Home grown broccoli harvested from our organi raised garden bed

Broccoli harvest, March 2011

Just harvested our home grown broccoli, which turned out to be a little over one pound!

Our first flower on the pea plants!

Flower on our pea plant!

Jan. 21st, 2011

Picture of our first potato growing!

So check out our very firt potato growing in our garden!

I planted this a few weeks back just to see what would happen...well it grew :)

I'm looking forward to planting some more potatoes very soon. I was able to locate some pototes called Yukon Gold and another potato that I can't recall the name at this time but, was a really cool purple color. I have heard great things about the Yukon Gold potatoes.

Cauliflower picture as promised - Fresh from the garden cauliflower

So here it is, the picture of our first cauliflower!

Looks pretty decent as far as I can tell. The plant was not the least bit affected by the mid 20 degree temps we have been having. In fact, the leaves of the cauliflower plants are looking better than ever since we've had this cold weather.

First signs of cauliflower!!!

Took a stroll trhough the garden yesterday and was amazed to see a great looking cauliflower head growing!

This is the first time I've grown cauliflower which is why this is so exciting!

Image to follow soon!

Bell pepper just starting to grow

It has been almost 2 months since we started the garden, Oct. 22, 2010, and we already have some great looking tomatoes, swiss shard, spinache, sun flowers and a few others.

Enjoy this image of what looks like our first green bell pepper!

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.

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.

A couple images of our newly planted raised gardens

I plan on taking better pictures and some video of our raised garden beds, however this is all I have at this time. We used some paint sticks to label our seed rows for fun and because we had so many left over from our interior house painting project.

This our smaller raised garden bed, it is half the size of our second raised garden bed. Notice the newly added metal stakes on the outside of the raised bed, they are 36" concrete stakes that have six or seven holes pre-drilled into them which made it great for driving screws into the raised bed frame. Without these large metal stakes the bed would surely bow out and eventually break open!

This our larger raised garden bed which is 10' x 3' x 18". Here you can see the paint stir sticks used as plant and seed markers for the time being.

Finished adding the soil to our raised garden beds!!!

We have finally finshed adding the soil to our raised garden beds! I was able to locate some looking anf feeling garden soil mix at a local yard. Can you believe we needed almost 10,000 pounds of soil!!!

I will upload a bunch of photos soon with all the information as to what I added to our garden soil mix. As for now,  I'm installing the soaker hose and will be adding seeds, plants and flowers in the next few days. The best thing about our timingwas that we were hit with a lot of rain last night which thoroughly soaked our raised gardens! Could'nt ask for anything better than that :)

Well stay posted for the pictures of our Arizona raised garden beds!

Real Fact #730 from Snapple

When you drink a Snapple ice tea, you get these cool "Real Facts" under tha cap of each bottle. Like this one that is perfect for our garden blog:

"Real Fact" #730
The fear of vegetables is called Lachanophobia.

Interesting don't you think!?!?

Starting some seeds indoors

Starting seeds indoors in our super sleek egg cartons. Placed in a East facing window for morning sun.

We have a bucnh of everything in here, which means I forgot and have nothing to type :)

This was taken about a week ago and today I could see waht looks like green breaking through one of them!

Most likely we have another 6 weeks of extreme heat, then it's off to the races as far as growing good food goes.

A few more peppers and a carrot for fun!

Here we picked a few of the peppers,(Anaheim & Jalapenos), hanging around and we just had to pull another carrot! They are so full of flavor!

I know, I know, the carrot is super small, lol, but it still tastes so good!

Look at this little carrot!!!

We threw a bunch of carrot seeds in a small container on the North/West side of our yard I think in March? Well we thought we should give one a pull and see whats been going on all this time. We were pretty happy with the findings, especially with all this heat and where they are located! I also recently read that you can take the carrot tops and mix them with various other wild flowers and even the top of new tumbleweeds growing in the yard and make a delicious salad! The things I've discovered since gardening amaze me more and more each day!

You will also notice the new logo design on this image :) 

I think I like this logo the best so far.

The start of the Arizona Sunshine Garden Project

Welcome to the beginning of the Arizona Sunshine Garden Project!

You'll soon be reading and viewing images about our Arizona garden adventure in which we have started from scratch, with very little gardening knowledge at all. A vision of eating our own home grown, chemical free food peeked our interest and we took off running...

Maybe not the most enjoyable time to plan and build a garden, but what else is there to do mid June in Arizona, lol!

I didn't care about a little hard work and sweat, I wanted to start eating fresh, great tasting produce as soon as possible. The few peppers and tomatoes we had always grown tasted so good, but it always seemed that life got in the way and we went back to the fast food preparation of microwaves and drive-thru's so quickly; not this time however!

Follow our journey and please feel free to comment and ask questions as this helps all of us find answers.

Happy Harvest!!!