Arizona Fall Garden Tour: What I’m Planting Now

It's planting time here in the low desert. I'm not finished yet but I'll show you my progress, my rainwater setup, and how I'm getting everything ready for my favorite growing season here in the low desert. You won't believe all of the citrus roots I pulled out of one bed and I can't wait to show you my new sweet potato curing setup. Let's start in the side yard. This is a site I love to see. My rain barrel is filled to the tippity top so now I get to use rain water to water in all of my new seeds and seedlings. To do that I have to switch from the city water to this rain barrel. I turn off the valve turning off the city water and then I turn on the pump that's inside here. That will give me water pressure so that it can run my hose, my drips, whatever I need until this water is gone and it rains again. You can tell it's fall because the pomegranates are getting close to ready. They look so good. I've harvested a couple they're not quite ready so I'm going to leave them on the tree a little bit longer. Let's check out the rest of the garden. These monsoon tomatoes are climbing up the cages so these are the jolene tomatoes more of a heat tolerant variety. The reason I planted them here is because this part of my yard is protected when we have a frost event so hopefully if we freeze these tomatoes will keep going and produce. They've got lots of blossoms starting to develop some fruit. No tomatoes yet. I have had tomatoes off of this larger juliet tomato back here. I tried to grow this juliet in one of these cages. It didn't work. This one plant is happier with lots more room. Peanuts are growing starting to maybe die back a little bit but because the weather is still good I want to leave them in the ground as long as possible so I have as many peanuts that are fully formed as I can get. I love this little herb bed. I cut back a lot of the herbs that were in here and I had to replant a couple like the thyme that did not survive summer but now everything is happy and mulched and ready for the cooler growing season. Last season this bed did not grow well. The plants struggled and really never took off. I didn't know why until it was time to turn over the bed. When I dug in the bed it was full of citrus roots from my neighbor's tree. Like the lemons don't like the roots so I dug out all of the roots from this bed dug down in here and got some of the feeder roots. So that will help this bed for this season but long term those roots are going to come back into this bed. If you have any great solutions for me let me know in the comments. I've got this bed completely planted out now. I've got lots of celery, beets, onions, some of my favorite greens. Hopefully we'll start harvesting soon. Let me show you what I planted in the arch garden next. I love this part of the garden and most of this is planted out. I still have lots of mulch that I need to finish mulching but let me show you this bed back here. This bed was full of sweet potatoes. I harvested them all and got a great harvest this year. Now I have cut flowers growing in here. A lot of my filler flowers are in this bed and I also planted something I'm really excited about. A couple of years ago I had a passion flower vine growing up over this trellis and gull fritillary butterflies all over my yard. I found another one at the Desert Botanical Garden sale. I got it planted and I cannot wait for the butterflies to come back to my yard. I'm going all in on cut flowers this season. This bed, this bed, another bed over there are full of cut flowers. I'm not exactly sure what I'll do with all of them once they're blooming but I'm so excited to see all of the flowers. I also added a few new roses this season. I've got two here at the ends of this bed. I have a Sunbelt Crazy Love. The Sunbelt roses grow so well here in the low desert. I have a couple of different varieties of Sunbelt in other areas. Those are the ones that pushed out blooms even during the summer. And then also this Caramel Kiss which is a rose I'm very excited about. Let me show you the other two over here. I'm adding State of Grace and Julia Child to my garden this year at the ends of these beds. These are both beautiful roses. I've seen them in bloom at Heirloom Roses. Cannot wait for the blooms. Their to get it out of that packaging right away. So I've got these in pots. Excited to get both of these planted. Now that we're in great rose growing weather, I'm also going to start fertilizing my roses more. My new roses that have not been in the ground for very long or just up to a year, I'm using this fertilizer. It's not as harsh and it won't burn the roots at all. And then for some of my more established roses, I'm going to start using this. Make sure we're getting lots of blooms this season. It's not just cut flowers in my garden. I'm also growing lots of cool season veggies. I've got my favorites like broccoli, cabbage, some mustard greens, beets, onions. What else do I have going on here? Parsley, lettuce, got some cosmos tucked in there, status. Okay, so there's a few more cut flowers. But going to be lots of vegetables too. My monsoon planted tomatoes are taking off. This is a sun gold and it's forming fruit. This is one plant covering this. This is our favorite tomato. So really excited to see the growth in this plant. Another one back here. I think that's a celebrity. And then I've got some beans here, some black eyed peas that are finishing up. It's time to take those out. But first I'm going to harvest a lot of those dry pods. So I have seeds to plant next year. So this bed has lots of snapdragons. But up against this wall, I have peas, not sweet peas, but actually peas that we can eat. And I've waited to mulch this bed until I see that the snapdragons kind of taking off a little bit and also the peas have popped up. So I'm going to add a thin layer of mulch and a little bit on these peas too now that they've emerged so that that moisture will stay in the ground a little bit longer. But I cannot wait for peas. Absolutely my favorite cool season crop. Luffa can take over the garden. So this year I decided to let it take over the chicken coop instead. And it's working out pretty well. The bees are loving the blooms. I've got fruits forming here. And I don't have to worry about getting this out of the garden so I can plant something else. I can just let it go as long as it needs to go so that I can harvest these mature luffa sponges. I did the same thing with Roselle this year. I have two Roselle plants and they're both in whiskey barrels. It's been perfect. They're growing up this trellis, which gives them a lot of support. I've been harvesting, drying Roselle. I ran out last year. So I'm making sure that I'm really good about harvesting and getting a lot of this fruit. But the nice thing is that these are not in my beds taking up all that space and I'm waiting patiently so I can get my fall crops planted. Getting them out of my beds and into these containers has worked out great this year. Let's head over to my main garden area. I'll show you what's still growing and what I've planted in those beds. This bed had a lot of lysianthus in it and it gave me blooms for a lot of the summer. But now those plants are going to take a little bit of a rest. They can perennialize here. So I'm going to cut them back just down to that rosette and let them rest. In the empty spots I've planted lots of ranunculus corms that will fill in and just be beautiful. I also have a pepper plant that is just pumping out so many peppers. Lots of peppers coming out of the garden right now. And over here in this bed I've got it planted out with lots of greens. I've got broccoli, kale, cilantro, some mustard, some herbs, and I have some carrots. I want to see if they've germinated. It looks like these seeds are popping up. I use seed tape right through here and so they've germinated. Let's check some of these others. Oh looks like they're, oh perfect. Okay it is time to take the burlap off. I still am going to have to come back in and thin but it's nice to see how many of these germinated and I definitely need to get this burlap off. It's starting to grow up through it. You don't want it to grow through too much because it'll pull them out. There we go. Yeah so time to get the burlap off and I've got the little carrot seedlings popping up through there. So I have more cool season crops planted in here. Some cabbage, what else do I have, some herbs, and I also planted sweet peas, the flower, in this bed and they're going to grow off these fryer trellises. So every couple of years I have to replace this jute netting. It doesn't last, doesn't last forever. So I've started getting this tied on. I need to finish. Ran out of string so I've got some more that's a little bit stronger. Hopefully it won't come off and I'm going to finish tying this on and the sweet peas are already germinating so they're going to climb up and this is my favorite variety. I grew it last year, the bix. They have long stems, cream colored, kind of orangey a little bit, blooms. They're so pretty. Cannot wait for these blooms. It's just going to be gorgeous here on this fryer trellis. These roses I planted a year or two ago are waking up after the long hot summer. I love seeing the new growth. I'm going to start fertilizing these a little bit more, starting to see some blooms on some of them, but overall things survive the summer which is the goal and these roses are just going to get better and better the longer they're in the ground. So I'm really happy to see this healthy fresh new growth. Now let's go into my favorite part of the garden right now because there is so much life. Okay the sun's still climbing but when the sun hits over here, the butterflies know to come. I've got all of this gumfrina. It's just gorgeous. I love it. I don't know when I'll cut it back. We'll just kind of see how it goes but I certainly won't as long as there are so many butterflies in my yard. So we've got all the gumfrina and then the peppers have gone crazy. They got really big. I was gone a lot during the summer and normally I'll cut my peppers back a little bit just to help control the size. I didn't do that this year so I've got these enormous pepper plants that are just covered in big delicious fruit which isn't a bad thing but keeping them supported has been a little bit tricky. But I've got some peppers here. I've started harvesting. There's lots to harvest. I'm usually harvesting once things turn red to keep the fruit production up but you can see lots of harvests. I've got more in here that I need to get out here and pick. I'm going to try a few new recipes this year. If you have any good pepper recipes I would love to see them. A lot of these are carmen peppers which have some heat but also have a lot of flavor. So really excited about using these. A favorite surprise for me this year was planting this and I never know how to say it, ageratum, ageratum. Tell me please how to say this. But this Texas, I think it's ageratum. It's like beautiful. Again a butterfly bee magnet. They love this. I planted this late, I think around May. It has taken off. It's crawling all through this bed. It's so happy and just amazingly well. Some of the annual floss flower that I planted didn't love the summer, died back. It's starting to come back now but this one just survived and has done amazingly well. It started out as just this little transplant from Arizona Worm Farm. Stuck it in. I'm so happy I did. So here I also have some ground cherries that I've been harvesting in here. So the nice thing about ground cherries is you know they're ready when they fall to the ground which might be where they got their name. So I've got a few more here. This is a fun fruit. It's in the tomato family but it's a little bit sweet so if you haven't grown this yet this is you know fun to grow. It does need some support or you just let it sprawl. I like to let it climb up this fryer trellis. I had more of the spicy peppers over in this area and this bed is more of the bell peppers and it's been so nice to come out harvest what I need. They're getting some nice size on them which I like too so I leave most of them on the plant until I need them. I've got a few here that I'm harvesting but I want to show you the size on some of these which a lot of times here in the low desert things don't size up the way we would like them to and the answer usually is the heat but a slightly more mild summer and this beautiful fall that we've had have really meant that a lot of these peppers are getting larger. I've got one in here that looks pretty great actually. So we're getting some nice size on some of these bell peppers which I love seeing. Tucked in here to make use of this bed I have some broccoli, some swiss chard that it's not necessarily going to use this trellis but I'm using this so I can get more cool season crops in here. This is exactly what you want your asparagus to look like. Look at all of this energy that this plant is growing and all of this eventually as it cools down all of this energy is going to go back into the roots so we should have a beautiful harvest, delicious harvest in the spring. So I'm just going to leave this alone, let it do its thing and then once it dies back then we'll cut it back. So along this wall I have a lot of in-ground plants. I've got some bulbs and I'm planting in here a lot of foxgloves. I love these flowers so I've got some plugs in here that will probably just not do much but next spring they should just be beautiful. I'm so grateful for all of the garden space that I have but not everybody has a big garden so this season I'm doing it again. I'm doing some small space gardening and experimenting with how much food I can actually grow in this two by six bed so stay tuned I'll let you know how much I grow in this bed. I'm also going to be planting in the green stalks again this year. I struggled a little bit but I'm going to give them another try. So I have my original green stalk with a little bit smaller pockets. I think these are called pockets so I have the smaller ones and now I have the deeper pockets. These are deeper and so maybe some of the issues that I had will be better with these and growing during the cool season will be much easier. So I'm planting both of these I think completely out with strawberries so I'm really excited to get these planted out and hopefully just get lots of strawberries. I've heard that strawberries are one of the best crops to grow. A lot of the advantages of growing in here are there's no roly-polies to eat all of your strawberries so excited. I'm waiting on my strawberries to come. I ordered them in the mail. I'm going to get these planted out and I cannot wait for that harvest. This front bed you can see it gets morning sunlight. Really great spot in my yard so those monsoon planted tomatoes taking off. These are aromas and I'm just I'm not pruning. I'm not really doing anything other than kind of tucking them up these trellises and hoping to get nice big harvests. I also have planted out my garlic. I got my garlic planted at the end of this bed. I'm doing a little bit of an experiment this year, vernalization. It's hard to know if that's helped or not helped. I've had some strange garlic harvests the last couple of years. So John at Forever Young Farms, he has had some advice and seeing that maybe vernalization isn't helping. So I vernalized which means I put it in the fridge for a few weeks. Half of the garlic and the other half I didn't. A little bit of an experiment. I'm definitely not the scientific kind of gardener but I do love a good experiment. So we'll see how this grows. I harvested all of those sweet potatoes but you have to cure them in order to turn the starches to sugars and make the sweet potatoes taste good. It's always been a struggle to figure out where I have a humid warm place in my house. My house isn't very humid so I've usually put them in like Walmart bags or something but I saw Wilder AZ Gardens on Instagram had an ingenious idea. Humidity domes. I mean the name is in what they are. She put her sweet potatoes in humidity domes to cure. So that's exactly what I've done. These are a weekend and so I've got a few more days of curing them but that traps the humidity inside. I'm actually been spraying them a little bit with a spray bottle trying to keep that humidity level up and I'll test them in a few days. You can tell they're ready when the skin doesn't peel easily from the skin of the potato. If you push on it it should be nice and taut on the potato and that way they'll store longer and taste better. I know this can feel overwhelming all of the things I've talked about planting and growing and I just want to remind you about some of the resources I have available. I have a flower planting guide, vegetable guide, calendars, and my new planner. This planner is invaluable. It gives you everything that you need to do month by month because gardening in the low desert is no joke but I am here to help. And finally containers. I have them spread all over my garden. I love getting them out once temperatures cool down. This is my favorite way to add bedding flowers and bulbs to my yard. I don't know if you remember but last year this area was gorgeous and I have it planted out again. I love growing flowers and bulbs in containers because I can let them go in the spring until they're done. I don't have to worry about pulling them out when it's time to plant my warm season crops next spring. I can just let them bloom. I cannot wait for these blooms. I'm so excited about all of the things I have planted. I have plenty of work left to do here in the garden but I'd love to hear what are you planting this fall? Let me know in the comments. What a thriving desert garden! Join my monthly online classes live or on replay and get instant access to past classes and journals. Bring your questions and let's grow together in Growing in the Garden Academy.