Thumb can turn green in much of Arizona in March
The threat of frost is just about past and it’s time to start planting out back. In central and southern Arizona, spring can come very early, making you eager to garden.
Be sure to take a local garden tour as soon as you can to find out what’s going on in the backyards of serious home gardeners. Take a journal along to write a few notes about what to try in your yard.
Check out the websites of Arizona Master Gardeners, the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and various local nurseries to find out what to plant and when. You can also get more inspiration at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and Tucson Botanical Garden.
A beginner veggie garden
If you’ve never had one before, now is a great time to get planting. The easy way is to build a raised garden that you fill with bagged gardening soil, commercially purchased, because the native Arizona soil in your yard would need a lot of work and amendment with compost and enrichment of various kinds.
Use stacked concrete blocks or pavers or boards and make your garden about 4 feet by 8 feet. Because the garden is raised up, it’s easy to water and pull the weeds. If that sounds too ambitious, just buy and fill up very large planters to keep on your patio.
You could start seeds in little pots indoors to get your sprouts, but go easy on yourself this first time and buy seedlings at a nursery. This is the time to plant jalapeños, bell peppers, salad tomatoes, strawberries, lettuce, kale, onions, radishes, carrots and beets and almost any kind of herb.
You can put in a drip irrigation system or just water with a garden hose and sprayer. You also need to fertilize regularly. Provide some screening over the plants to keep out rabbits, dogs, cats and birds. There could be insect emergencies; in that case, check with your nursery for what to do next.
By mid-June or July 1, you will have eaten all your produce and it may be time to start on other possibilities, though your choices will be much more limited. But maybe it will be too warm for all that and you can wait until fall.
Landscaping plants
Although many plants besides agaves, succulents, aloes and cactuses love the Arizona desert, there are some that grow well here and some that will not, so make your choices carefully at local nurseries that know what will grow in your area. Early March is a good time to plant to get trees and shrubs going before temperatures soar.
If you have an irrigation system, check to make sure it’s working properly. In a few weeks, you may need to start watering twice as much as you did recently, according to Jay Harper of Harper’s Nursery in Scottsdale.
Before digging that hole, check out amwua.org/plants/ and magazines of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association for names and photos of low-wateruse, sun-loving plants. The association can tell you things like whether a plant is fast- or slow-growing, attracts bees or birds, and even whether it has thorns and lots of litter.
Shrubs: Think about bougainvillea, hibiscus, Natal plum, red and pink fairy duster, yellow- and orange-bells, red and yellow bird of paradise, and flowering sages of all kinds. You can keep planting container-grown roses. Forget about trying azaleas, camellias, and gardenias. They are all native to areas with very acidic soil and tons of rain. So choices like that are way too challenging for most home gardeners. Hydrangeas and peonies are also a difficult choice, if you of shade tree in late February and all of March, including the desert-loving paloverdes and mesquites.
It’s best not to plant the sissoo or Indian rosewood; sometimes called the dalbergia. It’s lush and fast-growing, but very difficult to remove. If you cut it down, its roots keep right on sprouting all over your yard.
You can also plant trees that produce summer fruit and many kinds of citrus. But with all fruit-bearing trees, make your choices carefully, depending on where you live in the desert. Stone fruits often need a certain number of “chill hours” to produce tasty peaches, apricots or plums. They might not work in the hottest part of Phoenix. Some oranges and grapefruits won’t do well at higher elevations with heavier frost — places in Tucson, for example.
Fruit-bearing trees require patience and can be very labor intensive, as well. They need regular fertilizing and proper pruning. And sometimes they can attract more than the usual kind of pests to your
Annuals: You can still plant cool-season annuals in March, things like foxglove, delphinium, geraniums and petunias, but they’re not going to last long, especially if you don’t water regularly. You might plant marigolds, nasturtium, cosmos, sunflowers and zinnia — some can even be started from seeds. In April you can plant vinca, celosia, pentas and ornamental sweet potato.
Perennials: Drought-tolerant perennials will come back year after year. Think about paperflower, angelita daisy, globe mallow, salvias, verbena, chocolate flower, desert milkweed and one of the varieties from the penstemon family.
For more do-it-yourself tips, go to rosieonthehouse.com. An Arizona homebuilding and remodeling industry expert for 25 years, Rosie Romero is the host of the syndicated Saturday morning Rosie on the House radio program heard in Phoenix on KTAR-FM (92.3) from 7-11 a.m. Consult his website for other listings. Call 888-767-4348.