Learn how to plant onion sets and why interplanting or companion planting deters pests.
Planting Onion Sets and a Bit About Interplanting
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How to Plant Leeks
Leeks are a great addition to your Fall desert garden. They are hard to get to come from seed here in the desert since they need cool soil to germinate, and they need a very long growing season. Check out these tips for planting leeks!
New Potatoes
You might remember this post about how I experimented with growing potatoes in blue Ikea bags. This is an older video taken at the end of May when I dug my first bag of potatoes and found not one…but then I found some new potatoes in the other bags. Sorry that I am just now getting around to posting it, but I have been in a heat induced stupor for about a month. Thought this might be fun to watch a video of when it was simply hot at the end of May rather than deathly hot like it is now in July!
Mother Hen and Her Chicks
Here is a little peek inside the life of Coco, our mother hen and her three sweet little fuzz balls!
The Hatching
The day had finally come and boy were we excited! Get ready for the most chaotic video in the history of Cultivating Dust…
We started hearing peeping coming from the eggs on Friday, and this video was taken the next day on Saturday. By late Friday night, that egg had started to pip, so we knew that hatching would be soon! The first chick, Tootsie, hatched in the middle of the night sometime.The fluffy chick in the video, we found under mama hen when we woke up at dawn on Saturday morning.
What?!? What's that we hear under Coco? And why is there broken egg-shell in the nest?!?
I see a fluffy little head and beak sticking out!
Look what we found!
Working on coming out!
Pushing harder!
Hatching is hard work. A tired wet chick pops out of the egg! It's sibling says, "Hi!"
Hi! My name is Brownie!
The last egg has begun to pip!
Push!
Yeah!! Meet Puddle!
By the end of the day on Saturday, all 3 chicks had hatched and were fluffy and active! It was such a fun experience!
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The 5 “P’s” of Hatching*:
1. Peeping- you begin to hear peeping from inside the egg, and may see or feel the egg shimmy.
2. Pipping- this is where the chick pecks a tiny hole in the egg from the inside. This is the point of no return for the hatch similar to when a woman’s water breaks. Mama hen may help a bit and make the hole a bit bigger.
3. Pecking- the chick slowly spins its body inside the egg and pecks all around the circumference of the egg. This is exhausting to the chick, but it is very important that we don’t help them. This physical exertion is vital to their future survival.
4. Popping- after the chick has pecked through the entire egg, it pushes its way out until the egg pops open and the chick falls out!
5.) Pooping- once the chick has dried and become fluffy, it will start to become active, eat, drink and eventually poop. This is the final step to knowing that “all systems are go” for the new hatchling!
*The 5 “P’s” of Hatching were taught to us by our friend Jean who has taught us so much, and also gave us these fertile eggs that Coco sat on to hatch! Thanks Jean.
Candleing Eggs
When a hen is sitting on a clutch of eggs, the last thing you want to have happen is for a rotten egg to explode under her and soil her and all the other eggs. Eggs can become rotten during a hatch either because they were never fertile to begin with and never developed, or because they were fertile and started to develop, but the embryo died for whatever reason. During the process, bacteria can get into the egg and start to form gasses that eventually cause the egg to rupture.
Exploding rotten egg=no fun.
They way that you can avoid this is to candle your eggs. This is sort of like an egg “ultrasound” to allow you to see if an egg is developing or not. It takes some practice, but at about day 15, it should be very obvious which eggs are developing and which aren’t and you should be confident enough at that time to discard any eggs with no development.
You will need a strong LED flashlight, and you will want to do this at night. It will probably make mama hen very nervous, so you will want to work swiftly, but carefully so that you don’t crack any eggs. To candle the eggs hold them horizontally in one hand and use the other hand to put the flashlight behind the egg. You will need to wrap your hand around the bulb area of the flashlight to seal any light from escaping out the sides and force all the light to shine into the egg.
A developing egg.
This egg has a chick in it. The light part is the air sack and the darkness is the chick! I candled the night prior to taking this picture and I could see the chick moving and the heart beating. Tonight they’ve grown so much they can’t move!
Developing egg from another angle.
This is another developing egg. If you were seeing it with your own eyes, you would see blood vessels and a bit of slow squirming. When they get this developed, just like a human baby, they have a hard time moving around.
This egg is not developing either because it was infertile or not viable.
By contrast, this is one of Coco’s eggs that isn’t developing. You can see through it completely because the embryo doesn’t block any light. You cannot see a pronounced air sack. If you were to candle an egg from your refrigerator, it would look similar to this.
Keep in mind, that I started candleing eggs at about day 15 of a 21 day gestation period and then candled periodically up to hatching. If you candle earlier, you won’t see as distinct a contrast between developing and undeveloped eggs. I waited until the differences were very obvious and I felt sure about discarding the undeveloped eggs.
This candleing was done just a few days before hatching, and in my next post, we will show a video and some photos of the hatch!
Breaking a Broody Hen
Since this video was filmed, Coco, the hen in the cage was released from solitary confinement still broody. It looks like for her, this method wasn’t effective, although she was only in for 2 days. I spoke with a friend of mine who has kept hens a long time, and she suggested I just try to let her hatch out some fertile eggs. She keeps roosters so her eggs are all fertile. She let me take that day’s fertile eggs, so Coco is happily sitting on her clutch! I have candled the eggs, and several are developing nicely, so we should have chicks in a few weeks!
Coco's Fertile Clutch of Eggs
A quiet nest for Coco.
She's such a cute little Mommy in waiting!
After we let Coco sit on her clutch, another one of our hens Noodle, decided that she also wanted to sit on eggs…in fact, she wanted to sit on Coco’s eggs. With her. In the same nest. That wasn’t going to happen, so Noodle went into “solitary” and after 4 days (I know, it killed me to keep her in there that long) she has come out and has no interest in sitting on eggs anymore. The verdict? It seems to work sometimes, and maybe I just didn’t leave Coco long enough. Definitely something to try!
Growing Blueberries in the Desert Garden
Did you know you can grow blueberries in the desert? You can if you follow these three non-negotiable rules.
1.) You must plant Southern Highbush varieties (there are many.) These are low enough chill and will be heat tolerant enough to survive. Even some “low chill” varieties may reqire more chill hours then you get. In Phoenix proper, you need to look for varieties that are under 350. The lower, the better.
2.) You can never plant them in the ground. They are a container plant only and even then they require an acidic soil mixture with lots of peat moss and soil sulfer. No native desert soil. They require an pH of 4.5-5.5. Native soil here is about an 8. No matter how much you ammend our soil, it will never be acidic enough for long enough to keep the berry bush healthy and thriving. Remember, berry bushes are a long term plant. You want many, many years of production out of them. You might get a bush to live in the native soil for a season, but it will die eventually. Alright, enough about that.
3.) They are very sensitive to nitrate based nitrogen fertilizer. It will kill them quick. Be very sure you know the origin of any nitrogen in fertilizer and be sure the soil mixture you use doesn’t have any added in.
Watch your plants for heat and sun stress. Move them where they will get plenty of shade in the hottest part of the summer. This is an advantage to container plants, you can move them whenever you need to. Dave Wilson Nursery has a very helpful page about raising blueberries in a desert environment. Follow thier advice to the letter and you should be sucessful. Enjoy your blueberries!
First Time Gardeners| Maria’s Garden
I am doing a short little series here on the blog about first time gardeners. These posts will be different in that they won’t include a video. Instead, we’ll share photos and information about several first time gardeners who all have started their gardens in different ways and for different reasons. Hopefully, you’ll see a little of yourself in their stories.
Maria’s Garden
Maria and I have been friends for several years now. She and I have daughters the same age and we have found that rare blessing in that we are great friends, our kids are great friends, and our husbands are great friends. We often travel on vacation with them and they are truly a treasure. Maria is the type of person that, when she decides to do something, she goes for it. She doesn’t spend a lot of time hemming and hawing over details, she simply jumps in with both feet.
She recently expressed interest in starting a vegetable garden, and so on one of our “playdates” I looked over her area to determine what the best site was for a garden. They live in a beautiful neighborhood at the foot of the Phoenix Mountain Preserve, but one challenge is that there is a layer of granite about a foot down all over their property. When the pool was dug, and their citrus trees planted, the workers had to use jack hammers to get through the granite in order to dig. Now, she has a great pool, a few citrus trees and an awesome putting green in her backyard, but not a ton of usable gardening space.
That’s when I had a revelation. Anyone who has ever told me, or written to me saying that they want to garden but just don’t have the space, you have lost your last excuse.
Enter, the Earthbox. A self watering, self fertilizing garden in a box. You wouldn’t believe how much you can grow in one of these little babies!!
Plotting out the plants...
She chose to buy the trellis attachment for her Earthbox so that we could train the cucumbers that we planted up the trellis.
The Earthbox is on casters, so it can roll anywhere you want it. You simply fill it with soil per the directions, make a trench for the fertilizer (you can use organic,) cover the fertilizer with soil, and plant your veggies. Then, you fill the reservoir with water everyday and plants get just the amount of water and fertilizer that they need. You can’t overfill the reservoir because any excess comes out the overflow slot. One important piece of information for Arizona/desert gardeners is DO NOT use the plastic mulches that come with the Earthbox! They will turn the Earthbox into an oven and fry your plants. Now, you know how much I love mulching, so it pains me to say this, but the plastic mulch that makes all the difference for gardeners in cooler climates, will ruin your success in the desert. I think if you used a natural mulch like woodchips or straw, you wouldn’t have a problem, but the plastic is too much.
In Maria’s Earthbox garden, we planted 1 yellow pear cherry tomato, zucchini, asian cucumbers, sweet basil, chives, thyme, cilantro and jalapeno’s. All of that in about 2 1/2 sq. ft.!!! A tip for making it easier to plant nursery starts into your Earthbox (you can grow from seed directly in the container if you want,) is to swish the roots of the plants gently in a bucket of water to wash off all the soil so that they are easier to fit into the compact space. All the plants can thrive in close quarters because the Earthbox design allows all the plants to get all the water and nutrients they need! A productive garden in a small, portable space. No excuses people!
Almost done planting!
I have owned an Earthbox for 2 years now and love it. I bought one when we lived in our condo so that I could scratch my gardening itch and provide some fresh produce for my family during that time. Now that I live on a larger property, the Earthbox still provides a reliable harvest every season.
Maria and I both bought our Earthboxes locally at Summer Winds Nursery in order to save on shipping cost. They cost around $60 and include the fertilizer and dolomite (a calcium supplement to prevent blossom end rot,) so I think it is a good value. The trellis attachment is an extra cost, but it is very easy to use and assemble. There are plenty of plans to make your own self watering containers on the internet if you are so inclined, but sometimes its nice to have a pre-packaged, aesthetically pleasing product. Remember, your Earthbox will last many seasons, so the cost is mitigated the longer you use it! I had so much fun planting Maria’s garden with her and her munchkins, I can’t wait to watch it grow and produce!
(I have no affiliation or financial arrangement with Earthbox. The opinions I share about their product are my own, established over several seasons of use. If Earthbox would like to advertise on my site or send me free stuff, I wouldn’t complain.)
Here are Maria’s answers to the questions I asked
Maria’s answers:
Have you ever grown vegetables before? I have never grown veggies before or anything else for that matter.Why did you decide to start a garden this season? I decided to start a garden as I have changed my eating habits and introduced more of a raw food diet in my life. What are you most looking forward to harvesting from your garden? I can’t wait for the cucumbers, tomatoes and jalapeno to sprout:) What tips would you give another first time gardener? I look forward to reading the tips that others will post for 1st time gardeners:)
Ain't she purdy?
For more posts from first time gardeners, click here.
First Time Gardeners| Abbi’s Garden
I am doing a short little series here on the blog about first time gardeners. These posts will be different in that they won’t include a video. Instead, we’ll share photos and information about several first time gardeners who all have started their gardens in different ways and for different reasons. Hopefully, you’ll see a little of yourself in their stories.
Abbi’s Garden:
Abbi is a lifelong friend of mine. Our parents were friends before either of us were born. We grew up going to the same church and we graduated from the same highschool. I was a bridesmaid in Abbi’s wedding and we have remained close as we have both had our children.
Abbi has four children under 6 years old, so needless to say, she has a lot on her plate. She and I had chatted back and fourth on Facebook brainstorming ways that she could start a garden at home with minimal effort and expense. They had moved into their current house not long ago and were still familiarizing themselves with it. Up until recently, she had focused her energy on getting settled and organized inside the house, but spring was tugging at her heart so while she was waiting and gathering materials to build a small raised bed, she decided to pull some weeds in an area of her sideyard and found this:
She'd had a garden all along. It was simply growing a crop that was undesireable (weeds.)
She discovered three of these beds in her sideyard under the weeds. They already have nice ammended soil and an automatic drip system! Score.
Abbi is organized, calculated and research driven. Before she began planting, she wanted to make sure that she laid out her garden in a way that maximized her space and allowed for continued harvest. She used GrowVeg.com to plan her garden layout and cross referenced the suggested plants for zone 9 against the Urban Farm planting calendar that is linked on the sidebar of this blog. You can’t always trust Zone 9 planting recommendations in Phoenix because of our extreme heat, so I always recommend that desert gardeners double check their planting dates against a local source.
Once her plan was complete, Abbi and her kids planted some seeds and a few transplants into their new garden!
I love how she labeled her newly seeded veggies with river rocks and a Sharpie!
And, a few weeks in, many of her seeds have sprouted and are starting their journey towards harvest!
The baskets protect little Zuchini seedlings from the neighborhood squirrel. Everything is off to a great start!
Here are Abbi’s answers to the questions that I asked all of my first time gardeners:
Have you ever grown vegetables before? No, this is my first garden. Why did you decide to start your garden this season? I needed something else to do. Just kidding. I thought it would be a good experience and something fun to do with my girls. Also, I’m looking forward to eating from my own garden. What are you most looking forward to harvesting from your garden? Zucchini or watermelon. Probably watermelon. If you could give first time gardeners one tip, what would it be? Square foot gardening is the easiest method. Row planting is not.
To see more from other first time gardeners, click here.