One Month's Growth

Our Desert Garden is now at a little less than one month's growth and today we harvested our first cherry tomato. It looks as though we should have a green bell pepper within another week or so. We also have the start of our first beef steak tomato. The corn is a good 16 inches tall as well! We can also see the beginnings of our squash and the peas are starting to really come along. I feel it won't be too long before we are eating something from the garden almost every day! (click pictures to enlarge)

Below Right:
Garden 05/06/2009
Below Right:
Our first cherry tomato!

Finished and Planted

Now we are finally finished with the plant selection, the layout, the planting and the irrigation setup. It remains to see what ends up growing. The initial expenditures have been quite a bit more than originally planned and, depending on the size of the crop, could end up costing about $2.00 a bite! Ha!
We had .4 inches of rain in the past 24 hours on our freshly planted garden and are really hoping it didn't sustain any substantial damage from the soaking!

Starting to Plant

Getting plants readyGardening makes me tired!
Planting tomato plants
More preperations

Now we finally have our garden ready and can begin planting! The irrigation system seems to work as it is supposed to and we have decided what we want to plant in our desert garden.

Starting our garden

It would seem that today is the start day for our new desert garden. I have more than a little apprehension for this undertaking since, being a from the Midwest, Indiana to be exact, I haven't much of any idea how gardening works in the Sonoran desert.

We have decided on the spot for our little garden and selected an area of approximately 15 by 25 feet. Our house shades it from the hot, late afternoon sun and it would seem to get about 6-7 hours of direct sunlight.

Today we are going to purchase a garden tiller. We have decided on an electric model as our area is small and I don't really like having to deal with the noise and mess of a gasoline model either. Hopefully it will be powerful enough to turn our somewhat sandy soil and mix in the fertilizer we will pick up at the same time.

Still have to decide on watering system and narrow down what crops we're going to try at the same time. More on that later.