I can’t believe it has only been one week since I first posted about the garden!  In that short span of time, I’m happy to announce that we’re expecting…tomato babies!!!  Everything in both gardens (the traditional bed and the aquaponic) is growing beautifully!  The flowers are blooming and so are my allergies, but I can’t bear to not have flowers in the yard! Tomato Babies! So exciting! (aquaponic bed) So many flowers!  I think we’re going to have a great crop! (aquaponic bed) Tomatoes in the tradition garden bed Lemon Blossoms I am so excited about the baby lemon tree!  It’s so hard for me to have patience when starting with small trees.  We just planted the lemon tree last year and we harvested exactly ONE lemon this past winter!  I have high hopes for this year–the blooms are large and they smell so incredibly sweet! Pretty petunias in “wooley pocket”

Gardening in the desert southwest has its own set of challenges.  This is our second year in our home and the third growing season for our little backyard garden, and lets just say, if we were relying on our garden to feed us, we would have died long ago!  The biggest challenge with desert gardening is the extreme heat in the summer and the fact that it hardly ever rains.  Another major challenge is that we really don’t have “soil” that we can readily plant in and must amend our soil with potting soil and lots of fertilizers and nutrients.  A third issue is our very hard water that also happens to have a high pH level.   The first year, we tried growing various herbs and vegetables in containers.  We learned that we were able to easily grow basil, parsley, rosemary and oregano in our containers, but we didn’t have good luck with thyme and sage and the tomatoes we planted either didn’t fruit at all, or gave us very tiny stunted fruit that was afflicted …