This is my first year gardening, we picked up a good sized back yard so we put in some fruit trees and built a raised bed. So far we're doing ok, I learned a lot just doing it this first year that I think will go a long way in the future. We have one 4x8 raised bed with some squash, bell peppers, and pumpkin plants in them. I had no idea the squash and pumpkin would get so big, and packed the bell peppers in way too tight to get big plants. Still seems to be growing well, and this is the first pumpkin. We've already pulled out about 20 pounds of squash and get another pound every other day or so. I have another smaller box made from recycled pallets that I put some jalapeno plants and soybeans in. The soybeans are tiny but the jalapeno plants seem to be doing ok. I put a fig tree in the ground back in October or so last year, it died down to the ground but came back from the roots. It's pretty tiny now but seems to be fairing well. The stump next to the fig is the former trunk, I cut it to get it mostly out of the way. I almost pulled it out but we'll see how the recovery goes. I put a Granny Smith apple tree in the ground back around April and got a few flowers. We get some pretty bad spring time winds though so most were blown off. One of them did start to develop and I figure I'll see if I can eat it this year. I have a couple of fuji trees in the ground that seem to be growing really well, but haven't gotten flowers yet on them. We have a few other things growing in pots, my wife put some basil in the same pot as a mint, strawberry, and some random flowers (I'm not a flower guy). We also have a meyer lemon tree that was totally neglected and left outside all winter. It looked like a twig but came back in the spring, so now I'm excited to see how it does next year. And I have a cayenne pepper plant that only produced 1 pepper then quit for a while. Once the monsoons hit it kind of exploded with peppers. Good learning experience this year, next year I think we'll expand it a lot if I don't get deployed again. I think it's going well though for being my first time gardening ever and doing it in Arizona :D

The white mums I had planted from my daughter's wedding last year are about done blooming but others I had planted a couple years ago are just now starting to bloom. Strange, lol.... Ever faithful Tara ginger is just finishing its 2nd flush but still has a couple stragglers. Agustifolium is just about ready to bloom, but it's always late. Epiphyllum strictum is still pushing buds and blooming every couple weeks. I think these late high temp days are keeping it going. Most of my toadlilies are in full bloom, except one which is full of buds but no blooms. If it doesn't get a move on they'll be no blooms on it this year. Pink Lespedeza is blooming now and if I remember correctly it was over and done with by this time last year. I am so glad I started growing salvias. They were real show offs this year and still are. White Lady's Tresses (another wedding flower left over from last year) are beautiful now too.

Amanda, lol I didn't know I was preaching to the choir. When we moved here, we moved onto fallow farm land that hadn't been farmed in quite a while but probably had been chemically farmed. It also had an oil well at one point, but that well has been gone since sometimes in the 1970s, I gather, from what locals say. However, our garden is nowhere near the old oil well site (a deliberate choice). If there's anything that will teach you about insects, it is moving to the middle of nowhere to fallow farm land. Every insect you can imagine hit everything I planted the first couple of years. The good news, though, was that the predatory wasps, green lacewings, lady bugs and many less well known beneficial insects showed up too. I tried to focus on soil health and on attracting beneficials and I didn't use any pesticides of any kind the first few years, not even organic ones. By about 2001 or 2002, we had huge numbers of beneficials. That sounds good, except what it really meant was that we had really huge numbers of pest insects for them to feed upon, of course. I tried to interfere as little as possible, and as I watched over the months and years, I could see that the beneficial insects mostly keep the pest insects controlled to a certain level as long as nothing hurts the beneficial population. In horror one year, I realized my beneficial insects were mostly gone. Just gone. Couldn't find them anywhere at all. I tried not to panic as I was simultaneously trying to figure out what was going on. Gradually it dawned (oops no pun intended) on me that we also had low levels of pest insects. Finally, I concluded the beneficial insects weren't really gone, but rather that our land's ecosystem was in balance so that there were some pest insects, though not excessive numbers, so that there was not a large food supply for the beneficials. Hence, most of the beneficial insects went elsewhere. That was sort of a cool realization. Since then, while I have an occasional pest insect problem--like this year's massive cutworm outbreak--I don't have a big issue. Most years, I don't use anything much at all on anything in my garden. Maybe I'll use Bt on Colorado Potato Bugs or something, but generally I use nothing. My farming, ranching and gardening neighbors find this hard to believe because they rely more heavily on regular chemical use. You know how that goes....I'm not likely to convert them, so I don't try. That's a decision each person has to make for themselves. In my early years here, I felt like I spent an inordinate amount of time learning about the various insects---for example, the first time I found a lady bug larvae in my garden, I had no clue what it was. I'd always had ladybugs in Texas, but guess I wasn't observing them closely enough to see the larvae. I wasn't familiar with spined soldier bugs, and didn't know blister beetles could be both harmful and beneficial. I think if you watch the insects, they teach you a lot themselves. Grasshoppers have driven me to distraction some years, and I've used Nolo Bait and Semaspore both for about 15 or 20 years, usually using whichever one I find first in stores since their performance is more or less identical. I always have to check the expiration date on the containers because the stores don't always pull expired nosema locuste off their shelves when they expire. One year when the grasshoppers were so bad that they were eating the bark off the fruit trees, every living thing in my garden, the cotton rag rugs on the wraparound porch and even the fiberglass window screens on our house, I thought that the nosema locuste had failed me and I was pretty disgusted. That's because I was all wrapped up in our little world here on our land. A neighbor stopped by one day and asked what I was doing to control the grasshoppers. I told him about the Nolo Bait but said I didn't think it was working. He told me he knew it was working because he saw "barely" any grasshoppers on our property when he drove by daily, whereas on his property there were so many that it looked like the grass was moving in the absence of wind. It was, of course, the grasshoppers that were moving. That's when I realized that even organic products can only do so much sometimes, and you have to be content with that they do. Last summer I thought we had bad grasshoppers here (and they'd been a huge issue in 2010). Then, one day I went to a large, uncontrolled wildfire in western Love County where I spent much of the next two days. Oh my. They had 10 times as many grasshoppers there as we had at our house, and I mostly was staying on the grounds of a local church where we had set up a rehab station to feed and rehydrate the firefighters. Some of the firefighters told me the hoppers weren't as bad at the church as they were out in the pastures and fields, where they'd been eating the grass right down to the ground. (Apparently they hadn't eaten all of it, since there was plenty of it burning in that wildfire.) That was another reminder for me that sometimes when I think I have a high level of grasshoppers, it likely isn't as high as it would be if I wasn't using Nolo Bait. Last year I tried a new (to me) grasshopper bait called EcoBran. It does contain 2% Sevin, and while I normally do not use Sevin, I was feeling pretty nervous about the grasshoppers. In 2010, they had stripped some of my tomato plants down to bare stems, and those were mature plants with heavy foliage and loads of fruit. I was determined to avoid a repeat of that, but didn't want to spray a broad-spectrum pesticide. So, the EcoBran seemed like a good choice in that only insects that ingested the bait would be harmed by it. I put it out at the first appearance of hoppers that were beyond the stage/size where Nolo Bait is effective on them. Then, about two weeks later, I put it out again. While I had minor grasshopper damage, I didn't have major damage last summer and didn't have to use it again. I still have EcoBran in a bucket in the potting shed, but don't think I'll need it this year. While some parts of OK seem to have had an early arrival of lots of hoppers, here we only have had a few, and certainly not in numbers that worry me. That's the only time I've used a chemical pest product here, other than using one for fire ants in 2004. Since then, I've used the organic fire ant baits. The pests that plague me the most are spider mites, which seem to come in huge waves nonstop every summer, and squash vine borers. I've been pretty successful catching the squash bugs in the egg or nymph stage and disposing of them before they multiply enough to do much damage. . Last year, I was ready for war with the squash bugs and squash vine borers and never saw a single one of either of them for whatever reason. That's pretty rare, and it got to the point where I was sick of harvesting squash and sick of eating it and started hoping the plants would die. They didn't, not even after I stopped watering. That's an unusual summer though. The bugs and borers probably will show up in huge numbers this year to make up for last year. One of my favorite methods of grasshopper control is guinea fowl, but this will be our third summer without them. During the year of the cougar and bobcat issues, we lost so many chickens and guineas that I haven't even attempted to have guineas again, and the chickens only free-range when I am out in the yard and can keep an eye on them. I really miss the guineas. They would chase and eat hoppers all day long every day all summer long. We just have too much wildlife here for the guineas to be able to roam as freely as they like to roam. Dawn

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