Veggie Garden Update: Obstacle, Vegetable, Miracle

Broken sewer pipe.. not the best way to start a new project!

It's been quite some time now since I wrote my first post about our veggie garden, and it's fair to say that we've hit some pretty significant snags with the project since then. First of all, remember that broken pipe I mentioned? The one that one of us (I will not name names) smashed with a pickax? Well, that turned out to be a sewer pipe connecting our guest house to the main house. So with borrowed angle grinder in hand and a conversation with the retired plumber at Ace Hardware fresh in his mind ("You can fix it, just don't screw up and break the pipe or you'll pay thousands of dollars to replace all the outdoor plumbing on the property"), my indomitable husband approached that pipe with some trepidation. And yet... crisis averted! I wish now that I'd taken a photo of his professional repair job.

Once that was fixed, we re-buried the pipe and reconstructed our sunken beds around it. I put in a little rockwork to support the area where we had moved the most dirt around, and therefore where it was most likely to erode into the sunken beds. Then we mixed compost in with the native soil and set off on our bikes to stock up on seeds at a local nursery.

Our sunken beds, with reinforcing rockwork where we had to dig out the broken pipe.

I used rocks we already had around the yard, and created a walking surface with the flattest ones.

To start off with, we've planted carrots, cucumbers, basil, snow peas, and sweet peppers. Most of these were recommended for planting during this time of year by my desert gardening book; a few are experiments (i.e. they might die in the heat of the summer). We also used some drip irrigation tubing I had leftover from a work training to rig a gravity-fed irrigation system from our rain barrel.

Unsure of what I was doing as I planted the seeds, it occurred to me that in fact, I had never actually planted vegetables (aside from potted herbs) before. It's been my goal basically since moving to Tucson to plant a veggie garden, but school, work, and outdoorsing always seemed to get in the way until now.

I couldn't help but reflect as I buried each seed what a miracle it is that plants will, if we're lucky, spring from them. It's one of the most basic - and essential - biological functions out there, and certainly one that humans have been dependent on, well, forever. Much has been written about how disconnected we are from our food - the way it's produced, where it's produced, and the people who produce it - and it's certainly symptomatic of our larger disconnection from nature that I have now planted my first food-producing seeds at the ripe old age of thirty.

Yesterday, I got home from work tired, hungry, and a bit grouchy (for me, those things almost always go hand-in-hand), and so I was somewhat annoyed when J insisted that he had something important to show me outside. But he really did:

Snow pea

Cucumber

Carrot

Veggie Garden Groundbreaking

Yesterday, we finally broke ground on our sunken veggie beds! This is the first in a whole series of permaculture/urban homesteading/water harvesting projects we're planning to do around the house. With new pickax in hand, we took to the yard with plans to dig two sunken rows.

Sunken veggie beds make more sense than raised beds in arid climates, because they capture rainwater as well as make better use of the water that irrigates them, because they retain it longer. The sunken beds also create a small microclimate that protects plants from the wind and hot sun, forces that become especially brutal during the summer. (For more information on drylands gardening and water harvesting, check out local guru Brad Lancaster's website and books, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volumes 1 and 2.) We are just starting to apply these principles around our home (which we hope to transition into a homestead), and I use them all the time at work.

We finished digging the first row yesterday, and made a plan to finish the next one today. After a leisurely morning, we meandered out to the yard, and no sooner had we swung the pickax than the unthinkable happened: it started to rain. J had just read yesterday that, assuming we didn't get any rain today, Tucson would have gone the entire month of January without it, and apparently the winter rain gods were listening, because a downpour commenced. Not that I'm complaining - we'll take it whenever we can get it - but it was pretty funny that we hadn't even considered the possibility that it might rain - even when we looked outside and saw black storm clouds gathering over the western mountains.

So we made a trip to the nursery and hardware store instead, and by the time we got home, the sun was shining and we were ready to go. We had lunch, relaxed a bit, and headed back outside, where the clouds had once again gathered and it proceeded to rain some more! Sometimes what nature is telling you is that actually, it's a really good day to go inside, change into your pajama pants, drink tea, and watch multiple episodes of Dexter while snuggled on the couch with the kitties, and that your gardening plans, however noble, will have to wait.

To be continued...

Disclaimer: It didn't take long during the excavation of our first sunken bed for me to realize that it was not a good idea to proceed without having the property Blue Staked - that is, marked for all utilities. I have a tendency to jump headlong into these things without really thinking, but in this case, I don't recommend doing that! We did hit an old clay pipe of some kind, but luckily it doesn't appear to be in use anymore. When we hit what I believe is probably a water line while digging out the second bed, we decided to hold off on digging until we get the utilities marked.