Gardening for Hot and Dry Climates
When you’ve been gardening in a climate with four seasons and move to a hot, dry climate, gardening becomes a whole new experience. I’ve come across many people who have given up on gardening in our Arizona desert, because it wasn’t as easy as it …
If you ask a child what a plant needs to grow, common answers are going to be water, sun, soil, and air. Any beginning gardener would agree with the child. The one thing that is commonly forgotten about or least understood is feeding plants. There …
As someone who grew up on berries living in Northern Michigan, where they grew like weeds, moving to the Arizona desert presented many challenges with growing berries. I’ve experimented with different types of berries and witnessed other local gardener’s successes or failures with growing berries …
Have you ever dug in soil that just crumbled or was super dense? Well, if you live in hot, dry climates like the Arizona desert, this is a pretty common experience. Unless you’ve taken measures to create a healthy soil, I highly doubt any worm …
After several years of gardening or mastering growing the basics, has your love for gardening started to diminish? It may be time to take your gardening skills to the next level. Anything can lose its luster if we don’t continue to push ourselves to new …
After you finish cleaning the juice from your face gobbling up a mango, you’re left with a large seed pod. It’s pretty common to look at the seed and wonder if it could one day turn into a mango producing tree. Should I grow a …
In my daily interactions with others, as I discuss my gardening hobby, I tend to get comments like, “Oh, I’ve tried that but just don’t have a green thumb or things just don’t grow in the desert.” There are so many reasons why people have …
As someone living in the Phoenix, Arizona area, which is one of the largest U.S. cities, I’ve been fortunate enough to find many amazing local nurseries or places that offer a variety of different fruit trees. If you aren’t quite as lucky to have many …
Pomegranates are one of those fruits that tend to go under the radar. They pop up in stores for a short time of the year and then disappear. Pomegranate trees originated in the Middle East and seem made for hot, dry climates like our Arizona …
I’m a huge believer that everyone should give gardening a chance. Gardening sometimes gets a bad rep since it isn’t always portrayed as a “cool” thing to do, but those that don’t try it are missing out on something great. There are so many things …
One of the things I’ve really enjoyed on my gardening journey has been connecting with people of differing cultures and backgrounds. Gardening has a way of bringing people together for a common purpose. Since gardening is naturally a “down to earth” hobby, gardeners tend to be …
There are some basic tips that help turn your thumb green when it comes to starting a garden. One gardening buzzword that has been huge in helping me become a successful desert gardener is microclimate. When I began my gardening adventure, I had no idea …
For those of you that are new to growing fruit trees, one of the scariest things to do is to cut or prune your tree. We often think we are going to hurt the tree or it’s too painful to sacrifice some of the growth that …
One of the challenges of growing fruit trees is being patient. When you purchase a fruit tree you dream of harvesting the wonderful fruit from your tree, but it can be several years before that dream becomes a reality. So, if you’re an impatient gardener, …