So a couple weeks ago, we had a hard freeze. It got down to the upper 20's. Coldest it's been in Phoenix in a long long time, so I'm told. I knew the hard freeze was coming so I moved as much of my tropicals indoors for about a week until the freeze was over. I left some plants and trees outside, nothing I could do really.
The plants I brought indoors are all okay. But the stuff I left out, not so good. I left the ficus I was using for my cuttings outdoors. It's mostly all dead if not totally all dead, I still don't know. The Chinese elms I left outside are doing just fine. They dropped their leaves went into dormancy, and are now starting to wake up. Most of the plants I left outside are doing okay as a matter of fact. I don't know if the bougainvillea are dead, but overall it's not that bad. If my stool tree is dead, I'll go get another one and things will be back to normal soon.
The unexpected freeze got me thinking that maybe I need other trees besides ficus. I'm sure I'm wrong on this point, but on this note I decided to try some crabapples. With the 3 month required stratification, it's a bit late in the season to start with seeds. I found a guy on Ebay selling crabapple 'runts' for 50/$42, including shipping. He sent me 64 instead of the promised 50. Some were real runts, exactly what he promised. Some were growing big and strong, far more than what he promised. They arrived yesterday. They were bare root, moist packed in newspaper, then saran wrap, then in newspaper, wrapped in plastic bags, then wrapped in newspaper.
So it was time to pot up my crabs. Aaron suggest that while we're at it, we should pot up our pumpkins. I agreed. I ran out of dirt so we made a quick trip out to Lowe's and got some more dirt. While I was there, I also picked up some steer manure for the pumpkins. I got 65 four inch pots ready and potted them up as quickly and gently as I could. We then turned our attention to getting the buckets ready for the pumpkins.
Buckets, yes! This will be our first attempt at growing pumpkins. Aaron and I have done a bit of research and we know pumpkins need rich soil planted deep. They're heavy feeders and need a lot of steer manure and plenty of fertilizer. We decided to use 5 gallon buckets instead of growing mounds of dirt. I figure this will allow us to plant deep and will allow us to move to growing as needed.
Each bucket will have a specific type of pumpkin/squash. We will be trying acorn, butternut, zuchini, castilla (fairy tale pumpkins), and Atlantic Giants. We started two buckets, mostly filled with a rich organic soil, and topped with steer manure. These first two buckets have Atlantic Giant and castilla.
As for clay... we had an incident right before the first Second Friday of the year. A box full of my things was dropped, and a LOT of pieces were broken. What can you do when something like this happens except to shrug it off, try to be philosophical about it (out with the old, in with the new!) and try your best to just move on. So that's what I'm doing. I have a few pieces to re-make and I'm doing my best.
Second Second Friday of the year will be next week. I'll again haul out my wares and go out into the night.