An Oasis in the Desert

My husband and I live in the desert.  For a long time we thought we would be blessed to move to somewhere green, beautiful, somewhat more wet, as my husband says "somewhere better than here". For at least the time being though, that is not the Lord's plan for us and so we have been striving to create our own little oasis in the desert.  Just as a disclaimer, pretty much the only thing that I have kept alive in my entire life are my children, everything else dies under my care or has to be given away (short stints with animals).  I simply forget to water everything...but over the last year since we bought our house, my husband has been teaching me (and doing most of the watering) how to keep plants alive. Last year we moved into our house, and this is the loveliness that we started out with.  I wish I could find the rest of the pictures that I took because it would give you a true picture of what we were working with, but this will at least give a vague idea of what our backyard looked like.  Basically this, but more and everywhere....

It's hard to make out, but that is a strange patch of bamboo in the back in the planter that we transplanted and while we were transplanting that, we found green onions mixed in with the bamboo.  Strange, but true.  But other than that, there was a lemon tree, a jujube tree, and weeds in our backyard.  So over the last year we weeded, transplanted both the jujube tree and all the bamboo, as well as transplanting grass from a friend's yard (they put rock in) into our backyard. We also planted some climbing jasmine (which I didn't take pictures of because this post will already have a kind of picture overload).

In the shade of the lemon tree we planted a grape vine last year that looks like it will be giving us grapes this year if we can figure out how to keep bugs and birds from eating all of them once they start to get bigger.  The instructions for planting the grape vine said full sunlight, but I was skeptical that was true of Vegas so I planted it so that it gets afternoon shade.  This is a picture of the beginnings of some clusters that we started seeing about a week ago.

We also planted strawberries in the shade of the lemon tree which have had many flowers over the last year, but that we have only gotten to one strawberry before the bugs or birds ate them.  The strawberries have been really tiny though.  We also planted this watermelon plant last year (accidental dropping of seeds by my kids that I covered with dirt and thought oh well if it works it works) and we got one small watermelon off of that big, long vine..  This year we planted a couple of watermelon plants and a couple of pumpkin plants in the same spot.  We're excited to see whether they grow or not.  We also plan on doing a fall planting of both to see which fares better in our weather.

Next to the jujube tree we planted a raspberry bush...plant? and are excited to see how that fares, although I am very positive we won't see any fruit until at least next year.

And on the opposite side of the jujube we planted another grape vine which is actually in full afternoon sun so we will see which one of the two grape vines fares better, full afternoon sun or no afternoon sun.  We also planted onions, beans, and peas in the shade of the jujube tree.

In these cool bucket planters we tried some summer squash, broccoli, cilantro, and green onions.  So far we have had summer squash and broccoli show up.  Although I have to admit that if I had planted broccoli in the big backyard garden I would have thought they were weeds instead of plants and pulled them out.  

And finally, this is what our bougainvillea looked like in our front yard, but it didn't work where we had put it so we transplanted it to the backyard while it still looked dead after winter killed off all of the leaves.  I will keep you posted on whether it actually lives through the transplantation.  

Basically this is our test year, see what grows and what doesn't, what works and what doesn't.  I will keep you posted on how our little oasis is doing and if everything actually pokes its head up out of the ground or if there are some things that we never end up seeing at all.