DesertChris' High Desert Extreme Gardening Glog

Sanarda · Jun 3, 2013

Dang Chris! That is some serious stuff in all those vids. I cant complain about a little bit of heat and rain when your dealing with wild fires and hurricane forced winds. Just crazy......

koskorgul · Jun 3, 2013

Clicked like but dont like how close the fire is to ya. Stay safe.
My little brother went through the whole fire thing last year in colorado springs. Fire was about 2 blocks from his ex wifes and kids house before it finally started to get under control.

DesertChris · Jun 3, 2013

koskorgul said:
Clicked like but dont like how close the fire is to ya. Stay safe.
My little brother went through the whole fire thing last year in colorado springs. Fire was about 2 blocks from his ex wifes and kids house before it finally started to get under control.

Luckily, the leading edge of the fire is maybe 10 miles west of us, and was heading north....the firefighters have it 40% contained now. Thank goodness the wind was from the south, and not the usual wind from the west, or it would have been aimed right at us.
Mainly for us it is the smoke in the air that sucks, but one of the kids' friend's family home was burned to the foundation

Wow, 2 blocks is waaaay to close....

Sanarda said:
Dang Chris! That is some serious stuff in all those vids. I cant complain about a little bit of heat and rain when your dealing with wild fires and hurricane forced winds. Just crazy......

It is usually quite a challenge to garden here, but this year has so far been even more so....
We went from colder weather to hotter weather in the blink of an eye.
More wind than usual, and higher wind speeds...
And fires (which were expected due to zero rainfall in a long time).

My peppers seem to be in a super slow growth holding pattern right now.
They will take off eventually though.
But the tomatoes are growing nicely

The freakish wind and then triple digit weather and then wind again, has put the hurt on garden #3, the red bhut garden.
All 93 of the plants from seeds Meinchoh sent me look good.
Pepperlover.com plants were laid to waste....maybe 10/26 might survive.
The Canadian Express plants were hardest hit, maybe 20-30 out of 101 might make a comeback.
I will leave the stems in there to see how many put out new growth, some already are, but some stems look wilted beyond recovery.

Anyway.... that's why I started with so many....the red bhut garden can take a 100 plant massacre, and still have way too many plants for what I need.

Figure a possibly conservative, but hopeful, estimate of 100 plants with 50 pods each, still makes 5,000 pods.... I would have to eat 15 pods a day to use them in a year....lol
Figure 25 pods per plant, and I still would have to eat 7.5 red bhuts every day for a year....
And that is just the one variety of pepper plants

StupidJerk said:
Looking great.

Have you ever watched any of the Greening the Desert videos? If you ever decide you want to stay up there, desert permaculture might be something to look in to.

I'll have to check those out.
But we are renting this house, and want to get the heck out of this place in a couple years when the twins graduate from school.
We have discussed Georgia quite a bit, but the more I think about it, the more I think we should go to the tropical zone and become Ramone's neighbors....lol

RocketMan said:
Man, sure does remind me of when I lived in Abilene, TX. Had a friend leave his car parked in the middle of the student parking lot during Spring Break one year and when we got back there wasn't a single bit of paint left on it but for one side and the windows were all frosted except for the one side. That west Texas wind don't play around.

Wow, I haven't seen a car stripped like that yet.
The sand here is pretty powdery, so not as bad as if it was large granules of sand flying around at high speed.
But the sun, wind, sand etc... does damage paint pretty badly here.... Tons of cars under, 10 years old, around here with awful paint (including ours...lol)

KiNGDeNNiZ · Jun 4, 2013

horrible... thats the one problem we have in socal.. brush fires... hope things get better there

koskorgul · Jun 7, 2013

Ok Chris seen you have been online but no new updates.
Everything ok out there man

DesertChris · Jun 7, 2013

KiNGDeNNiZ said:
horrible... thats the one problem we have in socal.. brush fires... hope things get better there

Yep, that is definately the one downside of it....and here it is heat and wind..... and rabbits and squirrels...lol

koskorgul said:
Ok Chris seen you have been online but no new updates.
Everything ok out there man

Yep, everything is ok here.
Fire is pretty much out

Peppers seem to be in a stalled growth time. So not much going on there.
The Red Bhut Garden is interesting. 3 strains of red bhuts...
The strain from Meinchoh are all looking great. (93/93 plants)
The strain from pepperlover.com are nearly wiped out (maybe 10/26 that could survive)
The straim via the canadian express were decimated.... (maybe a couple will survive out of 101}
So I moved the stems of those 2 varieties over to one half of each of their 6 rows, and planted a big bag of garbanzo beans on the now open half of each of those 6 rows.

It has been too hot to work on gardens #2, & #4, so not much happening there, except tons of the sprawling plants for #4 have germinated in cups of soil (pumpkin, squash, cukes, beans) so i'll have to finish the preparations for #4 soon.
The chinense plants are stalled in growing right now, so I have some time to finish preparing garden #2 for them.

Yep, that's about it....

koskorgul · Jun 7, 2013

Glad to hear that the fire is pretty much done for.

Sorry to hear about all the plants being wiped out, ouch, that has got to suck. I had 2 that didnt make it and I hated to pull them. Have another that is really stalled in growth, no new growth since plant out. Then a Thai fire that I am havin issues with, but think I have that figured out. Had to repot it and will be doing that again this weekend so I can add some perlite and peat moss to the mix.

Temps here got up into the 90's 3 days straight last weekend, then dropped into the 70's for highs and 50's for lows. Now dealing with alot of rain from Andrea. Supposed to clear up tomorrow and up into the 80's for sunday.

So do you still have over 1k in plants?

DesertChris · Jun 7, 2013

koskorgul said:
Glad to hear that the fire is pretty much done for.

Sorry to hear about all the plants being wiped out, ouch, that has got to suck. I had 2 that didnt make it and I hated to pull them. Have another that is really stalled in growth, no new growth since plant out. Then a Thai fire that I am havin issues with, but think I have that figured out. Had to repot it and will be doing that again this weekend so I can add some perlite and peat moss to the mix.

Temps here got up into the 90's 3 days straight last weekend, then dropped into the 70's for highs and 50's for lows. Now dealing with alot of rain from Andrea. Supposed to clear up tomorrow and up into the 80's for sunday.

So do you still have over 1k in plants?

I figure probably around 1,100 plants or so right now....a few more seedlings popping, making up for some of the plant losses.
Not a real big deal, since I have so many for exactly this reason. The desert is a harsh place, and the #'s make up for it

Your weather sounds much better!!
We haven't seen rain in months.

Devv · Jun 7, 2013

So what's happening out there?

What happened to harm the plants?

koskorgul · Jun 7, 2013

DesertChris said:
I figure probably around 1,100 plants or so right now....a few more seedlings popping, making up for some of the plant losses.
Not a real big deal, since I have so many for exactly this reason. The desert is a harsh place, and the #'s make up for it
Your weather sounds much better!!
We haven't seen rain in months.

They have a flood warning in affect for some of the areas here in central Pa. supposed to get a few inches before it is all said and done.

DesertChris · Jun 7, 2013

Devv said:
So what's happening out there?

What happened to harm the plants?

I think it was the wind, and then high temps, and then smokey air from the fire, right after I planted out.
Weird thing was that only the 2 strains were affected, the Red Bhuts from Meinchoh all look good.
Possibly could have been grasshoppers, but I think they would have went for all 3 strains...very odd though.
All of the plants were hardened off together for weeks on the porch, so that wasn't the cause either.

All in all, there are still around 100 Red Bhuts, so I can't complain....lol

Devv · Jun 7, 2013

Well I'm sorry to hear you had losses. What are your temps now? We've been 94 average.

Can you believe we're having a June rain? I'm amazed...of course it wasn't forecast..

WalkGood · Jun 7, 2013

Sorry for your loss, think of it this way ... you have 99 more red Bhuts than I, lolz ... have a great weekend brethren!

DesertChris · Jun 7, 2013

Thanks guys, the upside is it now there was room to plant a bag of garbanzo beans....
Would rather have peppers, but I how good would fresh garbanzos be in Ramone's Garbanzo Pepper dip/spread

Oh, the tomatoes, and other non peppers are growing nicely

Should have a tomato jungle out there pretty soon...lolIn fact, there are a bunch of volunteer tomato seedlings/weedlings all over the garden...hahaha..I have been letting some of them grow, and might transplant them into garden #2 for fun

I've been letting some cilantro go to seed, and have been collecting the seeds to plant more.Going to do the same thing with a few turnips, parsley, thai basil and regular basil

Also, my phone says it is 105°, the feed is from the airfield a couple miles east.Thermometer on the porch, in the shade, says 100°

Nightshade · Jun 7, 2013

Your temps are better than mine it was 108 today

stc3248 · Jun 8, 2013

Wow...dodged a bullet there. Glad to hear its almost out. I really need to pack up a getaway kit and put some of the more important crap in my fire-proof safe. We've been lucky so far...but it's coming, I can feel it.

Pulpiteer · Jun 8, 2013

Just caught up on the glog - wow... that's a bunch of challenges you've got there. The windbreak is a necessity, isn't it? At least it's doing decent. Those temp fluctuations... wow. If some seeds do better than others that might help you select for next year. Maybe you'll end up developing some desert strains.

Glad the fire missed you. I've seen a couple people deal with those getting close in my time here on the glogs. Kind of a scary thing. Again, I'll take the Michigan winter, I think...

Keep up the hard work, you've got to be pretty busy still.

DocNrock · Jun 8, 2013

Happy to hear you missed the fire, although it sounds like it hit close to home. Very sorry to hear that. Hope your kid's friends parents will be able to rebuild. We've evacuated a couple of times when we lived in San Diego. No fun.

StupidJerk · Jun 14, 2013

How's everything going, Chris? Have things settled down?

DesertChris · Jun 15, 2013

StupidJerk said:
How's everything going, Chris? Have things settled down?

Things are going pretty good, and settling down finally.

Also, finally cooled down to the 90's, so I am able to work on finishing up garden #4 (for sprawling plants), then I will finish garden #2 {for the chinense pepper varieties

)

Hopefully I will set aside some time soon, to catch up on everyone's glogs, and post some photos in my glog.

The garden #1 with annuums and tomatoes is looking pretty good, and so is the garden #3 with the Red Bhuts.