Day 1

I am starting this blog in hopes that I might be able to pass on some of my gardening knowledge to other people and maybe one day hear that I have inspired someone to start up gardening for themselves.

I recently moved to a new home in Queen Creek AZ and left my previous garden I had been growing in for sixteen years.  After all of those years composting and amending the soil it had become a great little plot to grow my vegetables over the years.  I grew great cabbages (Stonehead is my favorite since its such a dense head) for making sauerkraut, radishes (French Breakfast is my favorite-seems to not cause me any heartburn) and peas (sugar snap because you can eat pods and all, and the Bassett hound loves peas) were my go to winter crops.  The Spring brought the dill and cucumbers for pickling (Rader cukes allowed me great specimens to pickle because they usually end up so straight they fit in the jars better and still if I let them or missed one while picking they were a great slicer that was rarely bitter) and the tomatoes and peppers for salsa (I have found the shorter date tomatoes work the best here because of the two short seasons they do best in, I did Goliath and Beefsteaks once or twice and was rewarded with a few large tomatoes rather than the abundance of smaller ones I got with Early Girl , Champion and Celebrity varieties).

I've now found myself with virgin soil for the most part and feel like I am starting over.  I have little amendments in and the cabbage have produced and one batch of sauerkraut is canned as well as the first batch of spicy pickled beets.  The size of the cabbages is underwhelming but I expected nothing different since I was in a hurry to plant when I moved in.  I did plant more numbers to compensate for the smaller sizes I got.  Beets and radishes seem to be a crop you can grow anywhere as they had little problems.  Peas also did great and I should have planted more simply to use their ability to affix nitrogen into the soil for the future crops.

I'm still plugging along with the new spring crops but the heat started rather early here but looks to cool a bit soon.  I will continue updating and letting you know what works for me as I try to get the soil here up to where I was in Mesa!