The Masochistic Gardener

So what do you do when you move to the desert?  Why, put in a garden, of course!

Put in a garden? you say.  Didn't you do that last year?  Why, yes.  Yes, I did.

It was what I shall call a 'successful experiment.'  That is to say, I put in a ton of work to grow about 20 bushels of basil (win!), a mega mint and a pumpkin vine that tried to take over the world.  After babying the garden through a summer of record breaking heat, I threw up my hands and walked away when the rabbits ate my one and only pumpkin just weeks before Halloween.

This was a tragic miscalculation.

I learned a lot in my first summer of vegetable gardening.  Square Foot Gardening?  Awesome!  Shoddy site prep for said garden? Not so awesome.  Forgetting to turn off the automatic sprinkler timer?  Not awesome. At. All.  By the end of our freakishly warm winter, the weeds had taken over my garden.  Again.

I needed a whip and a chair to get inside the fence when it was time to get started for the spring.  The basil had petrified into a woody bush.  The mint was so massive that it had invaded fully half of my garden.  Rabbits had moved in under it, built condos and bred like, well, rabbits.  And the weeds?  Oh, my.  Desert dwelling weeds are hearty buggers.  Grass and stickers had grown up not just around my raised beds, but through them.  There was a tragic miscommunication regarding weed removal and my M-i-L accidentally ruined all of the soil that remained from last year.

Sigh.

Basically, I was back to square one.  So I decided to do it right this time.

(To be continued!)