Well, after participating in the Desert Dwellers Thread I figured I would start my own thread to document my garden adventures.  

I would like to use this as a garden journal of sorts and plan to come back to it frequently so if a mod can keep this one out of the archives, I would appreciate it.

A little background:  My garden is located in southern Arizona, which is a very hot and dry climate.  Fortunately, we have mild winters which makes year round gardening possible.

I do all of my gardening in what I like to call double dug raised beds.  Simply put, I frame in the beds with 2x6 boards and then dig down about 15"-18" below the native soil level.  I then back fill the beds with about a 50-50 mix of compost and native soil.

After the initial planting, I try to practice no till gardening as much as possible.  I currently have a problem with rhizomatous grass in one of my beds that requires turning the soil in that bed before planting to try to remove the rhizomes.

Currently, I have just under 700 square feet of growing surface.  The total fenced in area is a little over 2000 square feet.  I left myself a little extra room when doing the fence so that I can put in a two foot wide raised bed around most of the perimeter if I decide to later.

The oldest part of my garden consist of twelve 4'x4' and one 2'x4' bed.  I have another area built off of the existing garden that has two 4'x12' beds that were put in last year.  In the same area I built an additional six 4'x12' and two 4'x14' beds this spring.

I use mostly organic methods built around lots of compost, cow manure, and mulch.  I say mostly organic because I do occasionally use synthetic fertilizers for heavy feeding crops.  

Ideally, I would like to get to a point where I no longer need to add purchased amendments for the garden.  In my opinion, compost should be the backbone of any garden, organic or not, so I try to make as much of it as I can.

I do not use pesticides or herbicides in my garden.  Weeds are usually easy enough to pull by hand and I find that most bug pressures can be dealt with through a combination of predatory insects and manual removal.  

My biggest pest issue tends to be birds and rabbits and I deal with them through physical exclusion by using fences and netting.

Below is a picture of what my garden looked like in the spring of 2011 when I took it over.

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This picture is from last year but I wanted to include it because it nicely illustrates how the oldest part of the garden has changed since I began working it.

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And this is what that part of the garden looks like currently.  I have several beds in here that need to be replanted.

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This is what the area off to the West side of the old garden looked like before I put two new beds in last year.

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And here it is after I put the beds in.  This picture is from last year so the tomatoes and peppers shown are no longer planted in these beds.

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This is what the new garden area looked like before I expanded this spring.

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And this is what it looks like as of yesterday.  Please ignore the clutter; it's still a construction zone.

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These next few pictures are all current.

My summer carrots are doing well.

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My sweet corn was planted late but it seems to be doing fine.

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This bed has two types of sweet potatoes planted in it.  They are really liking the heat.  I need to get around to removing that excess dirt but unlike the sweet potatoes, I don't like the heat so it'll have to wait.

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Like the corn, my squash and zucchini were planted late due to the expansion but they are booming now.  This bed has green zucchini and yellow squash and both are beginning to fruit.  Also, that's a first year planting of asparagus in the back bed.

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Half of this bed is planted with peppers and the other half has tomatoes.  The peppers got knocked down early because the rabbits were getting through the fence and chewing the leaves off but they have recovered now and some have peppers ready to pick.

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This bed has indeterminate tomatoes in one half of it and a variety of melons in the other.  All of these tomatoes have been pruned to just two growth tips and are being grown vertically using bailing twine and tomato clips.  I made the support structure from 1/2" EMT and Teks screws.

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Here is the same bed showing how I use netting to protect my crops from birds.  It seems no matter how many tomatoes I grow or what other gimmicks I try, if I do not physically exclude the birds they will eat all of my tomatoes before they have a chance to fully ripen.

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This is my problem bed with the rhizomatous grass infestation.  I don't think Riley wants me to get rid of his grass.

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That brings us up to date with where the garden stands at the moment so I will finish for now with a few recent harvest pictures.  If anyone has questions or comments, please chime in.

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Looks awesome!

A little harvest from today.

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Something has killed off one of my Early Girl tomatoes and a second is on its way out.  There are two more Early Girls in the same bed that so far still appear healthy but I suspect they will eventually succumb to whatever has hit the other two.

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Fortunately, I took some cuttings from those plants a few weeks ago and have 10 clones that should be ready to plant out in the next week or two.  I might wait until the monsoons hit to cool things down a little before I plant them though since it is going to get up to 116 degrees next week.

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And I harvested some more tomatoes today.

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Maybe I missed it, but what type of carrots are those? My wife will most likely be handling a few carrots in the container gardens/raised beds this year, and I'm not sure how well my normal Danvers will do in those conditions.

The carrots in the harvest picture are Nantes.  I believe the carrots in the large raised bed are also Nantes, but I would have to check my plant tag to be sure.

I've grown Nantes, Danvers, and Imperators in containers and they all do fine.  The Imperators are long carrots so if the container is too shallow they will come out a little funky.

I spent a little time in the garden today.  The zucchini are getting to the point where we can't eat them fast enough.  The yellow crookneck squash is right behind them.

I lost a third Early Girl Tomato.  I think it's only a matter of time until the last one in that bed carks it too.

Here's today's harvest.  I was going to pick more tomatoes but most of them will be getting frozen so I figured I would give them a little more time on the vines to fully ripen.

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I found another snake tangled up in my bird netting.  Unfortunately, I didn't find him soon enough.  Oh well, into the compost with him.

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He had a friend still on duty though.

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It's gonna be a fun week.

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Did they look like needed watering everyday before they started dying?  If so, I would guess Verticillium wilt fungus or Fusarium wilt fungus.  That entire bed will be affected if that is the case, and all your tomatoes will succumb.  It is also persistent in the soil for years.  The other thing it could be is early blight but I would doubt that judging by your climate.

It very well could be one of the wilt fungi.  My hope is that something is eating the roots since the plants have been falling kind of one by one.  

I may be wrong but if it was disease in the soil I would think it would be more likely for them to go at once.  

The symptoms are a healthy plant one day, then wilted as if the plant is water stressed, then dead.  

I don't think it is blight because the leaves don't show any signs of it and the air is way too dry here for that right now anyway.

Is there any way to know for certain if it is V or F wilt short of having a tissue sample analyzed?

You can cut a main stem and put it immediately in a clear glass of water. If you see a milky discharge from the cut part of the stem it is probably one of the wilts.  

Mine never died at the same time even if they were in the same bed. Some plants are stronger than others and can hold out longer. Different varieties can also be affected in different ways as well. 

All of the Early Girl tomatoes that were in the affected bed are now dead.  

Bear with me, I know this isn't the greatest pic.  Click the image to view a larger version.

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The root system on the left is from the last plant to wilt.  It was still alive when I dug it up but all the leaves were wilted.

When I dug it up, about half of the roots were dark and are what I would characterize as dead and the other half were still white and healthy looking.  

There were a few galls that looked like they could have been from nematodes but I have had those before (in a different bed) and in that instance the roots of the affected plants were completely covered in galls.  So if there are nematodes in this bed, it is a very minor infestation.

The plant on the right is from one of the Early Girls that was pretty much completely dead.  All the roots from this plant appeared dark and dead.

Both root masses had white fungal mycelium on them but without analyzing it that could just be from healthy soil.

In addition to losing all of the indeterminate Early Girl tomatoes in one of my beds, my Roma tomatoes are also dying off in a nearby bed.  

My Roma plants are determinate tomatoes and I have not witnessed any wilt in their leaves.  

I only get to visit the garden two or three times a week so it is possible that I have missed the wilt stage in the Romas.

Then again, since they are determinate tomatoes, it could be that they have just reached the end of their cycle and are dying off naturally.

I still have several more tomatoes in a couple of the new garden beds and there is no obvious signs of disease on any of them

The heat has been brutal for the past week or two (110-115 degrees) and even with running the drip system three times a day for 30 minutes each cycle, the corn, squash, zucchini and cucumbers really struggle from about 11 am until the sun drops over the horizon.

I think I made a mistake with trying to grow my melons vertically in the same bed as my tomatoes.  I have to net the tomatoes off to keep the birds out and I think that might be limiting pollinator access to the melon flowers because none of them seem to have set yet.

Speaking of the birds, they are pecking holes in my squash plants.  I swear, they seem to go after anything in the garden with a tinge of red, yellow, or orange.  

They are really damaging quite a few of my squashes, especially when they are small.  Fortunately, they leave the zucchini alone.

Since my pepper plants haven't bushed out enough to shade one another, I'm losing a lot of pepper fruits to sun scald.  This is a common problem for me in the summer time and will largely go away once the plants start growing together.

Even with the heat and disease issues, the garden is still producing.  Here is Tuesday's harvest:

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And another from Thursday.  As you can see, the squash on the far left has been attacked by the birds.

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Looks good OP. Why did you not use straw on your tomatoes this year?

I've been slack on the mulching this year.  The tomatoes in the older beds got mulched because they were planted in February and I just had more time to do it.  I hadn't yet started construction on the new garden area at that point.

When I planted the tomatoes and peppers in the new garden beds back in March and April, I was still building more beds so most of my garden time was spent doing that work.

Now that I've waited too long, things are grown up to the point that it would be a real hassle to mulch around most of the plants.

OK just wondering if you have had a bad experience with it. I've used mulch but my tomatoes still blighted. Using black plastic this year, we'll see what happens. May try straw next year.

The only bad experience I have had with mulch is a lot of straw that wasn't actually straw.  It was runner grass loaded with seed that has infested one of my beds.  Because of that I now stick to alfalfa hay or wood chips.

I have not.  I use mulch mainly to retain moisture, enrich the soil, and suppress weeds.  The plastic mulches aren't of interest to me because they don't feed the soil and I think they aren't particularly well suited to my conditions.  

Straw, hay, and wood chip mulch also provides excellent habitat for spiders, which are a great asset in a garden.

Today's harvest includes squash, zucchini, carrots, a couple sweet peppers and a handful of Cherokee Purple tomatoes.  

Ideally I would have let the tomatoes finish ripening on the vine but the heat really affects the ripening process so if I left them on there they would probably rot before they ripened.

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It's a cool overcast morning here in Boulder (59 F), and I'm on vacation.

Wandering the yard, my eye spots-- what is that!

My first ripe tomato of 2017.    Long way to go before my garden is in full eatin' mode.  Won't approach OP's output.  But I'm satisfied for today.

Good for you.  There's nothing quite like the satisfaction of producing your own food.

Here's today's harvest.

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Now that I have much more growing space than in the past, I've been giving a lot of thought to incorporating green manure and biomass production into my gardening.

Currently, my fertility management includes making my own compost (with just about whatever I can find), buying straw and hay for mulch, and gathering cow manure from range land in the desert.

I also use purchased fertilizers (both organic and synthetic) and I do buy in some compost when I don't have enough of my own which is usually when I am adding beds to the garden.  

I would really like to get away from buying all fertilizers and even straw and hay for mulch.

One of the thoughts I had for achieving that goal was to dedicate a 4'x12' garden bed to alfalfa production.  

Since alfalfa is a legume, it will add nitrogen to the garden by fixing it from the atmosphere.  

Also, according to Wikipedia, alfalfa can be cut up to 12 times a year in places like Arizona.  That should produce a lot of biomass that will go a long way towards satisfying my mulch requirements for the garden.

It would be nice to not have to pay $10-$12 bucks each for a small square bale every time I run out of mulch.

There are several fields of alfalfa not far from my garden that appear to grow year round so it should suit my climate well.  

Since the stand will be relatively small, I figure when it is ready to cut I can just hit it with the weed whacker or shears to harvest.

My current idea is to plant it after my corn crop and then rotate it out after a year or two.

That's about as far as I have gotten in my planning stages.  Since I've never grown alfalfa before, I have a few questions.

First, does anyone think planting alfalfa in the garden for biomass and fertility is a bad idea?  If so, why and what alternative would you recommend?

Is there a risk of alfalfa becoming invasive in a garden setting?  I imagine I would cut it before it flowers and seeds but since I don't know about alfalfa culture I'm not sure about that.

Speaking of cutting, how tall should it be before harvesting and what height should it be cut to for the optimal health of the stand?

What's the best way of killing off alfalfa when it is time to rotate it out?  I would like an organic option that ideally leaves the roots in place to maximize the fertilizer value of the nitrogen fixation.

I don't currently have any animals to feed alfalfa to but I might have chickens in the future.  Will they eat cut alfalfa, either fresh or dried?

Can anyone recommend a source for a small quantity of non-dormant alfalfa seed?  Johnny's sells what they call Summer Alfalfa in 1/4 lb. packets but I'm not sure if that would be the best variety for my situation.

Another idea I want to incorporate is complementing the alfalfa bed by growing green manures/cover crops if/when a bed is sitting fallow.  I've actually experimented with that once but it has been a few years and I didn't get good growth because I planted too late in the fall.

Currently, my plan is to take the 4'x4' beds in the old garden (the ones planted in annuals anyway) out of vegetable production this fall.  

I figure I will seed them with an oat and pea mix which should grow through our mild winters.  I'll probably terminate the crop in late winter or early spring and leave it on top of beds as a mulch.  

After that, I may just let them rest as is, plant them to another cover crop for the remainder of the year, or put them back into vegetables if I really need the space.  Suggestions are welcome here.

I would also appreciate any input on other cover crop/green manure/biomass strategies that would be appropriate to my area.  I need info on plant type, culture techniques, and termination methods.  

For reference, example conditions in my area are as follows:  Mid February to late April are generally warm days with cool nights (highs from 70-80 and lows of 40-50).

May to mid October is blistering hot (highs up to 115 with lows from 70-90) with June being the hottest and driest month.  July to September is monsoon season.  

Mid October to early or mid December is a little cooler than our Spring season and may include light frosts at nights, especially in December.

Mid December to mid or late February is what qualifies as winter around here.  Overnight lows might dip down to around 27 degrees during a normal year.  We usually only get about a weeks worth of nights with hard freezes.

We only average 10"-12" of rain a year but that's not such an issue now that the entire garden is on drip irrigation.  

Ideally, the crops I want to incorporate should fix nitrogen or be paired with something that fixes nitrogen, produce a lot of biomass, be easy to control to prevent them from becoming invasive, and be suitable for my growing conditions.

If anyone thinks I am heading in the wrong direction here, please speak up and make your case for why.  I want to reduce the need for outside inputs in my garden but I also don't want to introduce a crop that will turnout to be an invasive weed and be near impossible to get rid of.

All of those plants are dead and have since been removed.  I think the reason the one on the right has that grey brown look is because it was basically dead (as in all the leaves were brown and crusty and the stem was following right behind them) when I pulled it.

The other, greener plant hadn't died yet.  All the leaves were still green and soft, just wilted.

After further reading, I don't think the problem was either Verticillium or Fusarium wilt.  Here are some of the reasons for my thinking.

I grew the infected tomatoes from seed.  They spent their first two months of life indoors under grow lights and were grown in new seed starting mix inside containers that had been disinfected before planting.

After a couple months, they were planted outside in early February in a bed that was amended with my home made compost and some cow manure.  The bed was then mulched with old alfalfa hay.

From this point on, I think the only way the soil could have been contaminated would have been from localized spores or the irrigation water.

The plants lived symptom free for about 6 months and were in the ground for about 4 of those months before dying suddenly.  We're talking perfectly healthy one day, completely wilted the next, and then dried and crusty dead a day or two later.

My reading up on Verticillium and Fusarium wilts suggests that symptoms should have appeared before the entire plant wilted.  

Also, the plants didn't wilt during the heat of the day and then bounce back once things cooled off in the evening.  Once they wilted, they stayed that way until the foliage dried up.

I didn't have any tissue samples analyzed.  If it happens again, I will probably go down that road.

At this point, I suspect the cause was some kind of viral infection transmitted by insects or root rot caused by who knows what.  Some of the lower leaves had small holes in them, probably from flea beetles.  

I think my wording might have been confusing here.  By dedicate I mean always have one bed in alfalfa production but not necessarily the same bed.  

For example, after my sweet corn comes out I plant alfalfa in the corn bed.  I let it grow for a year or two then terminate the crop and move alfalfa production to another bed.  Ideally, I would let the new crop become established before terminating the old one.

I don't know if I am going to go as far as always rotating a cover crop behind a vegetable crop because of space constraints but I probably will do it selectively as space permits.  

The only reason I can think of that I would want to dry alfalfa before feeding it to chickens is if they won't eat it fresh.  I doubt that is the case.

If I wanted to grow a chicken feed for storage, I would stick with grain as it seems like it would be a lot easier.  

If I get chickens, I will have something fresh to feed them year round any way since there is always something growing in the garden.  I was just wondering if alfalfa can fill that role and it sounds like it can.

I plan to increase my compost making, but not in the way you suggest.  That compost will be used for amending productive beds before they are planted out for the season.  That's what I do currently.  I'm just going to expand it because I expanded the garden.

That said, I may use something like the alfalfa as a compost feed stock if I happen to not need it for mulch when it is ready to cut.

More than just letting the beds rest, I want to protect the soil from the sun and wind and feed the organisms that live in it while they are out of production.

What I plan to do with the cover crops mentioned in the old part of the garden is basically use them to mulch the soil while it is fallow.  This will effectively make leaf mold, it just does it in the place where it will be used instead of in a bin.  

Those beds will remain irrigated so the soil stays alive while it is fallow.  I think doing it that way will be better for the macro and micro organisms.  And it will be less work for me.

I've noticed with my mulching that I can apply a 4"-5" layer of hay or straw (with large pieces a foot or more in length) at the start of the growing season, and by the time the crop comes out, all that remains will be a thin layer of match stick sized pieces.  

Some spots will even be bare soil.  That's especially true with long season crops like tomatoes and peppers which usually stay in the ground for 9 or 10 months before a frost kills them.

The mulch will have turned into a rich humus that stays moist and has earthworms working in it right up near the surface.

The question I was really trying to get to is this:  From a fertility stand point, is it better to mulch the soil and let it sit without anything growing (even a cover crop) or to keep growing successive green manures.

I plan to grow at least one cover crop in the aforementioned beds so that I have the biomass to mulch them.  After that, is it better for them to sit or grow another cover crop?

In theory, if the cover crop includes a nitrogen fixer, the nitrogen levels should increase with each successive cover crop.  There is also value in letting deep rooted cover crops bring minerals up from depths that might be out of reach of common vegetables.  Ditto for cover crops that are particularly good accumulators.  

Those points would suggest that I should keep growing successive cover crops and just mulch them in place until I decide to put the beds back into vegetable production.  That is, unless there is more value in letting the beds rest.

What's the restorative value of leaving soil unplanted (but covered to protect it) versus continually growing cover crops in it?

The whole reason I want to restore the old part of the garden is because I have been growing in those beds more or less non-stop for the last 6 years.  

Some of the beds might have sat empty for a few months of the year during that period, but for the most part each bed gets two or three crops run through it each year.  One of the down sides of being able to garden year round is that doing so takes a lot out of the soil.

Lots of compost, manure, and some fertilizer before planting has kept the beds productive, but even with the amendments, constant cropping with vegetables that get removed from the garden probably isn't the best strategy for long term soil fertility.

We probably get half to two-thirds of our rain during the monsoons.  It's still not enough to keep a garden alive without irrigation but it helps.  Plants respond a lot better to rain water than irrigation.  

The big advantage for the garden though is that the monsoons help suppress the daily highs by a few degrees and make the air more humid.  The humidity is not so fun for us but the plants seem to prefer 100-105 degrees with some humidity over 105-110 degrees with basically no humidity.

I'll look into rye and orchard grass.  Thanks for your input.

That brings up another question I was wondering.  How volatile is the nitrogen fixed by legumes?  For example, if a person was going to grow a cover crop but for whatever reason wouldn't be able to follow that cover crop up with a vegetable crop within a couple months of terminating the cover crop, would it be more advantageous to use a non-legume cover crop that produces more biomass or stick with a legume that will fix nitrogen?

I know that of the major plant nutrients, nitrogen is the most susceptible to loss, but the way I understand it, some forms of nitrogen stick around in the soil longer than others.

My corn has begun to tassel.  There are no real signs of cobs forming and there definitely aren't any silks showing.  I think the heat has stressed the plants and caused them to tassel a little early.  I'm not very experienced with sweet corn so if someone could please let me know if this is normal or a problem, I would appreciate it.  

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The sweet potatoes have gone nuts.  Unlike the corn, they are loving the heat.  I hope they are growing as well below ground as they are above it.

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Well it's been almost 3 weeks since my last post here so I guess it's time for a bit of an update.

During late June and early July, the extreme, dry heat really put a damper on the harvests from the garden but I was still able to scrounge together a few veggies here and there several times a week.

I'll start with a look back on some of those harvests.

This harvest is from July 7th.  It's a little paltry, but I'll take it.

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July 9th's harvests almost wasn't even worth leaving the AC for.  

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Thankfully, the monsoons started shortly afterwards so the rewards from the garden were better on the 16th.

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Now that we're caught up with the harvests, lets look in on the garden.

As I mentioned, the monsoons have been a blessing.  We've been getting almost daily rain for the past two weeks or so.  Not only does the rain water the plants, but it helps push the temps under 100 degrees and cranks the humidity up, all things the plants love.

So far this is one of the best monsoon seasons I can remember in quite awhile.  I just hope that it doesn't peter out prematurely.  

I wish I had a rain gauge.  If I had to guess, I would say the garden has gotten around 5"-7" of rain in the last two weeks.  I realize that's not a lot for most of you, but when you consider that my area averages like 11"-12" a year, it's huge.

The melons and peppers are loving it.  My current batch of tomatoes is putting out new flowers so they might set some more fruit for late summer and fall.  FYI, planting melons in the same bed as my tomatoes was a bad idea.  The plan was to keep them pruned to one stem and train them up the twine, but they are much harder to keep up with than tomatoes.

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The next crop of carrots are doing fantastic.  I'll probably start thin harvesting them soon.

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The summer squash and zucchini are especially loving the lower temperatures and increased humidity.  Their production slowed down a lot in the 2 or 3 weeks before the monsoons started but they are now back at it.  I need to set aside time to prune back their old leaves so I can keep a better eye out for squash bugs.

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The first monsoon rain blew the corn down, just like I knew it would.  Every time it tries to stand back up a new storm blows it down again so it is looking pretty ratty.  Each stalk has about 2 or 3 ears on it so I'm hoping I will at least get a little something for my effort.  I think it should be ready sometime within the next month.  Of course, the sweet potatoes continue on their march towards world domination.

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Here's a shot of today's harvest.  

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Pepper production has kicked into full gear.  The tomatoes are becoming a little more sporadic but I am still getting some Romas and Cherokee Purples.  I also have some new pepper and tomato seedlings I need to get transplanted out in the garden for a fall crop.

I dug up one of my sweet potato plants to gauge how far along they are.  As seen above, it yielded 3 pretty decent tubers and some smaller ones that I left in the ground.  Another month or so and I think most of the tubers will be really nice.  I might even try to plant a second crop.

I ordered some cover crop seeds.  After doing some research, I decided on a non-dormant alfalfa variety, Sunn Hemp, black eye peas, cow peas, Sudangrass, and buckwheat.  

I'm thinking I'll sow the alfalfa in the old garden beds and let it grow for awhile to rejuvenate the soil.  I'll play with mixtures of the other cover crops in the new garden beds as space is available.

I really need to make time to do some maintenance in the garden.  The rains have weeds popping up all over the place, plus I need to hack back some of the melons in the tomato/melon bed so I can get them out of the netting.  

Since I have a bunch of tomato seedlings that need to be transplanted, I might just let the melons have that bed and remove the netting.

In addition to planting the cover crops, I need to start thinking about what, if anything, I want to plant for the fall.  I think I might try another crop of corn and maybe sweet potatoes.  I still have a couple of months before I need to worry about planting any cool weather crop seeds.