The Gardening Journey So Far

My gardening journey started with a backyard in a home that we were renting in Tucson in 2007. I believe a family member (probably my wife) provided me with a gift certificate to Burpee seeds. My first spring garden consisted of nice rows of plants including spinach, lettuce, beets, carrots, Brussel sprouts, sunflowers, regular cucumbers and some zucchini. The next season, I believe that I planted some Yellow Desert King Watermelon and some cantaloupe that came from seed of a store-bought cantaloupe. While the plants generally did okay. I learned that I could not transplant cucumbers well and I learned that desert soil needs more than a little amending. 

Around the same time as I began gardening, I felt the need to be able to interact with other gardeners. The Tucson Organic Gardeners became my place to “talk garden” and learn from others about how to effectively grow a variety of vegetables and flowers. I learned so much during that time. Additionally, while living in southeastern Tucson, I happened to be hoeing my front yard on a windy day and contracted Valley Fever, which continues with me to this day. 

My children picking peas in a  portion of the winter garden

My son with a Striped Armenian (Painted Serpent) Cucumber

After we moved from the southeast end of Tucson to the east, I began to build a new garden. This new garden would no longer have only native soil in it, but instead it would consist of primarily compost made with any easily acquired organic materials I could get my hands on along with some sifted native soil. Being a teacher on a single income in southern Arizona supporting a family of four mandated that the primary materials for my compost had to be free. Some of the materials that were incorporated into my compost included leaves, coffee grounds, shredded paper, horse manure, and anything else I could find. I began with a winter garden along a south-facing block wall. I removing the dirt and put cement blocks around it as a border. It worked beautifully well for the winter, but in the summer even the Armenian cucumbers, a heat-loving vegetable I had recently begun to love working with, displayed symptoms of stress from the radiant heat the south-facing wall would emit. 

Another son and a carrot in front of a winter garden.

In order to deal with the issues of a hot south-facing wall and to better provide an ideal place to grow my fruiting vegetables, I picked a location near the center of our yard, next to a shed, to dig out my summer garden. Given our indigent situation, a used playset and the dirt I removed from the summer garden became the cherished material of endless hours of entertainment for our children. 

Part of my Tucson Winter Garden

Our children with some sweet potatoes

Around 2011 I began blogging and became acquainted with other types of Armenian cucumbers. Soon thereafter, I met up with one of my very best friends, Guiseppe. Through him and Angelo of the AmiciDell’Orto (friends of the Garden) blog I discovered, then grew seeds of, an ever increasing number of heat-loving carosello cucumbers. Over the next couple years my collection of varieties increased and I began to recognize the need for more of these heat-loving vegetables to be offered to people throughout North America.

My Tucson Summer Garden

After nearly a decade of living in Arizona, the desert climate took a toll on my body. Despite my best efforts, I would often suffer from heat exhaustion and reoccurring symptoms of Valley Fever. Finally in the spring of 2014, near the end of a particularly stressful school year, my body nearly gave out. Dealing with intense stress and demands from all areas of my life, I experienced a heat stroke-type event while going on a hike. It was horrendous. From then on my body changed. I was no longer able to deal with heat, my body would no longer sweat normally and I would be in bed feeling sick multiple times a week. To further complicate matters, my Valley Fever flared up and I was becoming less able to support my family. Given my deteriorating health, things were likely to get much worse unless our family did something soon.

While we did have some very good things happening around the end of our time in Arizona (my seed business and the graduation of my wife with two teaching credentials) the majority of the my last school year was spent determining where we needed to go and preparing to move. With employment secured for the fall of 2015, I finished up work on the house while my family moved out to stay with family in Colorado. After selling our home and moving to the area around Fairfield, California, I grew a very small garden with a couple types of cucumbers and tomatoes in a rental home until we could afford to purchase a house in a more favorable location.

A blurry picture of my first CA cucumber

The decision to purchase the home we moved into in 2016 was really difficult for me. The only garden area available was very small and I nearly cried as I started shoveling out a little garden space where cats had been. A gentleman who worked for a local landfill provided me the unimaginable service of dropping off 10 yards of compost onto my driveway and within a couple years I had a garden going strong. 

As great as the service rendered by the gentleman was, I soon discovered a problem. It didn’t take long to realize that the number of rare cucumber varieties that I needed to grow was far greater than I had the space for. And space was not the only limiting factor. The fact that most all of the varieties that I needed to grow were the same species of plant (Cucumis melo) meant that I had to grow in multiple plots that were spaced far enough apart to avoid crossing. 

Over time, friends and church members agreed to allow me space to grow my plants in. It has been a huge blessing to be able to grow in these plots, even if only for a few years. Through friends and acquaintances, I slowly began to acquire more and more unique cucumber varieties. Sometimes I would stumble on a new variety and other times I would slowly work to build friendships in order to eventually be privileged with helping to steward a cultivar. Of note were the years of work required to find the Meloncella Fasciata di Salento or Striped Carosello Leccese. This was an extremely difficult variety to acquire seeds of and, other than the one source that I acquired them from in 2019, I have never had another Italian source offer me seed of anything like it. 

Throughout the time we have lived in Fairfield, I have been grateful recipient of those who have lent a little of their land to me, or allowed me to at least have a small raised bed on their property. There has been an ebb and flow in the number of plots available to me and I am currently losing access to several gardens. As time has passed, the energy I have to maintain these gardens has decreased and - other than cover crops - I rarely get around to doing any winter garden, preferring low-maintenance perennials during the winter months. 

 

The Scientific Gardener with his dad. 

Growing out plants, saving seed and selling the seed I grow has kept me so busy that I rarely have time or energy for much else in the garden sphere. That being said, I have been able to maintain a sufficient presence on social media enough to provide me with some much-needed publicity to maintain enough business to keep my seed shop going.