Digging a forest garden

In between the Palm Sunday activities, the weather is wonderful and my springtime gardening plans crystalize. I will plant heirloom (non-red) tomatoes, so my homemade pasta sauce will be bright and tasty! My Bell and New Mexican peppers grew well last year, and my experimental tepary bean crop was fantastically good. My hope is to extend organic annuals such as these to include perennial food crops in an edible forest ecology.  
The concept that I am aiming for is that of edible forest gardens, with overstories, understories, shrubs, herbs, groundcovers, all mutually supporting. A familiar example on a small scale are the Native American "Three Sisters" - corn to provide scaffolding, beans to enrich the soil, and squash to shade the roots and crowd out weeds.  A fourth sister Cleome serrulata  "Rocky Mountain bee-plant" attracts bees to pollenate all the blossoms and itself provide edible leaves, flowers, seeds, and roots.

Besides these traditional crops, I will try native Opuntia ellisiana "spineless prickly pear", 
Cnidoscolus chayamansa "tree spinach" or "chaya",  and Moringa oleifera "moringa" or "drumstick tree".  
I plan to expand the raised bed area with minimal disturbance to the existing plantings and the soil.  Extending two adjacent square plots along their common sides and excavating the space between them would create  a  4' x 12' raised bed with an existing Nandina ("Heavenly Bamboo") in the middle sharing space with the catnip, mints and other herbs.  Further excavating a second row would create a  4' x 8' raised bed with a 2' wide path between the two rows for access. 
A stronger digging shovel, a pinch point bar, soil tester and a wheelbarrow and we have begun!  

Sowing wildflowers

Happy Spring Equinox! A week ago, spring definitely came bursting in as the frosts vanished as abruptly as they had come. Yellow flowers suddenly appeared on a shrub against a east-facing wall, while its fellow on a south-facing wall was still only dried twigs. Lantana along a west-facing wall was re-sprouting, while the standalone ones were frost-damaged twigs. The microclimates at my place were becoming quite evident! A new carpet of mysterious sprouts had appeared in the parsley-scallion patch - what could they be? Tombstone roses were sending out new shoots while the Trees for Tucson trees were clearly alive but had neither leaf buds nor leaves.

Today, the Desert Willows from Trees from Tucson are sprouting green at their base.  I aerated their soil and put wire fencing around the trunks to guard against nibbling rabbits. The carpet of mysterious sprouts are identifying themselves as the children of the Vanilla Ice sunflowers planted last fall and permitted to self-seed. They are truly everywhere, poking out from the veggies plot, between the landscaping pebbles and somehow even transported over the gate into the front yard (by wind or shoes, I imagine).  Perhaps they can be transplanted to yet other nooks. 

As Angelina and I hiked along the wash this afternoon, I looked at all the native plants with new eyes.  What grows is adapted to its location; what doesn't should be planted elsewhere.  If not in full sun, then partial sun or shade.  Later, following the advice of my gardening books, I excavated berms and water channels on the southwest side of the house and broadcast wildflower seeds over the area.  Like the farmer who sowed his seed, I'll watch to see what comes up from this. I am struck by the parallels between the parable of the farmer and the sustainable gardening books I've been reading over the last year or two: "Sowing Seeds in the Desert", "Gaia's Garden", "Desert or Paradise". There's the same awareness of earth, sun and water in Biblical times as now, everywhere over the globe. 

Gardening Practice

Jim and I had moved to Arizona from Santa Barbara, a place where outdoor ficus could grow three stories tall, cutting off the light to the upstairs bedrooms, and front yard poinsettias grew ten feet tall, blooming their heads off in season or out.  Coming from this experience, we planted trumpet vines, landinas,  citrus trees, and various ground covers to round out the prickly pear, agaves, mesquite, palo verde and saguaro on our property. They initially did well, although in no way shooting up as explosively as in Central Coast California. We thought we would learn from our gardening mistakes exactly which plants worked best and where.
That first summer, I planted tomatoes and vincas in a patch of yard that I commandeered. The vincas sprouted bright light blossoms in profusion.  The tomatoes grew well, flowered, fruited.  Surprisingly, no worms found the tomato plants, but every other garden pest did. I built wire cages with progressively smaller mesh fencing, until I could no longer reach in to harvest my tomatoes; but alas, the snakes had no problem at all.  The second summer, I planted in earthen pots, and raised thusly above the ground, the tomatoes did fine. The third summer, I was pre-occupied with the community garden for our church pantry, and experiments with local seeds in my garden pots. Did you know that carrots when transplanted put their energy into developing incredible Rip-van-Winkle-class beards! But broccoli plants gone to seed make a beautiful arrangement.

The winter of 2012-2013, has been experiencing some abnormally cold nights with hard freezes. The first spell lasting three or four nights in succession took me by surprise. I did not realize that the late fruiting tomatoes would be transformed into ice cubes even when the plants themselves were covered up. The citruses were next. They had never recovered from the first frost three winters ago, the new foliage that came each spring and summer couldn't make up the losses from the freeze. This despite placing yard lights under the frost covers and large rocks to radiate heat captured during the day. The lemon tree fared a bit better, so perhaps it was its location in the windiest part of the backyard that doomed the orange tree.  Between wintertime frosts and summertime grasshoppers and orange dog caterpillars, what's a citrus to do?  In the meantime the almond is flowering and demanding to be put into the ground. Its fragrance is heady and we will plant it once spring is officially here.