Portrait of the gardener as a young lady

I suppose while I am waiting for the weather to get warm and my seeds to arrive that I should share a little bit about myself.

Like most people, I am a Tucson transplant.  I grew up in western Pennsylvania and moved to Tucson about four and a half years ago.  In Pennsylvania, we always had gardens.  Until I was 12 my family lived in a house on a large plot of land just near a heavily wooded area.  We practically lived in the woods, and I spent many hours wandering in our wild back yard.  My parents kept an impressive vegetable garden in soil that was well fertilized by years of composted leaves.  I don't remember too much about what we kept.  We do like to tell the story of my mom and dad putting a hole in the screen door to stick a rifle through and pick off the groundhogs and rabbits that would visit our garden buffet.  The thing I remember most about our gardens were the blueberry bushes.  Oh, the blueberries!  If you have never had fresh, delicious summer blueberries right off the tree then I don't know if I could ever describe them to you.  In the evenings my mom, dad, brother and I would go out to our 4-5 bushes armed with those giant big gulp cups.  I was young but remember the bushes being nearly as tall as I, and they may have been taller.  We would pick dozens upon dozens of blueberries every night.  We ate them fresh, with vanilla ice cream, in pies, in muffins, in pancakes. . .

When we moved to a new house, we tried transplanting the bushes, but they did not take. 

We moved to a more suburban neighborhood when I was 12 or so.  We still had a fair amount of land (in Pennsylvania it seems to be standard!) but it was on a slope.  Good for sledding, but not great for developing.  My mom got really into gardening now that the trees were not hogging all the sunlight and she had 4-5 large garden beds in the front and back yards.  Mostly flowers and shrubs.  I had my own small patch on one side of our house and grew daylillies, japanese evergreen shrubs, a climbing rose, and a variety of flowers.  I liked the idea of creatures living in the garden and called it my "toad garden".  You see, when we had moved into the new house, it was early spring.  Our house had been build that previous winter.  Apparently, a fair amount of frogs and toads had used that empty, muddy lot as a hibernation ground, and when the spring came, our yard was overflowing with toads.  My little brother and I spent a fair amount of time catching them and observing them in buckets.  Did you know toads pee when caught?  Yes, it was pretty gross.  At any rate, I kept small dishes of water and upturned pots with escape holes in them for a toad habitat.  I don't know if anything ever lived there, but I had a good time gardening.  When we removed our swimming pool in the back yard, instead of covering over the entire deck, my dad left a small portion open.  He built steps down to the ground and now keeps a vegetable garden there.  He was just here visiting and giving me tips on growing garlic, potatoes, and some more vegetables that need a bit more preparation.

Through college, I always kept potted plants at school in our sad little dorms.  I tried to keep an orchid, and while I kept it happy and growing new leaves, I could never get it to bloom again.  I had a very happy aloe plant that nearly tripled in size over its long life.  I studied Art History and English Literature at Juniata College in Central Pennsylvania.  We were a bunch of liberal hippies studying in a small railroad town in the middle of the mountains and forest.  I have some good friends from college who are now working on farms or teaching camps on wooded islands and living close to the land - and I am always jealous of their stories! 

I moved to Tucson in 2006, after graduating with my B.A., with a good friend from college.  She was attending grad school at the University of Arizona, and as I had no job offers and no grand plans, I figured a change of scenery was in order.  I soon got a job (well, several) at the U of A.  But I fell in love with Tucson the moment I stepped off the plane.

I think a lot of people have great misconceptions about the desert, and I hope to correct some of those through my blog.  I know I fell in love with Tucson because it was so completely different from everything I had seen and known before.  Even today the novelty has not worn off.  Tall, scraggly mountains just a few miles away, mighty saguaro cacti, hardy succulents and desert plants that live off nearly nothing at all!  It's amazingly beautiful out here, and the city is a fantastic community with a lot of life flowing through it. 

Unfortunately, my Pennsylvania green thumb was not designed for the desert.  I've managed to kill almost everything I've tried to grow both inside and out - including cactus.  I realized I needed to prepare myself and adapt to the desert just like everything else out here.

I later attended the University of Arizona, getting my M.A. in Art Education.  And although I probably had better job prospects in a larger city with more museums, when I graduated in 2010 I couldn't bear to leave!  My boyfriend, Erik, and I spent an agonizing year trying to figure out what was best for us both to do.  You see, he had been thinking about buying a house, and with the recent crash in prices, it seemed like the perfect time to invest in a modest starter house.  I was never happier than the day I decided to stop job searching all over the country and focus my attention on Tucson.  After a long (9 month) search, we found a fantastic remodeled house in a nice, established neighborhood just outside of downtown Tucson.  We moved in in October and have just been biding our time for good weather to start planting.  Having a large yard and room for a vegetable garden was one of our #1 considerations in buying a house.  We are ready to go!

So now, here I am.  Nearly five years in Tucson with a degree, a job, a house, and a lot of plans.  And now: a blog! 

Coming soon: some sketches for backyard plans, putting together the first garden bed, and a list of vegetables and plants I hope to have in the future.