About

What do you get when you transplant¹ a gardener from the mild West Coast to Flagstaff, AZ, where it's high and dry² and cold and windy and snowy with occasional forest fires and floods and terrible soil?

a. A lot of dead plants.

b. A frustrated gardener who almost gave up her favorite hobby.

c. More dead plants.

d. All of the above.

If you chose (d), congratulations, you win a prize! What's the prize? How about a dead plant? I have lots of those.

I moved here almost three years ago, and I really did almost give up gardening. My previous gardening experiences were in Portland, OR, and Southern California, both of which are gardening paradises.³ I read about gardening here, I talked to co-workers, I talked to nursery staff, I even talked to master gardeners at the local home and garden show. It can be done, they said, but it's hard. I heard phrases like, "late frosts," "drying winds," and "short growing season." But I'm stubborn, so I tried. My first year kill list would make Ted Bundy proud: several fruit trees, about 20 raspberry starts, about a dozen strawberry starts, and I can't remember how many perennials. I did manage to grow tomatoes, but I had to ripen them all indoors. Short growing season, y'know.

I got more selective in Year 2, buying stuff that was better suited to the climate and taking the time to amend the soil. My kill list got longer, and I still had to ripen my tomatoes indoors.

Which brings us to 2016, the year I almost gave up. "I'll have to find another hobby," I told my husband. "I love Flagstaff, but gardening just isn't working out." My resolve lasted till June, when a trip to the East Coast reminded me that the color green is a thing that is supposed to exist in a garden. I came back with new resolve. I bought about $50 of vegetable starts the day after I got home and planted them. Three hours later, all but three were toast. Yep. Really. A plague of grasshoppers had eaten them down to nubs. I stomped around the house, demanding a flamethrower and a tactical nuke (yep, really). My husband suggested something slightly less drastic: pesticides. And so, for the first time in a couple decades, I used a pesticide other than slug bait (I did live in Portland for 14 years. The slugs there will eat your garden and then start on your house.  They would probably eat a tactical nuke too.).

I bought more veggie starts and hauled truckloads of manure. A few things grew once I got the hoppers under control. I hauled more manure. More stuff grew. We went on a local garden tour, and I discovered that it is actually possible to grow stuff here. I designed a kitchen garden. My husband stared at me when I showed him pictures of what I wanted to build. He said, "But the gardens in those pictures are green, and this is Flagstaff." I ignored him and soldiered on. He stifled his comments⁴ and helped me build it. I probably should have made the tagline for this blog, "I will not be deterred," because that's pretty much the theme for gardening in Flagstaff. I hope you'll stop by every now and then to see how I'm doing in my battles with fire, flood, wind, snow, and grasshoppers. We gardeners are a determined lot.

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1. Heh, heh. "Transplant." "Gardener." See what I did there?
2. Note for the uninitiated: That is a Def Leppard reference. If you hang around here very long, you'll get used to those.
3. Is "paradises" a word? Well, it is now.
4. Wanna know how my husband and I have managed to stay married for 25 years? This is why. He's a very tolerant man.