Frost and freeze plant damage in our Arizona landscape - January 2011

Cold frame images for the small raised garden

Here is our completed cold frame for the frost cloth during the winter. I will also use this for the shade cloth during the summer months.

I've only had to use this once for a frost and it worked great. It was very easy to drape the frost cloth over this structure.

Here you can see how I used rebar inside the 1/2" pvc to keep the pvc pipe from bending.

This image shows the use of pvc caps on the 1/2" pvc pipe frame. I drilled a hole just below the cap to run the wire through. If you do not use a cap, the frost and/or shade cloth will tear from the tops of the pvc pip; they are sharp.

Raised garden frost coth frame with landscsape wire, pvc and rebar - Part 1 of 2

A video showing our raised garden bed frost cloth frame for our Arizona winter garden. Very simple and easy to make.

Alfalfa hay added to the top of our raised garden beds in Arizona

A few days back I added a top dressing of alfalfa hay to our raised garden beds here in Arizona. Since we are leaving our hot temps, sort of, the cool nights will be here soon and the alfalfa hay around the plants will act like a blanket of sorts for our plants. It also adds some nutrients to the soil as it breaks down as well as adding a cool look to the entire raised garden bed. I plan on covering these raised garden beds with frost cloth when the real winter weather gets here.

Here are a few photos:

 This our larger of the two raised garden beds. The large empty looking space closest to us has a lot of herbs, however, yesterday I added a lot of flowers in this area to help bring in the beneficial insects.

The dark brown color of the soil to the left of the raised bed is not run-off or run-under from the raised bed, however, it is from spraying the hose. When our rain barrels are set up I hope to eliminate using the hose from the house and use only stored rain water.

 This is our smaller of the two raised garden beds.

Another picture of our smaller raised garden bed and our wine barrel with some wild flowers and other great looking flowers.

So many seeds sprouting in our garden

The heat here in Arizona has been on a steady increase for some reason. Nothing record breaking, but still way above average. While checking the saoker hose in our raised garden beds today, I noticed a lot of seeds have started to sprout. Both our wild flower and our vegetable seeds are doing extremly well as far as I can tell. I've noticed the sun flowers, peas, corn, lettuce,spinach, lima beans and a few others have broken through the top soil to see the sun!

I hope to have some images to share with you in a day or so.