Pima County Cooperative Extension

After spending Wednesday with the Santa Cruz County Extension staff, we began Thursday by heading to the Pima County Extension office.  Pima County is the county that houses Tucson, and the extension office was only about a ten minute drive from where we have been staying.  Along the way we passed by the campus of the University of Arizona as well as their animal research farm.  At the Extension office, we had two separate tours.  The first was a tour of the Master Gardener demonstration gardens.  Pima County has over 150 Master Gardner volunteers, and each one volunteers on a committee to manage one section of the demonstration garden.  This includes a rose garden, a raised bed vegetable garden, a desert garden, a pollinator garden, a basin vegetable garden, and much more.

We saw several interesting things on the tour, as the plant life in Arizona is naturally quite different than what we have in North Carolina.  The most interesting thing to me, from a production side, was how they grow vegetables.  In Arizona, the soil is very sandy, the climate is hot and dry, and the natural soil pH is between 7 and 8.5.  Obviously, it is very difficult to grow vegetables in those conditions.  Raised bed gardening allows users to use compost or potting mixes rather than soil, not unlike the Square Foot Gardening method I talked so much about last week.

 
But what if you prefer to grow vegetables in the ground?  The basin gardens show how that is possible.  In these areas, the soil for the beds is dug out to a depth of 2 feet.  A small portion of this soil is mixed with compost and returned to the beds and the remaining soil is mounded up around the edge of the garden to create a berm.  This provides the vegetables with a better soil media to grow in, while also helping to direct water to the gardens and retain it there when it rains.  Rains are very infrequent here, other than in the monsoon season late in the summer, so gardeners in Arizona must practice water conservation.  At the demonstration gardens, the rain water from the roofs of the buildings is directed to cisterns and used to irrigate all the plants within the gardens (except the vegetables).


I was also quite interested botanically in the plants that I didn't recognize; those that we can't grow in North Carolina.  Many of these were various types of cactus, agave, palm, yucca, and other desert plants.  I took particular interest in the cactus collection.  I can't tell you much about any of these varieties but I wanted to share an assortment of pictures with you so you can see the diversity in this group of plants.  We often think of a cactus as the single straight stem with two arms, when they really come in many different forms.

The young pads of the Nopalitos cactus (Opuntia ficus-indica)are called Nopales. They are edible and are often cooked with eggs and jalapenos

Trichocereus hybrid

Golden barrel cactus (Echinocactus grusonii)

Fishhook barrel cactus (Ferocactus colvillei)

Mexican fence post (Pachycereus marginatus)

Octopus cactus (Stenocereus alamosensis)

Argentine saguaro (Echinopsis tersheckii)

Close up of the spines on the Argentine saguaro

San Pedro cactus (Cereus pachynoi)

Night blooming cereus (Trichocereus sp)

Pine Cone Cactus (Tephrocactus articulatus)

Giant saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea)

 I'm finding that this trip is keeping us so busy there's no as much time to write about as I hoped, but in my next post I'll share about the second part of our tour, the Tucson Village Farm.