Welcome! My name is Kat, and this is the inaugural post of Raven+Root. This site is a space for those seeking connection with the land, radical reclamation of the authentic self, & cooperative re-integration with the natural world. Here you’ll find posts and tutorials about low desert gardening, vegetarian & plant-based cookery, rewilding, living seasonally, Naturalistic/Atheistic Paganism and Witchcraft, imbuing ritual into the mundane, honoring the cycles of life, & ways to cultivate a slow, intention-filled human experience.
I live in the Southwestern US, in the low desert of Tucson, AZ. Our home sits nestled in a 70s suburb at the foothills of the Santa Catalina mountains. Here in Tucson, we garden in USDA Zone 9b, which sees mid-winter low temperatures of around 25F, with summer highs up to 120F. We average about 12″ of rainfall per year, & have a beautiful monsoon season that lasts from about July 4th through the first week of September.
The sun here is very intense, so gardening in the Sonoran desert has unique challenges, especially in the summer months. Due to the heat and intensity of the sun, many vegetable plants here slow significantly or stop producing entirely in the hottest months due to their flowers being sterilized by high ambient temperatures.
Additionally, our landscape is quite arid, and many growers here struggle with compacted/clay soils, inadequate organic matter in the ground, and high supplemental water requirements.
However, it is absolutely possible to grow not only verdant, lush plants here, but food as well.
One of the challenges I had as a beginning gardener with no experience whatsoever was that widely accepted planting traditions and timing often do not apply to the Sonoran low desert. Here, if we time our plantings to anticipate lush, vibrant food production for mid-June, we’re going to be disappointed by a virtually sterile and quite possibly crunchy plant wasteland instead. We can often start planting outside in late February to early March, and have to anticipate and work around the incredibly harsh conditions of our full summer sun, aridity, and extreme heat (often up to 120F).
We have a lovely warm Fall and mild Winters here, so the low desert is an amazing place for year-round gardening. Here in Tucson, the ground does not freeze, so it opens up huge possibilities for growing through the cool season.
Additionally, Southern Arizona has a long history of agriculture, stretching back thousands of years due to the remarkable skill and innovation of the native peoples indigenous to this area. The Tohono O’odham and Pasqua Yaqui tribes have been farming in the Tucson basin since long before the waves of European colonization swept into Southern Arizona. As such, there is a huge wealth of arid farming techniques available to us here through the cultural conservation efforts of local organizations, tribes, individuals, and agricultural cooperatives.
So. In this blog, I hope to share my excitement for and ecstatic love of gardening, with special attention to the unique growing conditions of the Sonoran low desert. Growing on my land, receiving food from that space, and engaging with the cycles of life here have been deeply transformative experiences for me, and I hope to share that with the world!
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