New Year, new garden. Time to crank out those January gardening tasks!

As it turns out, the seasons here are quite busy September/November and January/February. I learned the hard way last year that if you don’t pretty much finish your spring and summer gardening to-dos by about Valentine’s Day, your goose is cooked. Or rather, your garden is cooked, because it hasn’t been established enough by the time the 100 degree weather is upon us.

The New Year is here and I found some time in my schedule to check off some gardening stuff. Of course I just want to jump right to the fun stuff, like planting plants! But first, a little planning and preparing the garden beds.

The planning part took some doing but ultimately I’m going with a few layered annual garden beds with sunflowers, zinnias, snapdragons, California poppies, and nasturtiums amongst my aloe and little John shrubs. My mother-in-law generously shared her seeds with me of her successful plants in Washington state and I wanted to add snapdragons to the mix because I know that’s something that grows well here. Well, you know what they say about best laid plan(t)s…

As for prepping the garden beds, the book I’m consulting says to mix some compost or mulch with manure fertilizer and rake that evenly into the ground. Well, I had a bucket of compost from the city on hand already, as well as some mulch I hadn’t used up. There is a big storm in the forecast for tomorrow but I’m going to at least get the beds prepped and ready to go. Want to know how I took 3 trips to the hardware store in one day and ended up with 33 snapdragons and a bunch of other plants and seed packets, a new gardening tool, some lawn, garden and hibiscus fertilizers, strawberry starts and 2 pots, and exactly zero plants or seeds planted? Read on…

Before I start this story, a word on fertilizer – I have never fertilized my houseplants or vegetables. I decided my crops will do a whole lot better this year if I follow directions and feed my plants as well as water them. I’m not sure what my fertilizer aversion is about. Perhaps it’s the smell or low confidence that I will get the mixture right. I guess I believe I’ll put too much and it will burn my plants. Meanwhile, they’re not growing to full potential and let’s face it, in the desert these green living things need a boost. So part of my new year is resolving to fertilize my plants and get over trying something new in the process.

So I dropped my son off at preschool today and had a few hours to kill as well as some errands to run. Well, a lot of the shops in my town don’t open until 10 or 10:30, and often times at the hour I have downtime I’ll look around and the only thing open is Target or Home Depot. If I have my pick Home Depot wins every time – it smells better and the stuff inside is way more interesting. Besides, a stay at home mom browsing at Target is such a cliche. Anyhow, I found some fertilizer over at the Home Depot. The price was right – at $5 I really can’t complain. I examined the dusty container and it’s made with fish oil and it’s some sort of concentrated liquid. As long as it doesn’t spill in the car that’s great. I figure I can mix it up into my compost and mulch, then mix that into my soil. As dedicated as I am to my garden, I’m not all about the manure yet. I used the opportunity to look over the seed packets and settled on some larkspur. I was really looking for some hollyhocks because I heard those do well here but then I saw someone had recently purchased all the larkspur, at least that is what it looked like from the stock as there were only 3 packets left, so I thought what the hey, we will try them. I found some strawberry starts too so I was ready to check that off my January task list and spend the rest of the day gardening. My total came to about $30. I joked with the cashier that’s $30 to feed the birds!

I got my other errands done and found myself in that weird quandary of either turning back home just to immediately leave to go pick up my son, or go find someplace to loiter for a half hour or so. Lowe’s seemed like the most logical place to loiter in this situation so I mosied around and bought a planter box for the strawberries, another pot for my Chinese money plant I need to repot, 30 snapdragon plants, and some hibiscus fertilizer. I couldn’t just loiter around without buying anything now could I? That would be rude.

Family obligations took me away from my purpose. I threw some stew makings in the crockpot and it was late afternoon by the time I got back to my garden. By my calculation I had 3 hours of daylight left. No matter, I would dilute the fertilizer, mix it with compost and mulch, mix that into the soil and be good to go to plant my seeds. Easy-peasy.

So I scrutinized my fertilizer and determined it was 2 tablespoons to 1 gallon of water. I had a 4 gallon bucket so I opened the container (pee-yew) and eyeballed it with the fishy stuff, and then I turned my hose on inside the bucket. Slop immediately sprayed into the air, splashing drops of the fishy substance onto my face. Whoops.

That task done, it was now time to mix it into the compost and mulch I had on hand. I poured half of my compost bucket into another bucket, and then poured half the mulch on top of each. Then poured half the diluted fertilizer over the two buckets to make a sort of slurry. The only thing that remained was to dump it out onto the beds and start mixing. Well, when I did that, the sludge stayed at the bottom of the bucket and the only thing for it was to scoop it out with my hands. My gloves aren’t waterproof so not only was my face fishy, I now had stinky wet hands too. Oh well, time to rake it into the soil.

After contemplating which tool in my arsenal I was going to use for this task, I settled on a double sided hoe/pickaxe. Consulting Google now, it’s actually a two prong weeder hoe. In my naivety I believed the weeder side was for making two furrows into the ground for planting seeds. Well, I started on this task and discovered the ground was compacted solid. We had a bunch of wind storms over the summer and with it came what looks and feels like dry silt and a lot of it. I still can’t seem to get rid of it on my doorstep and all over my decorative rock. The rains we had after that must have made it solid on top of the sandy soil because when I hacked into it now, I found that the soil just crumbled off into big clumps. Then I had to chop at the big clumps to get workable soil.

And that’s when my hoe broke. The desert is pretty hard on wood and that’s why when it came time to buy a patio set I bought an aluminum one. So this hoe wouldn’t stay on the handle, and anytime I tried to twist the metal hoe back in, the wood just crumbled.

Back to the Home Depot I went, disheveled and smelling of fish I’m sure. I asked someone where to find the gardening tools and asked which kind of tool to use to break up compacted ground. He pointed to a 3-prong hand rake. I stubbornly insisted on a tool like my old one, with a longer handle so I could work standing up. They were out of those, as it seems everyone else has the same idea right now. He again directed me to the hand rake, which I already own and comes with any standard hand trowel set. No no, I needed something larger and didn’t want to be on my hands and knees for this task. Not even a week into the new year and I was already not listening to those wiser than me! I settled on a stiff rake about a foot across. I also got 3 more snapdragons because I liked the color, a mum-like plant that I hope will serve as a pollinator for my tomatoes, a gardenia, a handheld spreader, and I found some lawn fertilizer on sale so at that price why not buy two?

I was losing daylight, fast. I quickly discovered this was going to be a 2-day project. There would be no planting of plants today. Good thing I had dinner going in the crockpot already. I started raking in the sludgy fishy mixture with my new tool and lo and behold it was difficult to use and wasn’t real effective against compacted silty sand. Feeling silly, I reached for my old 3 prong hand tool and knee pads and began methodically beating on the soil. By golly, that Home Depot employee had the right idea, as this approach worked! And, being close to the soil I discovered some weeds and got rid of those, and got all the benefits of having one’s nose close to the soil.

I know it’s the wrong season to do this but some of the aloe fronds were really in my way. I grabbed ahold of even the brown ones and they wouldn’t budge, so I hacked away at it with my hand trowel. It drained so much sappy looking substance from the plant that I thought it would deflate. It didn’t. Just then my husband must have checked the crockpot, as a not too appetizing beef odor filled the air. Pee-yew! I hoped my dinner once cooked would be better than what I was smelling.

I kept working away at the soil, hacking aloes sparingly, until dark. When I finished I gathered my supplies and aloe fronds to clean up and that’s when I realized that disgusting beefy smell was coming from the aloes and not my house. Yuck!! Days later and I still can smell it in my nose. Who knew they stank so bad? I thought the ones in my yard were medicinal and that in a pinch I could use them on a burn. There’s no way I’m doing that after this discovery! These aloes are absolutely giant and really need to be divided at the first opportunity but I’m waiting to see which ones bloom again this spring. They shoot out a giant stalk as tall as I am with yellow blooms that attract the hummingbirds.

After dinner, it was dark but the storm was coming. I resolved to fertilize my lawn before the rains hit and then be done with it. As I checked the garage for a headlamp to use, I saw the same hand spreader I just purchased earlier in the day in my husband’s cabinet. I smiled to myself, thinking about how much we are two peas in a pod. I smiled again, realizing this meant yet another trip to the hardware store to return the new one, and knowing without a doubt I would be buying some more plants!

Here’s what I’m doing this month

I’m using a month by month gardening book and taking notes! These are the tasks I’m doing this month:

• Buy and plant spring-flowering annuals
• Sow seeds of nasturtium and California Poppy
• Fertilize annuals late in the month with a high phosphorus and low nitrogen fertilizer
• Make a note in my planner to chill tulip and hyacinth bulbs around Halloween
• Get cacti for my goat and turtle planters
• Plant strawberries
• Fertilize lawn and mow at 2 inches
• Plant any shrubs this month
• Plant transplants and seeds of herbs and veggies of the cole variety

Later, I added:

• Weed front landscaping
• Take care of emu bush
• Get seeds from snapdragons
• Repot Chinese money plant

Whew, there’s a lot to do!

My garden had some ups and downs this year! Read on for a list of what I learned.

• Pay attention to when it’s a good time to plant. Planting a few weeks later might be too late. I planted tomatoes way too late in the spring. If I had planted them on time I think I would have gotten more fruit.
• Likewise, pay attention to where you’re planting it in relationship to what kind of sun is in that area and proximity to other plants that might overshadow it. I accidentally planted cool season tomatoes in front of cilantro and chives, and as a result my herbs are getting no sun. And I planted my radishes and carrots on top of each other so now the radishes are choking out the carrots. Whoops.
• I learned which areas of my yard get sun, shade, and wind. There was no other way to learn this except by trial and error. This was probably the hardest lesson learned and I’m still discovering my own microclimates.
• Full sun doesn’t always mean full desert sun. A lot of nursery plants are labeled full sun for other parts of the country, not Zone 9b. Meanwhile, plants grown for food actually do need full sun for the majority of the day. I chose not to listen to this and my vegetables didn’t do all that well.
• Drought tolerant, native plants are best. Tropical plants are the most difficult here, and even cacti can expire easily. Virtually all of the plants we planted when we bought the house have died, as we didn’t do enough research first on what grows well here.
• Thinning is necessary and easy with a pair of scissors, though it may be a little sad and feel ruthless and counterproductive to complete this task.
• On the subject of being ruthless, as my father-in-law says, if you don’t like it yank it out and plant a new one. This is a whole different way of thinking for me, as previously I believed fervently in hurt no living thing. Except spiders setting up shop in my home – those can die.
• Summer gardening is a whole different ballgame than the growing and planting season that starts in the fall. And what a hard summer season this was! After hearing from master gardeners who also struggled with this past summer’s heat and winds, I don’t feel so bad about my paltry efforts.
• Attend plant sales early and ask the people who have been doing this a long time for tips. Trust me, all the good stuff will be gone if you sleep on this. Take advantage of free gardening seminars specific to the area.
• I had no idea the garden could be so full of drama – the highs of seeing those little green shoots pop up and the extreme lows of seeing a wind damaged or pest-ridden garden after all that work. It’s best and fun to check on it every day to see what’s going on in the garden!

I’ll be the first to admit I still have no idea what I am doing. It’s all an experiment!

The biggest challenge that I’m still figuring out is what to plant in the raised garden beds my husband built for me on the east side of the house. So far we’ve tried:

• Tomatoes (successful-ish)
• Corn
• Beans
• Sweet peas
• Lettuce (somewhat successful – slow growing and then something ate it)
• Spinach
• Sunflowers
• Zinnias
• Pumpkins
• Calendula (somewhat successful – a volunteer plant appeared after the last one died out)
• Basil
• Marigolds

Anyway, nothing seems to be growing well there in spite of those fabulous raised beds! My thought is to keep experimenting and planting there to find out what likes to grow there.

Here’s to a great gardening season in 2023!