In June I wasn't having very high hopes for what I had planted because growing here is SO DIFFERENT than Michigan! We got some good soaking rains in July and things exploded!
I planted the sunflowers in April, and the vegetable garden in May. The soil isn't very good there (yet) but we got one Dinosaur kale plant (out of how many seeds did I plant?), a decent amount of spinach (until it got too hot) and lettuce in late in June, collard greens by July, finally some yellow wax beans and a few green beans.
I have learned A LOT on my first attempt at gardening in the desert! One, you HAVE to use straw for mulch, otherwise it drys out way too fast between waterings. The soil needs A LOT of conditioning; I have been faithfully composting all of our kitchen waste and will start adding it to the vegetable garden when things are finally done (which will be soon, as it has been bone dry lately). I will have to get landscape cloth for next year to keep the sun from beating down on all the tender plants.
Some things I did do right - I had a lot of time in early spring due to the lock down, so that is when I built my 7' x 10' vegetable garden. I encircled it with chicken wire, which I buried 6" into the soil to keep critters from digging under the fence, and that worked really good. I think just a few mice may have gotten in, but the rabbits and squirrels were kept out. Some birds may have gotten to a a few seedlings, but they didn't do that much damage. Maybe I was just lucky this first year!
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