.34!!!

The $130 bill is unitemized: where it’s supposed to list the number of gallons used this month and last month, it says “0.” The $87 bill shows I used 2992 gallons, about 15 percent of the normal amount for the dead of summer.

I suspect they’ve added the “someone’s” water bill to my normal bill.

Happy day. Now I get to spend half of Monday morning doing battle with those people, and probably getting nowhere. If they give me any guff, I’m calling the state AG’s office and reporting that someone stole my identity to get free water.

The water bill is normally astronomical at this time of year. We’ve had day after day of 115- to 118-degree weather. Every plant in the yard has to be watered every single day, and some potted plants have to be watered twice in a day to be kept alive. I’m determined to see the butternut squash through the summer: it has some tiny baby squash, and if it survives, we may get some fall produce from it.

The tomato plants are still alive, but their fruit literally cooks on the vine. The three vine-ripened tomatoes I’ve salvaged have tasted sweet but the pulp is strangely dry: unjuicy tomatoes. La Bethulia was right that chard will live in the heat…but it’s very, very unhappy stuff. The basil and the thyme are OK. Everything else is suffering terribly.

I could have bought a year’s worth of fancy vegetables at Whole Foods for what the water company is charging me this month!

Image: Matthew Bowden, Wikipedia Commons

Beloved Yard Dude Gone

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Gerardo the Yard Dude Extraordinaire has disappeared from the scene. He’s not answering phone calls, and that’s not like him. So La Maya (another of his clients) and I are worried something’s happened to him.

Of late, he’s had a hard time getting good workers, partly because many migrants are staying in Mexico for lack of work here, and partly because the rabid Sheriff Joe’s publicity racist anti-undocumented worker campaign has resulted in so much harassment for Latinos that people who jump through all the immigration hoops to enter the country go to friendlier locales. Gerardo himself is very smart and very good at what he does. But some of the characters he’s hired lately have been annoying. He does a lot of the work himself, and so he’s not riding herd on these guys—and they’re guys who need to be watched every minute. The result is not always ideal.

Meanwhile, speaking of rabid, the dratted palm trees around the pool have gone into a reproductive frenzy. Why people plant palms around swimming pools (or anywhere, for that matter) beats me. They’re one of the messiest trees around. They grow out of the top, sprouting a new topknot of fronds each spring. The previous year’s growth then dies, creating an ideal nest for cockroaches. At the same time, the plant springs a crop of long flowering wands, which drop millions of tiny, crisply sharp blossoms all over the ground and into the pool. The things are too small to be caught by most pump pot and skimmer baskets, and so they get sucked into your pump. Not good. Worse: the fertilized flowers produce BB-sized seeds. These rock-hard little fellows also drop into the pool, where the pool cleaner picks them up and chokes on them, resulting in a nice repair bill.

So, once a year you have to get a guy to come round and trim the palm trees, at rates ranging from $25 to $45 apiece. Some people have them taken out, but in a yard like mine, where the pool is built within a couple feet of the wall, removing the stumps would pose quite a challenge. Besides, in such a confined area there’s not much else you can plant that will cast even a modicum of shade.

Gerardo was doing the job for $25, very cheap. So I cringed at the thought of having to track down someone else to do the palms and, BTW, the monthly yard work.

At this time of year, dozens of itinerant workers roam the neighborhoods looking for palm tree work. They litter your front door with cards. So I picked one whose name I vaguely remembered from last year: Joel G.

I’m impressed:

1. He’s Mexican. Several amazing experiences have left me strongly preferring Mexican over Anglo landscape workers.

2. He showed up promptly to provide an estimate. He must live nearby, because he was here 15 minutes after I called.

3. He looks substantial and honest. OK, I know you can’t tell a book by its (etc.), but gut instinct goes a long way toward assessing character. He’s clean-cut, neatly dressed, and has a frank, straightforward manner. At first inspection, I’m guessing this is probably a decent man.

4. His English is excellent. That helps a lot, because my Spanish leaves a lot to be desired. Like…oh, say, Spanish.

5. He charges a reasonable price, only $5 a tree more than Gerardo.

6. He also advertises a number of other skills, the very skills M’hijito and I have need of: he can install watering systems and lay gravel. If his price is right there, too, we may hire him to do the landscaping at the downtown house.

And he’s hired. We’ll see how good a job he does on the palms. If that works out, maybe we can get him going on the two houses, and that would be a great help in our lives.

I hope Gerardo is OK. Palm tree work is very dangerous—every year men are injured or killed wrestling with these nasty plants. Worse even than falling off an 80-foot-high stem is getting trapped under one of the heavy fronds: if you can’t get out quickly, you suffocate. It’s such a gruesome way to die that just about every incident hits the newspapers, and so if anything like that had happened to him, La Maya would have picked up on it, since she still gets the Arizona Republic. But other injuries and car wrecks are so commonplace no one even notices. We’re both assuming he’s met with some accident…but who knows? Maybe he took a salaried job.

Image by Ginobovara, Wikipedia Commons

DIY splendor!

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One of Funny’s Ten Money Principles is “do it yourself.” Great piles of cash are to be saved (and spent) by following this principle. If you’re at all handy or crafty, improvements to your house, yard, and vehicles are waiting for you.

This weekend I visited the home of some friends who deserve the nomination for All-Time Great Do-It-Yourselfers. Fred is a firefighter, and Kathy works for the Great Desert University. A few years ago, not long before the real estate bubble began its final expansion, they built their dream house on an acre of land under the White Tank Mountains, a natural preserve on the far west side of the Valley. The basic structure of the house was built by the developer, a man they had met through their daughter’s sport, but Fred wired the place for sound, and working together Fred and Kathy installed a handsome stone façade in front. Then they started on the huge backyard.

Still a work in progress, it’s beginning to shape up as a lovely park-like retreat. Fred has made a hobby of metal-working; when they built the house, he specified a separate, fire-resistant workshop, which you can see in some of the photos here. At the outset, they laid two large patios, one of paving bricks and one of flagstone. The flagstone surface was the only landscaping project for which they needed professional help. Otherwise, Fred and Kathy designed and installed the entire hardscape, the structures, and the plantings.

dcp_2467This shade structure was built of scrap metal. The entire thing consists of recycled materials. It casts a cooling, airy shadow close to the house’s covered patio, where, Kathy says, the two of them like to sip wine in the evenings and dream up new projects. Beneath it, they built (themselves!) a complete outdoor kitchen with propane-powered gear and a stone countertop. Taken together with the house’s built-in overhang, the flagstone patio, and the great room that opens into the backyard, the whole arrangement makes an awesome entertainment area. 

dcp_2469
(Click on the photos for larger views.)

But that’s just the beginning. In addition to the barbecue kitchen, they also designed and built a fantastic propane fireplace, complete with a Santa Fe-style wall and bancos. In this view, a protective covering is set in place over the firebox. The other evening, though, SDXB and I had the privilege of joining our hosts in front of this lovely hearth, where we watched the sun set over the mountains and the moon and stars come to vibrant life. That’s a young elm tree behind the structure. The flowering trees are Desert Museum hybrid paloverdes, an exceptionally beautiful xeric tree that, once established, provides great shade and hardly ever has to be watered.

dcp_2473Their latest development is an elaborate garden structure. Fred also built the framework in his workshop, although this time the metal was, I believe, not recycled. Here are Kathy and VickyC about to enter through the gated arch—the fencing discourages coyotes and can be equipped with a dog- and rabbit-repelling barrier. A couple of weeks ago, Kathy planted a pair of Lady Banks climbing roses, one on either side of the archway. It will take a year or two, but in due course these plants will cover the arch with flowering vines. The skeletal “roof” of the structure is designed to accommodate shade and frost fabric, which will protect tomatoes in the scorching Arizona summer and frost-sensitive plants during the chilly winter nights. 

They already have a healthy garden of tomatoes, peppers, squash, eggplants, herbs, and the like:

dcp_2475

The amount of work Fred and Kathy have done themselves represents savings in the tens of thousands of dollars. I can’t imagine what it would cost to have even one of those weather-resistant, termite-resistant metal structures built. An outdoor kitchen? I’ve never asked, because I can’t afford it. Outdoor fireplace? Doesn’t compute.

Kathy says that, except for the metalwork and the flagstone installation, most of the projects were not difficult to build. I think, though, that success with these projects requires meticulous care, knowledge of building codes, and understanding of how to design block and metal structures that will withstand the test of time. Clearly it’s not impossible to acquire these skills. The result is pretty amazing.