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Editor's Note: Not a Bad Year of Gardening I hoped to have added a water harvesting system to my house and garden but never got it done due to a lingering shoulder injury which still hasn't corrected itself. The sore shoulder made for difficulty lifting heavy objects including the camera I rely on to take pictures for this website. But I did manage to check out a couple of the local firms that install water harvest systems but thought the prices were a bit steep for what I wanted to pay. I'd also planned to order several yards of clean fill dirt so I could build a couple of berms to slow down some of the runoff and give my trees a chance to absorb the rainwater instead of it flowing into the wash on the edge of my property. Would have been an excellent project to have completed considering the winter rains we had. Maybe it'll get done before the summer monsoons roll in. With the rising cost of water, especially for the avid gardener, it's probably in everyone's best interest to look into ways to harvest rain water and recycle some of the grey water from our homes. I hope to make a few changes around my garden and home in the coming year to save a bit of money on my watering costs. When, and if it gets done, I'll be sure to share the experience on these pages. By mid March I hope to get a few summer squash, tomatoes, and bush beans planted in the raised beds for some fresh produce on the table in a couple of months. As spring arrives, I hope to spend some pleasant mornings and evenings in and around the garden enjoying the outdoors and the local wildlife that might pay me a visit. I've been fortunate not to have had my Collared Peccary, Tayassu tajacu, problem I've had in the past years. I'd only see one or two and they generally stayed down back along the wash. I figured most of them had been killed when they tried to cross the busy streets because I'd seen their carcasses along the road on occasion. Well that all changed in the new year. Seems like I've got a new small herd that's making the rounds in the neighborhood. In the last three weeks of February, 2010, four or five of them have shown up almost every night to cause havoc with pots and plants. They want to sample everything and in doing so destroy the plants when they pull them out of the ground and often break plant containers when they knock them over. I lost a very nice clay strawberry pot filled with spinach when they knocked it off a concrete bench.
They've also decided to climb the stairs to the back porch where I have a lot of plants in the winter and even more during the summer. I'm going to have to build some sort of movable fencing to keep them off the porch at night. There's not much I can do about the rest of the yard unless I want to install an electrified fence or build a wall, neither of which I want to do. Eventually, I'm sure they'll move on to another neighborhood to torment the homeowners for a while. Then after a month or two they'll return to continue my aggravation. So I'll continue to live with my wildlife encounters and gardening adventures. But here's hoping for a pleasant and successful year of gardening to all The Tucson Gardener website visitors.
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