Backyard Gardens

We live in southern Arizona, Oro Valley to be exact, and have tried for several years to grow vegetables of different types with less than overwhelming results. All of our previous attempts have been in pots and mostly tomatoes and herbs. With the heat in southern Arizona trying to keep the pots well irrigated was a challenge without rigging up a permanent watering system which meant I would have to do some serious digging and plumbing to put that in place. This was not something I wanted to do.


So over Christmas and New Year's holiday of 2009/2010 I built a 4'x8' wooden garden box from plans I got from Sunset magazine. The design is pretty simple and easy to build. The box is made up of six 2"x6"x8' boards stacked on top of each other. The 8' sides of the box have two 8' boards and the 4' sides have one 8' board cut in half. The corners are made up of 4"x4" posts cut into 2' lengths. The 2"x6" boards are bolted onto the 4"x4"s and bingo bango you've got a 4'x8' garden box. The boxes hold about 1 yard of soil which I got from a local material supply yard.


After building the first box and putting it into place I decided to change the design by doubling the height of the box from two lengths of boards to four. The higher box is easier to work in since you don't have to bend over as far. I use a five gallon paint bucket as my working stool when necessary and the revised height is better.


As I mentioned, I didn't want to go to the trouble of installing a permanent automatic watering system for a couple of reasons. One reason is that the nearest water source is too far away from the garden box so a new hose bib would have to be installed which would require more work than I wanted to do at this point. The other reasons have mostly to do with general laziness. So I ginned up a poor man's system by setting up a battery operated timer on the closest hose bib and running a regular garden hose from the hose bib to the garden box. I ran the hose up the side of the garden box and attached a really cool sprinkler called the NoodleHead which I bought at the L.A. County Fair in September 2009. This sprinkler head has a bunch of short black tubes like the ones used for drip irrigation which you can bend to fit any watering pattern you may have. A really cool item, check them out on their website.


So, I've got the box and the watering system set up ready to go all I needed was soil. I had two choices, one was to buy a bunch of bags of soil from Home Depot or go to my favorite material supply yard, Bob's Materials, and buy what I figured would be about two yards of soil to fill up the two foot high box. The bags of soil would cost too much so I went with the loose soil from Bob's. I have a 1998 Nissan Frontier pickup and love it for just this kind of job. One yard of soil costs only $33 and fits perfectly in the bed of the pickup. Of course I look like a low-rider with my back end dropped pretty low but I can mosey on home just fine. Since the closest I can get to the backyard is the street out front I am left with hauling the soil from the truck to the garden box by wheelbarrow. I rigged up a ramp with a spare 2"x6" board and a few bricks so dumping the soil into the box was pretty easy once you got the hang of hitting the ramp and getting under the wheelbarrow handles to dump. With my son Tommy's help we had the first yard of soil offloaded in about 30 minutes and back to Bob's we went.


I amended the soil with some all purpose vegetable fertilizer and watered the soil really well and let the soil settle for a week. The one box yielded a great crop of lettuce over the winter along with broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, radishes, spinach and dill. Success!


So in early spring I added another box and also prepared a corner of our yard for some zucchini and melons. For the summer, in one box (picture on the left) we planted three tomatoes, a japenese eggplant, two sweet basils and a thyme. In the second box (pictured below) we planted three tomatillos, an eggplant, a yellow chili, an Anaheim chili, a rosemary and peppermint. In the corner spot, not in a box, we planted two kinds of zucchini and some sort of melon that we lost track of.




We've got a few lessons learned from this summer's plantings.

• The conical tomato cages are not big enough if you're planting in something other than a pot, I'm going to create my own next year.
• One tomatillo plant would have been plenty for a whole 4'x8' box, they really get big and spread like a bush.
• We really don't like eggplant all that much.
• Squash plants make you itch when you harvest them, long sleeves and gloves are recommended.
• Giving away homegrown veggies is a great way to spend time with neighbors.

So, we're in early October and it's getting close to the time to plant winter stuff. Our zucchini is just about done as is one of the two remaining tomatoes. We have no idea how long the tomatillos will continue so we'll have to wait and see. The basil will last through Thanksgiving at least depending how quickly its get cold here in the desert.

As we plant our winter veggies I'll give an update.