Excessive Heat Wave

I was nervous about going on a two week vacation and leaving my precious plants to be hand watered by a kind neighbor during the hottest month of the year. Our cisterns and water barrels had long since run out of rainwater. In preparation for the trip, I started deep watering all the plants a few days ahead.  Dan had read that when the temperture is over 80 degrees that plants can't transpire, so they don't take in water. Since we don't have a drip system, I had to wait until it cooled off in the evening or early morning. I used that time to gather my Zero Waste assessories for our road trip.

For our deep watering we use a method recommended by a local arborist. Dan had drilled two small holes in five gallon buckets.  We use three buckets of water on each of our three jujube trees. It takes 20 minutes for each bucket to drain. Luckily, we have three buckets or I would have been there all night. I did that same process with our moringa, pomegranate, fig, and curry plants. The day before we left, I even watered our cactus garden, agaves, and an acacia that hadn't started to leaf yet. On the night before we left, I used the hose to slow water our Mexican Honeysuckle that usually get our sink rinse water everyday.

Meanwhile, I took pictures of our plants to include in the directions for our neighbor (which included filling the bird bath.) I didn't get much sleep that night worrying about my plants and all that water!  I guess you can call me a parachute plant parent. And I still had to plant my sweet potato slip in the morning! 

After a lovely family vacation, I finally got the nerve to text our neighbor to see how things were doing. She said the plants were doing well. She enjoyed two tasty cherry tomatos. Whew! 

When we got home three days later, I was shocked to find that Tucson was under an excessive heat warning! 

One of the tomato plants was looking pretty sad (despite having several tomatoes on it.) Our mint plant that was struggling before the trip was now dead along with some tomato volunteers. (Mint never makes it in our yard... Go figure...) Some of the leaves on our sunchokes were a little crispy.  Oddly, our moringa had flowers. Usually they get flowers after they are really big. And one of them was really struggling.

After 12 hours on the road, I stayed up late watering my emaciated plants. 

I was actually surprised to find that the sweet potato plant was flourishing with new leaves (in the compost under the bird netting cage.)

And the curry and some of the tomatoes were doing just fine. Thanks to my kind neighbor! Of course our native plants were doing great. The acacia now has leaves, and the mesquite has lots of pods. I was surprised to see how well the jujubes were doing. All three have lots of little fruit! Maybe those shiny leaves make it durable?  

Since I got home I've been kind of sleep deprived, staying up late and getting up early trying to water the plants in my garden before it reaches 80 degrees.  It was 78 degrees at 5:30 this morning! When am I supposed to water them?!! We haven't even washed our dirty clothes from the trip yet because the greywater irrigates the fig and pomegranate and we don't want to waste that water if they aren't taking it in. 

When I decided to write this blog, I figured I'd reach out to some gardening experts on Facebook.  

I heard that plants can't take in water after the temperature reaches 80 degrees. With this extreme heat way into the night, how are you watering your plants? Also, are there some plants (heritage figs and pomegranate or native trees maybe) that have adapted to take in water after 80 degrees?

Jared Kitty Katt McKinley from Spade Foot Nursury gave the best reply: 

That is an overstatement. And it’s a dangerous one because it leads people to making bad choices. One must water plants when it’s hot and dry. Plants most certainly take in water above 80°. It’s kind of ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Especially native plants that evolved with monsoon. Sometimes institutions take research done in other places and extrapolate. I would pay that advice no heed as it really doesn’t apply to our climate. Plants cool themselves off by taking in water and letting the water evaporate from their leaves. If they weren’t taking in water after 80° they would die. One can always expect some wilting and visual struggle in some plants, particularly new plants in summer. But as someone who has started countless plants in summer, I’m here to tell you that so long as you water consistently and correctly, your plant (given it’s appropriate for our climate and properly planted) will make it. For whatever it’s worth, I think it’s best to water in the morning in summer if only because you don’t want a plant to spend it’s driest hours during a hot part of the day.

Thanks, Jared! So what did I learn from all this?  That I should check with our local desert plant experts before getting sleep deprived. I think it's best to water early in the morning or late at night so the water doesn't all evaporate.  We need to get those other two cisterns installed before the big monsoon rains start! And hook up a string of clay ollas to them so they can be self watering! I'm so grateful to have native mesquites and drought adapted jujubes that do great on just the water that sinks into their catchment basins - and palo verde volunteers that shade our little garden.  

I plan to finally get a good nights sleep... well... as soon as I water the moringas. 

Larger considerations:

Planning for Urban Heat Resilience

PAS REPORT 600 BY LADD KEITH, SARA MEEROW

UPDATE on Spring Garden in Desert Food Forest

In my April 6th blog I wrote about my little experiments of growing a vegetable garden amongst my desert plants at strategic spots around the front yard.  Here are the results of those experiments and what I learned from them. 

I planted one of the tomato plants in a hole left from pulling out a dead milkweed. The soil around the roots looked really good so I thought the tomato would do well out there in the sun. I protected it from lizards and squirrels with a plant cage.  As you can see, this tomato plant did great. I was delighted when it got flowers. But I wasn't sure if it was a self-pollinating tomato, so I took the cage off of it for a few days.  

To be honest the plant cage was a little bit of a pain. I had to remove the gravel I had built up around the cage to keep out the pesky lizards. And it was difficult getting the spike that held the cage down back into the hard ground. One day I spotted some termites in the woodchip mulch dangerously close to the tomato plant, so I had to remove the cage to pull the mulch back. Another time I had to remove it to pull off some low branches that were getting brown from touching the ground. But all in all I'd say it was worth it. Look at all those tomatoes that the squirrels can't get! 

opening the cage

The next experiment wasn't as successful. I wanted to see how our tomato plant would do in the mesquite guild. I was hoping the tomato plant would benefit from the nitrogen the bean tree fixed in the ground. I don't know if there was too much shade, mulch or the hard ground that kept the plant from thriving, because I damaged the trunk when I pulled off a low hanging leaf. 😒

Next are the Jerusalem artichokes (also known as sunchokes). I hand water all of my garden to control how much water I use. I was concerned about how much water I used to get these started.  I watered them several times a day to keep the bulbs moist as recommend.  It was really good for soil. Check out the mushrooms growing there! 

But all the new watering used up the rainwater in my cisterns. Once they were established I cut back the water to once a day.  They seem to be alright with it. I think the living purslane mulch helps retain the water.  I heard that plants don't take in water above 80 degrees. So I try to water them in the morning just after 8 a.m. (Now that it is getting hotter, it's more like 7 a.m.) 

Jerusalem artichokes now hitting the top of the cage 

Unfortunately, I didn't get directions on the sunchokes before planting them. I found out later that they would crowd out any other plant nearby. So when they got bigger, I removed the tomato I planted under the same cage.  I dug the hole in the new spot first, then I carefully dug around the roots of the tomato plant and grabbed some of the surrounding soil to plant with it.  

Might have been better not to do this during the heat of the day... It was looking really sad. I even had to prop up the wilty branches with some sticks.  I thought it might be a goner. 

But I watered it and concocted a shade contraption for it.

I went ahead and harvested some purslane for lunch while the sunchokes were uncovered.  

The tomato plant is thriving on the south facing wall that gets plenty of sun and occasional shade from the toilet planter (don't ask... lol)  I try to water the tomatoes at the same time everyday at 8 a.m. before it gets too hot.  

Well, that was a fun and mostly successful experiment!  I learned a lot and didn't kill most of my plants. 

Growing our Edible Forest

We have a dream of transforming our previously gravel yard into a desert oasis with an edible forest and native pollinators irrigated with rainwater.  We have a long way to go. Just making our landscape as water efficient and sustainable as possible is an experimental process.

It all started by observing where our water was puddling during our magnificent monsoons. First, we made some small changes such as removing a few bricks at the end of the patio to allow it to drain into our Mexican Honeysuckle. And it worked beautifully! No more mosquito breeding pool! And our Mexican Honeysuckle perked right up!

That success led to other simple adaptations like using the gutters to direct roof water into our kitchen garden.  Our kitchen garden is a little experiment in growing food using just what the desert provides to naturally nourish the soil (like compost and palo verde mulch.)  It took 3 gallons of water a day for a few herbs and a couple of tomato plants. So we started supplementing that with kitchen rinse water. Ever the optimist, Dan installed a couple of water barrels to collect more rainwater.  All for a tomato!

Maybe we'll get a bigger reward for our efforts in edible native plants...

Dan dug up all the gravel in the front yard so the rainwater would sink into the ground instead of flowing out to the street to evaporate. (We still need to add some organic mulch. It works with the roots of native grasses to form a sponge that allows the rainwater to seep into the ground and hold the moisture longer.  This is what Brad Lancaster calls "planting the rain.") We would use that water to irrigate an edible forest of native plants:  broadleaf hackberry. sweet acacia (behind ocotillo), wolf berry (in basin), desert hackberry (in foreground), and velvet mesquite. Don't know how much human food we'll get from them, but they are great pollinators. We watered them until they were established and then waited for the rain. And waited... Would it ever rain?

We needed something really drought tolerant that we could eat, so we decided to plant moringa in our street side basin. Moringa leaves, flowers, and pods are all edible and highly nutritious - and not just for wildlife. We sowed the moringa seeds in June so they would be well established by monsoon season. It took about a gallon of water a day to get them started until the monsoon rains finally took over. The incredible thing is that the moringa continued to grow after the monsoons ended even though we weren't watering them! They still have flowers and pods! Gonga!

Now we're watching to see what they do in the first frost.

In our backyard, we planted another edible forest of Kino fig and pomegranate trees. (See pic at top of page.)  We chose these heritage trees because they have adapted to the desert.  Twice a week we slow watered them using a five gallon bucket with two small holes. Dan finally found the time to dig out a catchment basin around the fruit trees and to install a laundry to landscape system to irrigate them. "Celebrate good times! Oh, yeah!"  He still needs to shape it a bit and fill it up with organic mulch. (The mulch holds the moisture and releases nutrients as it breaks down.) He managed to get it installed just in time for the winter rains!

What's next? It's back to shaping the front yard basin and filling it with a truck load of mulch. There's so much more we want to do when we have the time and money. A chicken coop by the big garden... Our friendly neighbor has offered to let us connect a cistern to the gutter on his roof to water our that garden! It's all a process!

Gotta love the process!

Morning Solace

Woke up to the smell of rain this morning. Or so I thought. Outside I found the ground bone dry. Still… it smelled like hope to me. And I need a little hope these days.

Lately I’m not getting up as many blogs as I would like. Too many days have gotten away from me as I got sucked into the “black void” of following the damaging acts of our government for Desktop Activist Tucson. With all that is going on in the world, it’s hard to find time or the rationale for the more joyful pursuits like blogging or writing my screenplay.

My one solace is tending our little garden and watching what we planted grow.  It gives me a chance to watch the butterflies and bees (there still are some!) pollinating our moringas, listen to the sound of birds singing and children at play.  Or, like Pooh above, just bask in the morning sun and autumn breezes. Ahh…Autumn. 

I need that. It’s been a long, hard summer.

We tried an experiment. Inspired by the rich natural soil in the alleyway (nourished by decomposing weeds and some native trees), we decided to plant a 3 Sisters Garden with drought-tolerant heritage seeds. The object was to see how our garden would fare on just our monsoon rain and some palo verde mulch to hold in the moisture.

Unlike last year, we actually got some nice monsoon showers this summer. Every morning I happily recorded the growth in our heritage garden. While the Tohono O’odham 60 Day Corn didn’t “grow as high as an elephant’s eye,” it did grow up past my knee. It even started to sprout some seeds.

Then...the rains stopped. And it got scorching hot. It was unseasonably hot and dry. 

 In two weeks it looked like this...

I was completely disheartened when someone or something stomped through our garden knocking down the corn. 

But amidst the bent, dried stalks, there were a few patches of green - signs of life in the desert!  The cowpea plants we got from our local seed library had survived! A friendly gardener encouraged me, “I think it’s time you watered them. They deserve it for hanging in there. They are survivors.”

So I started lugging my watering can out behind the back fence to water them. Those sun scorched, insect ravaged plants sprouted new leaves and then I spotted - the first white flower!

It was wonderful to see something growing amongst all the devastation. (OK. I’m getting a little dramatic here.) But this was just the reminder that I needed to make more of an effort to find a balance in my life - between fighting environment assaults and doing things that enrich my soul. I finally found the heart to work on my love project again. 

Grateful to be catching a little morning solace, I breathe in the autumn breeze and survey my garden. In the kitchen garden, a tomato is showing its autumn colors. As I fill the clay olla by the cherry tomato plant bees buzz overhead - a welcome sign that the tiny yellow flowers will be pollinated. Closer inspection uncovers two new tomatoes!  A glimpse of hope. 

Another benefit of working in the garden:

Antidepressant Microbes In Soil: How Dirt Makes You Happy