greetings from beneath the mesquite

I am another non-user of social media and appreciate places like this! I am a retired agronomist (soils and forage crops) from a colder place. Moved from deep well drained, silt loam, (46" of rain each year) and composted goat manure to decomposed granite and 16" of rain(New Mexico) and now sand (12" of rain)with some degree of organic matter but oh so different! Had big gardens at one time, now just a few elevated boxes. Compost is slowly growing, breaking down nicely: made from chicken manure, wood shavings and coffee grounds. Very small scale in my elder years. Love communing with the native shrubs and trees. SO sad to see so much butchery-over-pruning of these wise ones. Y'all seem like a lovely bunch!

Welcome!
Fellow agronomist here. (See my bio)

I've got sandy "loam" which has more clay than OM. It took a couple years to figure out it was also polluted with drilling mud. So I built raised beds and filled them with locally sourced compost mixed with mulch - for water retention. I'm hoping bring in a lg mycorrhyzal community to do some remediation, as well as hook up with my garden plants.

Glad you're here!

Hi!
It's such a different ecology to work with, moving from gardening in the ground (or field) with all the existing life that has established interactions versus filling beds or boxes. Adjusting the former was for me more of a "tweaking" but now it's creating an ecosystem from scratch! I have to admit to buying bagged organic soil products to create adequate volume. I believe I have enough homemade compost for next season. Tucson is weirdly wonderful tomato growing territory. Never have I seen such hearty, robust plants and Southwestern veggies tend to be intensely flavored because of the dry climate. Produce is small, but flavor is much more important to me. The basil is insane. I never thought I'd get tired of pesto, but......We could get frost in early November, ya never know!

We have a compost pile going how much we'll have next year would only be a guess, but I'd bet it won't be near enough to top off my beds at the end of the spring crop.

I'm glad to hear all that heat is good for something. 😉
The sun here is so intense, and this is coming from someone who use to live and crew for hot air balloons in Albuquerque, that we built a cover using 70% shareholders over my first 18 beds so the plants wouldn't fry before they matured. The new 12 beds will have a structure in place should cover for them become necessary.

We're in the TX Winter Garden area and usually don't get a frost until Dec/Jan.

Hey there!

Oh you're here in Tucson? Glad to hear you've got access to chicken manure, I'll bet that helps the compost a ton. We just got a local coffee grounds source too, it's so nice to be able to turn it back into food 😃

I think you're right about the concentrated flavor here, I used to live on the East coast with 50" of rain and it felt like all that water dilutes the flavor of tomatoes and melons maybe. I didn't think about that before, but I've been really impressed with the flavor of tomatoes here too 😋

Isn't it so tough to produce enough compost to keep everything going?! I'm finding we really have to get creating about sourcing material for it. We did a drip line across our compost bays too, that's been a big help in the dry heat.

Hey @Imagardener, what did you use as the shade structure in Abq (or what are you planning on using in Texas)? We've been looking for something good to build a structure at our community garden that could cover a lot of plots, so I'm always interested to hear how folks are building theirs.

Glad you're both here!

LearnDirt, I never gardened in Alb. Here in TX we built a pergola using 4"x4" in concrete, set 12' apart. The upper frame is 2"x6" with wiggle wire channels set along the edges to hold the 70% shade cloth.
We have really vicious winds come through here, but so far it appears to be holding up.