Guest blogger: Steven Hilliard (my husband)
When I retired to sunny and dry Arizona from the cloudy and wet Pacific Northwest, I figured I had it made. Maybe now my tomatoes and peppers would ripen with all the heat and sunshine. That was the problem, there was just too much heat and sunshine at five-thousand feet elevation. The thin atmosphere permitted the sun’s rays to literally burn up my seedlings and even some mature plants like pole beans. Not only that, the extremely dry mountain air, only 10 to 15 percent RH, sucked up the moisture as fast as I could drench the soil with the garden hose. By midday my squash, cucks, and zucks were literally panting for a drink. I just couldn’t keep the soil damp no matter how often I watered. That was the first year.
The second year, I bought mature potted plants from the local nursery and things went pretty well for awhile. In fact, that year I was able to harvest a satisfactory crop of vine-ripened tomatoes, eggplants, and cucumbers, most of them heirloom. But the predators caught up with me the third year. When I say predators, I’m talking about elk, a whole herd of them that can glide over an six-foot fence as easily as a pole vaulter. What was left of the garden after they were finished, the javelina cleaned up. Javelina are peccaries that over the centuries immigrated to the southwest from the Amazon jungles. These smelly, pig-like rodents run in family groups and can squirm under a fence as easily as do snakes. They can turn a garden into a dust bowl in three passes. So I built a chain link fence with a strand of electric wire on top. That kept the big critters out.
But I forgot to mention the little varmints–the rabbits, ground squirrels, and pocket gophers–that wandered in from the nearby national forest. Let me tell you about the worst of them, the pocket gophers, which eventually brought about my downfall. I noticed one fine day that a normally healthy tomato plant looked droopy, like it needed watering. So I gave it a good soaking. The next day, of all things, it had vanished! The second plant next to it now looked wilted. What’s more, the following day, son-of-a-gun, if that love apple didn’t disappear as well. It went on like that sequentially, until the entire row of tomato plants wilted and disappeared from the face of the earth.
It started again with the pepper plants, one by one, day after day until that row was almost depleted. I frantically watered what remained of them and even replanted new starts, but it was hopeless. The disappearing act played on every day like a tired television movie that I’d seen dozens of times before.
Later, as I dug near a row of eggplants, I happened to notice a pepper plant in the act of being pulled under the soil right in front of my eyes! Something was summarily dragging the plant, roots first, under the soil. Although I was furious, the humorous scene reminded me of a cartoon where Bugs Bunny was filching carrots from Elmer Fudd’s vegetable patch. “What’s up doc?” I muttered along with a heap of other expletives that aren’t fit for print. A few minutes later at my feet I spied a near-sighted, hamster-looking rodent clearing out its tunnel and kicking the dirt onto my garden clogs! He was so intent in his work, and so nearsighted, that he didn’t even notice me as I stared at him, my mouth agog.
I tried smacking him with the flat side of the shovel but he was gone in a flash. I dug up his tunnel and came to an underground cavern where all my heirloom vegetables were stored, like hay in a loft. Well, I tried every poison and smoke bomb I found at the plant store but I was just throwing away my money. The traps they sold were great at driving their spikes into the palm of my hand, but useless otherwise. Nothing worked. It was too much for me. After some forty years of gardening, I decided to give it up and eat TV dinners instead of fresh heirloom vegetables. In spite of this lovely climate, I couldn’t get anything to grow. The clever pocket gopher had me licked.
Then, last year, although it was late in the season, an inspiration hit me–raised beds. I don’t know where I got the idea–probably from a magazine article. Money was no object here. What counted was outwitting the critters, especially the pocket gophers. I started by digging down a foot deep and establishing a five-foot wide by sixteen-foot long bed. To keep out the pocket gophers, I laid down a roll of half-inch mesh galvanized hardware cloth that I bought on sale at the local home improvement center. For the sides and ends I mortared up three rows of 8 x 8 x 16-inch cinder blocks. Pocket gophers are burrowers, not climbers. The blocks were mortared only on their tops, not on their ends. I capped the whole affair off with a row of two-inch thick headers.
Then I shoveled in screened topsoil and plenty of composts. Compost holds the moisture well, keeping the soil from drying out, which is a major headache in this dry climate. To temper the sun’s harsh rays, I covered the whole affair with shade cloth. I found through trial and error that 40% shade cloth works best at my elevation, anything stronger and the plants turn out leggy. Down in the desert near Phoenix they use 70% shade cloth. Wow!
As a frame for the shade cloth I installed hoops made from half-inch PVC water pipes every four feet along the sides. To do this I drilled a series of holes with a masonry bit into the caps and stuffed the ends of the pipes into the hollow spaces of the blocks. Shade cloth was draped over the whole affair and secured by plastic clips that I ordered over the internet. Now I finally had a garden!
Shade cloth, let me tell you, is a boon to this type of gardening. As I pointed out, it not only protects the tender cultivars from literally being roasted by the sun’s rays, but shields the area from wind-born weed seeds, many insects, and cats wanting to use the place for a litter box. My greatest pleasure was to find a grasshopper the size of a marlin lure tangled in the strands of the netting. I plucked it out and dashed it against the ground and then tried to stomp on it. That amazing pest got up and hopped away. They’re that tough. No wonder locust plagues have brought down whole civilizations in ancient times.
Not every plant likes shade cloth though. For instance, once established, peppers and eggplants prefer to brave it out without the veil over their heads. Tomatoes, on the other hand, prefer the morning sun but are thankful for the afternoon shade. All of this proves that a person should yield to the needs of his little darlings. I learned this the hard way when under the shade cloth the peppers and eggplants put on an impressive display of leaves but very little fruit. Or were these nightshade berries, judging by their size? As you can see from the photos, the chard, beets, turnips, carrots, onions, lettuce, etc. sure liked it. This project turned out so successful that I built another bed–twice as long as the first one.
As the cool season stepped in to replace the summer heat, I replaced the shade cloth with greenhouse plastic. Also I replaced the summer vegetables with cool weather crops like spinach, turnips, kale, etc. I even planted mache and miner’s lettuce, as well as an assortment of lettuces, chards, onions, beets, and Asian greens. Most of the old standbys did very well during the winter when the outside temperatures got down into the twenties and even sometimes into single digits or lower. They were quite cozy under the poly wrapping as you can see from the photos.
As of this writing, I’m itching for the summer planting season to arrive. I’d like to try some exotic varieties next like sunchokes, saluyot, and winged bean plants. Arizona, with all its faults, is perfect for growing vine crops such as squash, watermelon, cantaloupe, and Armenian cucumber. I can’t wait for May to come.
As far as all the money I spent, and it was indeed substantial, I read somewhere that for every dollar invested in a garden a person can expect four dollars in return. Every day, even in the bleakest of winter weather, I was able to present a huge plastic bowl filled with fresh greens to my wife, which goes to verify that statement. Also it’s nice to gaze out of my kitchen window in the morning and see that my organic vegetables are still there in the garden, not in the bellies of javelina or elk. But my triumph over the wily pocket gopher is the greatest reward.
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