Adventures in Gardening in the High Desert: Part 2

The last time I wrote about gardening this season, May had just begun. Most of my plant starts were still growing safely under grow lights inside the house, while the garden outside was barren but for young garlic, asparagus, and strawberries. Now it's mid-July, and things are looking quite different.

For starters, the garden at home is flourishing. As I write this, two of the three raised beds are full of sugar snap peas, peppers of different varieties, a scattering of sunflowers, and lettuce. Just this week, we harvested armfuls of garlic and shallots from those beds, clearing up room for the aforementioned crops as well as upcoming summer squash, beets, kohlrabi, and carrots.

The garlic and shallots had been growing since last October (laying dormant for the winter months) and started sending up scapes around early- to mid-June, announcing their imminent readiness. The heat of the past few weeks sped this along, I think, as some of the soft-necked garlic began to fall over. The hard-necked garlic could've probably stayed in the ground a little longer, but with space being a valuable and limited resource, I decided they all had to come out. They're mostly good-sized bulbs, making my first Fall-planting of garlic a successful endeavor! My only question is whether we'll be able to eat it all...

Here, take a look at our shallot and garlic harvest for yourself:

Pictured: one Helena for scale.

The third raised bed is half strawberries and half asparagus, both of which have just about run their course for the season. Those crops are both perennial, so they'll keep growing all year, soaking up sunshine and strengthening root systems before dying back next winter – only to come back again in the spring. Perennial crops might be my favorite type of crop to grow, because once established they require little work, and the harvest gets better and better every year!

Outside of the three beds are a variety of pots and bins housing tomatoes, peppers, spring onions, peas, winter squash, cucumbers, herbs, and more. In addition to the garlic and shallots, I just harvested a big bunch of Parisian carrots known for their round and... stubby shape.

Fresh garden salad with home-grown lettuce and wild pansies.

I would be remiss to talk about the home garden without also mentioning the state of our compost, a topic which I've written about before, and talked about often to anyone willing (or perhaps unwilling) to lend an ear. In addition to the compost bin I got for Tom early in our relationship, we now also have a small compost tumbler à la Miracle-Gro.

Between the large 86-gallon bin and the two 18.5-gallon compartments of the tumbler, we now have, more or less, a three-bin system with varying stages of broken-down food/plant scraps. The resulting compost doesn't go unused – after harvesting the garlic and shallots, I spread a generous layer of compost on the two raised beds, roughly 10-gallons-worth.

An earlier state of the compost – flipping the contents of the bin to mix things up and increase aeration.

If you read Part 1 of this season's gardening series, you may recall that I mentioned plots in a community garden. Instead of two plots, however, we ended up with just one. Still, a 10x10 ft gardening plot is more than it seems. Earlier this season, when the weather had warmed enough, we planted it full of tomatoes and tomatillos, left a corner full of existing strawberry plants, and filled the empty spaces with over a hundred leeks. Today, there's also a handful of sunflowers, and melon seedlings are emerging for what will (hopefully) be a delicious yet late-season harvest.

One half of the community garden plot, with strawberries, sunflowers, tomatillos, tomatoes, and leeks.

Unfortunately, this being the High Desert, the climate doesn't always make gardening here easy. Just a few weeks ago, in June, a frost just about killed all of our tomato plants at the community garden. Everything at home appeared unscathed, so either the 1.4-mile distance (as the crow flies) was enough for a significant difference in temperature, or the community garden's midnight watering schedule had put the plants in a precarious spot.

Either way, this was a tough blow. I was worried all my effort of starting tomatoes back in April had been for naught. At the time, I consoled myself with the thought that we still had two thriving plants at home, as well as plants in the gardens of friends and family who had received starts from me. Fortunately, the tomato plants are now (finally) making a comeback!

Tom, ever the engineer, designed the supports for our tomatillos when we ran out of tomato cages. You can still see signs of the frost damage, but this tomatillo plant seems to be recovering.

Next time, I will report back on harvests of our summer crops. I am so looking forward to some garden-fresh tomatoes!

Let me know what you're growing this year by leaving a comment below!