Adventures in Gardening in the High Desert: Part 1

Last year's midsummer garden – with tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers and more!

This past winter – my first full winter in Bend – I tried to fully embrace all of the good parts of living somewhere with a cold and snowy season. Some of my favorite winter activities have included learning how to snowboard, going ice skating, curling up under a warm blanket, making hot chocolate, watching my boyfriend play ice hockey, and cold plunging.

Cold plunging when the air is 25℉ and the water about 34℉!

While there's still snow to be enjoyed up on the mountain, it's starting to feel more and more like spring. In fact, these last few days it has felt more like summer than anything. It's as if we went from freezing temperatures to scorching hot in a matter of days. The truth is, Bend is in the high desert, and the high desert can experience some extreme fluctuations in temperature; just this past Saturday we had a low of 43℉ (6℃) and a high of 88℉ (31℃)!

For me, the arrival of spring has meant changes in outdoor activities, for example leaning more towards climbing and water-based sports. Just recently, I've started learning how to river surf (something that I'll have to write a separate post about soon). In addition to all of this outdoor recreation, I'm diving into my first real season gardening in the high desert. While I did get to garden a bit last year, this year I'll have more time, resources, and space available, and that's a pretty exciting prospect.

Although the gardening season starts late in the high desert, I began preparing over a month ago by planting seeds and building a make-shift "grow room" on an open shelf indoors. However, I think I may have started just a little too early; the pepper plants are already starting to outgrow their containers and won't be able to wait much longer to be planted in the ground. I blame my overeagerness! Unfortunately, nighttime temperatures are still too low to transplant hot-season crops, so they'll just have to hold on a little longer.

Pepper seedlings in early April

The tomato plants, on the other hand, I started several weeks after the peppers and I think I got the timing just right. They are just growing their 2nd or 3rd set of true leaves, and will be a perfect size for transplanting within a few weeks. Hopefully by then the nighttime temperatures will be warm enough for hardening and transplanting.

Dozens of tomato seedlings freshly transplanted.

You may be wondering where all of these things will be growing?

Last post, I mentioned that I would soon be moving for roughly the 9th time in just the last few years. I moved in with Tom (yes, it's exciting!) and we have several raised beds in the backyard. But I'm afraid those beds are already spoken for. Last fall, we planted two beds just about FULL of garlic, and the third bed has perennial asparagus and strawberries. While some peppers and tomatoes will be able to grow in pots in the yard (in addition to the two up-cycled glass recycling bins now holding spinach and carrot seedlings), I have way more tomato and pepper seedlings than we have room for.

Garden beds full of garlic, strawberries, and asparagus (with a makeshift fence to keep dogs out).

That's where the community garden comes in...

This spring, I "applied" to the three community gardens in town. Only two of them are within a reasonable distance of the house, but I figured I may as well try for all three. For a town as big as Bend, I can only imagine what kind of waiting lists these gardens have. Needless to say, I did not get a community garden plot for two of them. As luck would have it, however, both Tom and I got a plot at the third garden!

So now we not only have three raised beds and some random pots, but we also have two community garden plots! I would have found homes for my tomato and pepper seedlings if needed, but I'm so glad that we'll at least be able to plant some of them. In fact, we're particularly excited about a new variety of tomato called Midnight Roma, a deep purple-red tomato with a dark skin.

Needless to say, I'm eager to plant the peppers and tomatoes, which will be the heart of our summer crop. But I have to wait a little longer while the nighttime temperatures continue to fluctuate. In the meantime, however, we'll have asparagus, spinach, and carrots! We'll also be growing sunflowers, peas, beans, radishes, squash, cucumbers, and more. The garlic will be growing all summer long before it can be harvested in the fall.

Our first garden harvest meal with asparagus and purple basil!

I'll try to write more updates on my gardening adventures soon. In the meantime, I want to know: what are your garden adventures this year?

And, if you're interested, you can read more about some of my past adventures in farming and garden education!