Winter garden y-cumin’ in!

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.