A Garden in my Mind

I suppose I'll start at the beginning, just like my garden.  My boyfriend and I just bought a house in October of 2010 in Tucson, Arizona.  Chief among our concerns were having ample room for a backyard garden - particularly vegetable.  We got our wish and purchased a home with a rather large dirt lot in the back.  Beyond a small, unpruned lime tree and tall Mesquite tree covered in mistletoe, the backyard was bare. 

Now it's January, and after reading a barrage of southwest gardening books and websites, I'm starting to go into action. 

Currently, I'm trying to figure out what my dream garden would look like.  I've poured over the Burpee and White Flower Farm catalogs.  In Pennsylvania, where I grew up, I always had a garden and potted plants.  But there you could toss seeds on the ground and find a plant two weeks later.  Some of the plants and garden designs I grew up with are very inappropriate, if not impossible, for the desert.  My guides so far have been the Sunset Western Garden Book and George Brookbank's Desert Gardening, along with many online guides and articles, including the quintessential Arizona Master Gardener Manual from the University of Arizona.  I have many scribbled, random notes that I would like to make sense of.  That's where this blog comes in.

In my dream garden, I would have berries.  Blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries.  It seems blackberries do best of all in Tucson, but I am going to experiment.  Citrus trees are a must.  I love the birds of paradise, mexican honeysuckle, and the creosote.  I adore cacti and succulents of all kinds.  I miss crocuses and may foolishly give them a shot.  And of course, we plan to have an amazing vegetable garden.

I have to admit: I've killed many things in the desert.  But armed with my guides and 4 years of mistakes under my belt, I am going to forge ahead!  This weekend we will build our first container and I've ordered seeds in the mail.  But more on that later.  I hope you will all stick around to see how it goes!