Living Garden

In my desert it doesn't take long for the August's gardening dead zone to pass right by. If I blink, or don't want to sweat (so I stay inside), I miss the window for planting fall plants, but this year I didn't do either. I have been busy pushing seeds into the ground for weeks now, and already my work is starting to show both in my chipped and peeling fingernails and in the starts bursting out of the earth. The first collage was taken from our landscape that we've finally started!! It only took about 5 years, but now we have an amazing array of color in our front courtyard. It reminds us of Hawaii with plumeria and hibiscus, fig and snail vine, and other tropical flora.

These next pictures are of my basil/herb garden and vegetable garden. This year I have all the basil I want, FINALLY. I planted about 60 seeds this year. And 8 basil plants are huge, 10 are medium, and there's a pot of decent ones (that I hope to move into the kitchen when it gets cold outside). We have pesto daily and I'm ready to start drying some basil for winter. Gardening is so rewarding when it works out how I dream it will:). The tomato plants are coming back to life after the blazing heat of July and August. There are broccoli, cucmbers, armenian cucumbers, (cantalope-I couldn't bring myself to pull all of them out), chard, leeks, green onions, garlic, arugula, a variety of lettuce, cilantro (I want to make cilantro pesto next:)), carrots, and a few other things breaching the surface of the soil now. We were blessed with rain almost daily for a week after I got the majority of my fall seeds into the ground! That was a huge blessing! We won't get ANY sweet potatoes this year. We'll definitely miss that harvest, it was such a treasure hunt for us! The chickens were ruthless in the garden this year and dug up every evidence of sweet potato vine they could find. We'll have to try again next year.

We have enough chickens now, which give us enough eggs that we don't have to buy them any more:). I don't really know how many years it has been for us to get to this point. But it sure is nice to have all my eggs coming from my own backyard, not to mention the chicken manure fertilizer that the grape vines and apple trees love.