>Can Apache Junction be that different from Tucson, with no rain at all? Um Susan, that's like saying that Queens isn't any different from say, the Finger Lakes area.....a world of difference, believe me (and I've been to both places :) The desert has many faces, many elevations. As mentioned above, Tucson is higher than the Valley of the Sun, gets more rain, and generally is about 10 degrees cooler. Plus, Tucson is a real city, with a downtown, barrio, university and cultural events, and some of the best hiking in the SW. Tucson is very old (in fact, its nicknamed the Old Pueblo, and has among its jewels San Xavier del Bac, a 17th century mission recently restored), and for the most part has tried hard to keep its desert from being over run by development (tho a recent visit did make me cry when I drove on Contaro road to get to Ina - what are they thinking?) Without rain, Tucson is dry, but still green in a lush desert way. AJ is a 'city' with no center, no history to speak of, originally a place where the Seniors went to escape from Phoenix. And any green has been bulldozed away. And when there's no rain, its a dusty and depressing place to be. While its fine as a base to explore the superstitions, its not a place you'd want to stay for very long. As amigo says, there are some places that you might stay in. But not many. The Mesa area bordering AJ is'nt a mecca, but I have to say that Mesa is starting to come alive with its downtown area.

Johnny, I know you will hate having to use a chemical fertilizer this year, but sometimes it is a necesary evil and growing crops for the food banks is more important that staying 100% organic in every instance. Then, next spring, after your green manure crops have grown and have been incorporated in the soil, it will be in much better shape. I was hoping the orchard had been there more recently so you had a chance of having more organic matter in the soil. I love the jar soil test too. I recommend it here about 2 times a month probably, and even more as planting season approaches and new gardeners join the forum. My dad's family dry-land farmed as sharecroppers in Montague County, TX, just catty-corner from the western end of Love County, OK, in the 19-teens through the start of World War II, including the Dust Bowl years. They nearly starved to death in the Dust Bowl years and my dad and his brothers often said that WWII saved their lives by getting them off the farm. At least once they joined the military, they got 3 good meals a day and put some meat on their bones. If you've never read the outstanding book, "The Worst Hard Time", by Timothy Egan, I highly recommend it. It is about the Dust Bowl years, including the role that land speculators and wheat prices paid in the whole plowing-up-the-Great-Plains and leaving it fallow debacle, as well as the unproven-but-highly-touted-at-the-time belief that dust mulch would hold moisture and prevent erosion (we see how that theory failed). I read this book at least once a year, usually during the worst of the hot, dry, summer months, to help me keep our hot, droughty summers in perspective because, no matter how hot and dry a summer, nothing we endure here comes close to what the folks in this part of the country endured during the Dust Bowl years. While Timothy Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting done on another topic, I certainly thought "The Worst Hard TIme" was also worth of a Pulitzer. He did receive a well-deserved National Book Award for "The Worst Hard Time". A friend of mine who grew up on land adjacent to ours was not born until after The Dust Bowl Years, but her mother remembered those years and she has shared with me her mother's memories of what the Dust Bowl was like for those who lived here in our part of OK, a bit east of the true Dust Bowl region, and those memories are of a very harsh time. I cannot imagine living through all of that. Just the amount of effort it took to try to keep all the dust out of their homes is staggering to think about, as is the number of lives taken by Dust pneumonia. After reading this book shortly after it was published, I became much more diligent about both mulching and cover cropping. There is not a bare inch of soil in either my front or back garden right now---the front garden is mulched and the back garden has a cover crop sown/sprouted in the fall by Mother Nature. I would have planted a cover crop back there this fall if she hadn't. It may be a weedy cover crop, but it covers every inch of the back garden except for the thickly mulched pathway that cuts through the center of the garden. And, I have no idea what "they" are thinking, but they need to read "The Worst Hard Time" before they make some errors that lead to another Dust Bowl. You know, we had some mini Dust Bowl like flare-ups here in OK during the drought of 2011, and we don't need any more of that! When we first moved here and broke ground for the garden, our neighborhood crowd of old farmers and ranchers told me about how lovely the soil used to be at our place, back before the Dust Bowl carried it all away. Our wicked red clay is, of course, the subsoil that was left after all the topsoil blew away. All those guys, except for Fred, are gone now and I miss them. There's nothing like hearing the history of your own place from the folks who grew up here, even if parts of the history are hard to bear. When I discovered cotton root rot in our soil during our first or second year here, it was the old farmer crowd who told me about how our land once was used to grow cotton. I don't know who was more surprised---they were shocked I figured out the cotton root rot on my own (but we had it in Texas, so I knew it from plant symptoms as soon as the plants began dying) and I was shocked to learn our grassland pastures once grew cotton. Those guys also regaled me with fun stories of how they'd come over here to swim in our pond after working hard all day and other stories of floods that would bring water from our creek up over the roadway, effectively giving them a day off from school because the school bus wouldn't cross the bridge when water was running over it. They also were the ones who didn't laugh and tell me I was imagining things when I told them I was hearing cougars from a distance and assumed the cougars were down in the river bottom lands. Instead, they shared their cougar stories with me and, once they knew I was hearing cougars, they cautioned me pretty much daily to be careful and to never go into the woodland unarmed. I didn't heed that advice as well as I should have until I encountered a cougar near my garden. Since then, I am better about keeping a gun nearby at all times, though occasionally I still forget to carry it with me. One of those guys, who came here in 1903 and who grew up on land very close to where we now live, would tell me how they had to take the horse and wagon down to the Red River to cut wood to haul home for firewood when he was a child because there were no trees anywhere else. Standing with him in my garden right beside a woodland of mature trees that were easily 50, 60 or 70 years old, it amazed me to hear about the time when this place was treeless. I kept asking him if he was sure there were no trees, and I think that made him mad, but it just was almost impossible for me to imagine a time when our huge woodland trees were not here. Everyone told me our first year here that I should hire someone to clear an acre of woodland for me so I could plant a garden there and have great garden soil from the start, but I'd never sacrifice decades of woodland growth for a garden plot. Tim and I have such a great appreciation for all our trees that to this day we won't hardly cut down a tree unless it is dying and is a threat to fall on a building or on the garden or something similar. Our only exception is cedar trees and we have cut down hundreds of them since moving here and have to relentlessly fight them still or they'd take over every square inch of our land. I spend part of every winter going into the woodland and cutting down all the cedar trees that sprout nonstop. Dawn

Nice proponents of Spring blooming for you, Rina. Bernard, that's a cute little white flower on the kalanchoe. Great job on the baby toes. It looks very happy. Succulentlife, love the minis and their charming little flower. Ewwmayo, always a soft spot for those variegated haworthias. Great little Morgan and the lilliputian gastric IS cute. Love what Spring brings to everyones yard!!! My first blooming babies: My group of Pachyphytum oviferum are all throwing out some spikes.

Our garden is hot and tired and has lots of fungal diseases thanks to the constant moisture in part of May and early June, but much of the disease has stalled and isn't progressing too much since we haven't had rain in over 2 weeks now. We have billions of spider mites invading from adjacent fields, which is a problem for the tomatoes and likely will become a problem for everything else before too long, but then, that's why we get a chance with many plants to start over with new plants for fall. Despite the above, pretty much everything is producing well. I don't know if we are at our peak tomato harvest yet, but tomatoes are piling up all over the house and I've been working as hard as I can to process them in a timely manner. We eat them every day. The tomato glut will last only a few weeks but by the time that heat slows down production, we'll be getting tired of tomatoes so I'm okay with that. The pole snap beans are producing heavily now and my goal for today is to pick beans and sweet corn, process most for the freezer, and keep enough in the fridge to eat fresh during the rest of this week. I was going to harvest late yesterday in the cool of the evening, but just as we were finishing dinner we got paged out to a fatality explosion/house fire and it was too dark (after midnight) in the garden for me to harvest anything after we got home. My harvesting plans keep running into lots of interruptions like that. Sweet corn has been ripening unevenly instead of all at once like it usually does, but that works to a gardener's advantage as it means you don't have to harvest every ear on the same day. It is a really good corn year, and no coons have showed up yet to fight us for every ear. Sweet peppers have been very slow to set peppers in this heat, but the hot peppers are going like gangbusters which is good since I am using lots of them while canning salsa. Onions and potatoes are cured and stored away, and I haven't even looked at the garlic lately. It is in the back garden and I don't go there as much as the front garden at this time of year. I need to check the garlic while back there harvesting sweet corn today. The cucumbers continue to produce well, though they have slowed down a bit in the heat. I watered them last week and they seemed to perk up quite a bit after that, so I think our pickle-making isn't over yet. Summer squash is producing well, and I haven't seen any squash bugs or SVBs in the garden yet (knock on wood) though I am sure they'll show up any day now. I have scattered succession plantings around in various parts of the garden hoping that when the pests show up, maybe they won't find everything at the same time. Lima beans are setting a lot of buds but I don't know if any have bloomed yet. I tend to sort of ignore bean plants until I suddenly realize there's a lot of beans that need to be picked. The southern peas are really beginning to shine. The earliest variety, 6-Week Purplehull, is just a couple of days from harvest and I can hardly wait. On whatever day we get the first purple hull pea harvest, we'll be having peas, homemade cornbread and brisket for dinner, and to be honest, I won't even care if I eat brisket or not. I can make an entire meal from a big bowl of purple hull peas and cornbread. I believe all 5 other southern pea varieties now are in bloom, so we'll be in southern pea hog heaven for the next few weeks. The flowers look pretty good despite the heat. The poppies finally have faded away in the heat, which is normal for them, but the zinnias took over that area without missing a beat and are in full bloom, accompanied in that corner of the garden by Laura Bush petunias and verbena bonariensis. The first hollyhocks are blooming, even as the adjacent crinum lilies and day lilies are slowing down and finishing up. The batfaced cuphea 'Sriracha Rose' and the balsam are in full bloom and looking really nice, but the sweet alyssum and nasturtiums (both are cool-season flowers) are about done, having had all the heat they can stand. The artichoke flowers are fading and I'm letting them go to seed. All the annual summer flowers look fine, though some were not thrilled with the heat. Morning glories are blooming on the garden fence, and some of the cannas are in bloom. The purple coneflowers look spectacular, and have for several weeks now, but the red hot poker is about to finish up, and the Luna hardy hibiscus hasn't bloomed yet, though it looks like it will begin blooming shortly. The garden looks great when I am out there in it, with cool-season plants like dill, parsley and fennel blooming now as they bolt. More butterflies are showing up daily, and there's always tons of bees. That reminds me, I need to harvest dill seeds today. I've already been harvesting dill weed to use in canning as needed. The basil has been feeling ignored and is trying to bolt, but I cut it back really hard the other day, so it should be fine now. The catmint has been in bloom for a couple of months and I need to prune it back to enourage a new flush of blooms. Melons didn't like our heavy rain in May and early June and have stalled in their growth but I imagine they'll take off just fine now that we are back to being hot and dry. The okra hasn't produced pods yet, but I planted it late after the first round just faded away in the constant rain in May and early June. The new plants look happy and are growing well, but won't produce for a while yet. We're still harvesting peaches and plums, and a handful of strawberries here and there. Figs aren't ripe yet, but are getting close. I'm not going to have as much time in the garden today as hoped, thanks to yesterday's fire. We went through tons and tons of bottled water and Gatorade and packaged snacks. so after I harvest this morning, we need to make a run down to Sam's Club in Denton (such a long drive from here to go anywhere!) to restock our Fire Rehab truck. That will kill my plans to do anything more than harvest sweet corn and snap beans, but maybe I can get out and harvest other things very late in the day this evening or first-thing tomorrow. I don't know how or when I'll find time to weed or to deadhead the flowers. Luckily those are tasks you can let slide for a while. Overall the garden is highly productive and I have no complaints. It isn't perfect, but no garden ever is. I expect tomorrow to be a huge canning day, but intend to start and end the day in the garden harvesting even if there isn't time for anything else. This is how I fall behind on weeding at the time of the year. Half the grass got mowed this past weekend, but the other half awaits its visit from the mower. So many chores, so little time.