Making the desert bloom

I can't grow plants for shit. I have a black thumb. My previous attempt to grow plants in the desert yielded 2 cherry tomatoes and a few puny peppers.


Our new house has two giant gardening beds with sprinkler irrigation. We decided to give gardening one more try.

We loaded up the soil with soil conditioner and planted 4 cucumber (which were labeled peppers... oh well), 2 oregano, 2 squash, 2 eggplant (one bianca, one Japanese eggplant), 2 actual peppers, one cherry tomato and 2 basil plants.

BEFORE: cucumber and oregano

After I turned on, but not off, the irrigation system over night... three times... we decided that Luke should be in charge of watering lest I drown the plants.

We planted in April and I'd say things are looking pretty damn good:

AFTER: cucumber and oregano

The cucumber are doing tremendously well. After a few weeks I decided to pull a plant that looked small and I'm glad I did, we'll be swimming in cucumber soon enough.

Although birds have been eating the blossoms off of one of the plants, we do have 2 large squash plants.

L is staking one of our peppers and one of the eggplant.

We also ended up with the largest tomato bush I've ever seen, much less grown:

 It's staked in 3 separate places and wasn't even wilting in todays 106F temps.

Even Bucket got in on the gardening fun (mainly by chewing on his hat):