It's been a while since I have posted here, mainly due to life changes. I am still gardening. I miss chatting with everyone!

Marie, I miss you too. I don't garden really these days so have backed out of much activity here.

Kind of sad that no one seems to be around here. I have pretty much given up on checking in.

I'm admin for Garden Art and Purslane so I do check into ATP daily but there is rarely anything posted here anymore.
I'd follow your threads if you all share garned things though

I know I stopped checking in because life got crazy.
But I really mussed chatting with everyone. .

I'm new here, but I suspect you'll be hearing from me a lot. I'm so happy about my garden this year. I'm passionate about my edible landscaping. Almost everything I grow can be eaten, and believe me, I love eating stuff I have grown. I have the usual tomatoes, peppers, beans, beets, carrots, onions, etc., growing in my garden although my plots look quite bare as it is the beginning of the season. I find this time of the year both exciting and depressing.

This year, I am most excited about eggplants and sweet potatoes. I have never liked eggplants, but since my roommate likes them, I decided to jump in with both feet and get a variety of them in the hopes I find some that I like. As soon as the harvesting of them begins, I plan to spend a lot of time experimenting in the kitchen. I love fruits and vegetables and it has always bothered me that I don't like eggplants. Actually, I also don't like that common yellow squash, so if that had been my roommate's favorite, he would be on his own.

Fortunately, I do love eating spaghetti squash and mine are now growing. Yippee!

I am very passionate about sweet potatoes but haven't spent nowhere near enough time discovering new recipes. Most of the time I just eat it with some butter and brown sugar or honey. I just ordered some potato growing bags and my sweet potato slips from www.tatorman.com and can't wait until they get here.

Eating salads completely changed for me when I stopped using salad dressings and began to use just olive oil. I put a lot of herbs from my garden into my salads. I like spinach and arugula salads with a lot of fresh basil leaves. I am growing sweet basil, boxwood basil, cinnamon basil, dark opal basil, and Romanesco basil this year. I also put chives, parsley, oregano, thyme and tarragon in my salads. So yummy.

As you can tell, I love love love fresh herbs. I actually didn't even know how much I liked fresh herbs until I started growing them myself. "Fresh" herbs from the grocery store are definitely not the same. Maybe because I don't put any chemicals in my garden. I grow some herbs because they are great companion plants. Other herbs because they are great with tea and honey, like stevia, mints, bee balm, lemon balm, german chamomile, feverfew, rose hips, and whatever else I can find. My entire backyard was used mainly for growing herbs, with some also growing in the front yard.

I also love berries. Strawberries, fall gold raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, and grapes. (Although not a big fan of the red raspberries I have tried. They are just okay to me.) I have some gojiberry seeds I plan to plant and grow in large pots. I have not been able to garden for a few years, so I unfortunately forgot quite a bit, but since last spring I'm trying to get caught up again. Thanks to having a roommate that can do the heavy lifting and digging for me.

My favorite flowers are daylilies, also edible and many don't know that. I don't happen to have any now, but hope to soon. As you can tell, I have a lot of interests in the garden, so if you are around, I am often poking in the forums when I am not outside. I read just about all the forums because that is how I have learned what types of stuff to do "next" year.

Cheshirekat I grew Sweet potatoes here in Tucson several years ago . Had great success. I think potatoes are one of the most fun things to grow. You never know what surprises are growing under ground, so fun to dig up. I never really ate sweet potatoes till I grew them and found some good recipes for them.

Check into the daylily forums, lots of nice people. Especially on The Porch Swing.

Wow cheshirekat your guardian sounds amazing! I have just started adding more edibles to my garden. I have always had some but am now adding many more.
my favorite edible flower is that of the pineapple guava.

hello quietyard. Yeah, potatoes are fun to grow. I was through the roof the first time I grew potatoes. My late husband was very pessimistic about them growing because I chose to grow them in containers. I was very into containers at the time because my yard had so much shade and many of my plants I rotated in and out of the sunny areas. I didn't have many sunny areas that were good companions for potatoes, so putting them in a huge container worked out quite well. Every day that the vines were still green and healthy made me happily anticipate digging the potatoes up.

After that, I had to try sweet potatoes. I also ordered them off the internet then as well. I had a wonderful garden center near my house at the time. But their sweet potatoes would arrive much too late for me so I had to find a place on the internet that delivered. Not sure now what that place was without looking through my old receipts. But I am grateful they made the ordering process and delivery easy enough for me to always remember that experience of success when my hand came out of the dirt with a nice sweet potato.

I've been visiting the daylily forums a lot. I have some ideas where I will plant some once I get them. I'm going to hope there are some left locally when the fall nears. That was always the best time to plant daylilies so I could be like a kid when they popped up in the spring and I would anxiously await the first bloom. The first bloom would usually open for me to see on my way out the door to work. I always turned around and went back into the house to tell my husband about it. I also grew many in containers along a path in my garden. As they got bigger and bigger, they'd get moved to a spot in the ground.

Desertdenial said:Wow cheshirekat your guardian sounds amazing! I have just started adding more edibles to my garden. I have always had some but am now adding many more.
my favorite edible flower is that of the pineapple guava.

Hello there!

Well, I wish my garden was amazing. It is much too bare at the moment, but I do have a lot of stuff planted and planned that I am looking forward to harvesting. I have to look at my garden plots all the time and give all those still underground a pep talk.

Yesterday was the day I spoiled the pole beans, lima beans, and sugar snaps growing along one area of a south chain-link fence. I had to grow some kind of vine there because my neighbors on that side have a ton of weeds. It is scary to see how many of them grow right up to the edge of the fence, ready to invade my yard. Although my arugula did some invading as well and I happily dug a couple up from over there to get to the seeds I forgot to harvest last year. I have never grown beans or peas before and I'm so happy to see that they are growing well and clinging to the fence already. Next year, I'll have to try some black-eyed peas if I can find a spot to squeeze them in.

Yes, do grow some edibles! I totally enjoy any flowers that bloom in my garden, especially those that bloom with the promise of "I can EAT it!"

Hello again Chat.. I grow most every thing in pots now, mostly flowers but two pots have tomatoes. Love changing the garden around so with pots this is very doable. I am new the last couple years to daylilies. I have grown quite a few now from seed that my friend Margaret sent me from her Canadian plants. Beautiful plants that do well in Arizona. Mine are all in containers.

When I lived in a house I had so many pots/containers I lost track. They did so well in them since I could move them around to the best sun for each one. Now I have only 10 on my balcony and 2 indoors.

for the longest time I stayed away for pots but now I have an entire porch full of them.

They grow on you Marie and seem to multiply when your back is turned.

Mine seem to multiply like rabbits!

@Desertdenial, pineapple guava sounds so yummy, does it taste like pineapple? Do you top your fruit salads with it?

@boopaints, my husband used to say I was always playing musical pots in the backyard.

I started out gardening with a few flowers because it took a year for my late husband to get the backyard soil amended and tilled when we first move into our house.

The first year, we had long rows of veggies and I was in heaven. The husband was a bit bitter that the squirrels ate every last bit of corn. We didn't get one ear!

We only had the big garden for a couple years. With the heat, I tried to garden later and later at night, but it was too dark and too far away from the house. Then I just started doing everything in the front yard because we had a street light across the street. Plus I could chat with my next door neighbor out front while working in the daytime. Her husband grew veggies in the backyard while she took care of the flowers, mostly irises, in the front yard.

At one point I went back to gardening more in the back with more pots than in ground. I mostly just put the vining stuff in the ground, like squash and melon. Everything else started to get put in pots. The biggest pots were the white plastic drum found, I think, in an alley. I washed and sun dried it for over a year before the husband cut it in half for the potatoes and sweet potatoes. I felt that all my plants got much more attention in pots. I found all kinds of benches and tables for my backyard. So, I could easily chat and repot all my goodies at a comfortable height.

I'll have to dig through some old photos of stuff I used to grow.

Not a single pepper plant germinated this year from seed. So I replanted them the other day. I'm growing anaheim and serrano. Will be a bummer not having them sooner. I never had as many fails germinating in pots as I do these little grow cells. But I don't have enough pots to start seeds in. I had planned to get more pots this year, but while I was recovering from surgery, the roommate was busy outside expanding the garden and putting up a fence since we had such a mild winter and the ground stayed workable.

I have been putting the seedlings into empty water bottles with the tops cut off. I'm wondering if I have enough bottles and potting mix to start the seeds in them.

Hi, I'm fairly new to this forum, but sure would like to see our SW thread become more active. I'll do my part and visit more regularly! Count me in!

Let's get this group active again. I'm watching, but never see any posts.
Where are you all? I was just visiting at the Mid Atlantic Gardening group. Every year they have a plant swap and quite a potluck feast as well. It really looks like fun. See their menu:
The thread "Fall Swap Food Thread" in Mid Atlantic Gardening forum
I'd love to get this group active again, and maybe to plan something like a swap party in a year or two. Would anyone be interested?

Hi all,
I am a native Phoenician who moved to Washington state for 25 years, I am gardening in the southwest now. I started over in 2015 and have had success with Iris, Daylily, Canna, a couple of Echinacea, Amaryllis, Gailardia, Salvia's, Penstemon and a few other perennials. I grew leaf lettuce, radish, sweet potatoes, green onions, tomatoes, melons, and of course tomatoes. I have been watching to see if others were on this forum and I am glad to see that some are still active.
I just love plants that will grow here!!! Any other suggestions?

Hi Carla! Have you ever tried Plumerias? I grow a couple in pots, they do well in our heat if kept in filtered sun. However, they do not like frost so would need to be covered or brought in, in the cold parts of winter.