Urban Farming Externship - Week 11

I spent another fun Saturday morning with Suzanne yesterday - the owner of Vilardi Gardens. The first thing I wanted to ask her about was how all her plants were doing after our record-breaking rain on Monday. For those of you that didn't hear, it rained steadily all over Phoenix from about 2am to 10am, breaking records and causing flooding all over the valley. It was pretty intense; some commuters were stranded on their way to work and some workplaces shut down completely. Matt and I had just built a retractable shade for our garden the day before, and I had just planted my new babies from Suzanne! When I left for work Monday morning, some of them were under water:

Needless to say, I was pretty upset on Monday. I love the rain, but this was my first experience with flash flooding as a gardener. I was so sure that all my new plants were dead. 

One of the things Suzanne told me a couple of weeks ago that really stuck with me is that "plants want to live." Of course, I knew that, but I had never truly understood it. I thought of plants as delicate little beings that needed to be babied every day of their lives here in Arizona in order to survive. To some extent, in Phoenix at least, this is true; but what I'm realizing is that if you provide plants with what they need, they are pretty resilient. Here are some pictures of those plant starts today, a week later:

What I had done, was assume that since the rains wreaked havoc on our modern lives, that it was also going to wreak havoc on my plants. Not true. One day of record-breaking rain? Psh. Plants want to live. 

Back to this week's externship!

We planted lemongrass! It smelled so wonderful and I got so sucked into what I was doing that before I knew it, we had over 100 new plants done and it was time to go!

You can easily start lemongrass from one mother plant. One huge plant can be separated into countless smaller plants. Neat!

Here are some other pretty pictures from that day - I love all the zinnias!

This week completes my externship. I've learned so much! I will continue to post my outdoor projects on here and I'm also going to continue volunteering for Suzanne. I have to apologize for not posting instructions for the retractable shade. I have a feeling we'll make another in the future so I'll document it then - or maybe just post the instructions. It was super easy and less than $100! 

Thanks for joining me in my urban farming journey!

Happy planting! 

PS - My cover crop finally started to sprout after all that rain! ;)