This time last year the garden was still in pots in my yard waiting for better weather, all the while being abused by worse weather. Last year we went from too cool to plant to too hot. When we did finally plant the vegetables we had to rig make-shift shade cloth, but even with that it was too hot.
This year we have reasonable temperatures; we’re just lacking rain. I don’t think the Arizona summer monsoons are reliable for another month or so, so I guess our lack of rain is to be expected. However, because of how dry everything is we are seeing unusual activity in the garden. Birds ate every single cherry we had right off the trees. While the birds usually eat some of them, they generally wait until they are ripe and leave us most of them. Not this year, they ate the cherries well before they were ripe and left us nothing but cherry pits attached to the trees. We also have a critter digging up some of the irrigation lines looking for water. It has not chewed through the line yet and hopefully it won’t.
On the plus side, most of the plants are doing great. We have tomatoes ripening already – the earliest ever for us, I have picked a few eggplant, and rhubarb we transplanted last fall did a lot better than expected. All of the plants that need planting are planted so now I just have to bring up the plants that travel back and forth every year and live in pots, the peppers and some herbs. Most of those came up this weekend so we are ready for summer. And that means waiting and monitoring until the rush of full-blown harvests.
Smoketree Cellars 