The definition of insanity

I didn't always have a brown thumb (opposite of green thumb). I planted stuff all the time when I lived in Tucson and harvested plenty of stuff that ended up actually being edible. I don't know why I'm so compelled to even try to garden anymore after what's happened since we moved to this house.

2005
This was a "bye" season for us. We'd just moved in, I was pregnant, and we were still making sense of our rocky yard that was forested by weeds taller than our kids.

2006
Time to get serious about the garden! I cleared out a space under the fig tree, where there weren't many rocks. I bordered it with bigger rocks and got some soil amendments to mix into the native "soil." When I dumped out the store-bought dirt, I realized how huge the contrast was between the store-bought dirt and the native dirt. The black bagged dirt made the stuff in the ground look like beach sand. But I had to plant! I put the seeds into the ground, watered, etc. Stuff sprouted. It grew pretty slowly, though, that is, if a bird didn't come along and nip off the fresh leaves. I re-planted a time or two. Nothing got any bigger than a seedling, though. I figured out later that "soil" was a bit strong of a word to describe the native stuff. It was more like a fine dust, hardened into "ground" by the years of rain and not growing anything. I chalked up the wasted time and resources from the in-ground garden to experience that would lead me to NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

2007-8
I visited my aunt and uncle in Davis, California. They have a HUGE garden that takes up about a third of their backyard. If our garden was that successful, I wouldn't mind the square footage myself. They seriously don't need to buy produce certain times of the year because they can grow anything they want. In 2007, I learned why. My uncle mentioned that his neighbor had dug a swimming pool that year, and even though the hole had to be six-feet-plus deep, the rich, black soil went down all the way as far as they dug. This would explain why everything that grows in Davis is twice as tall as trees elsewhere. They're so danged HAPPY in their perfect soil. Somewhere in there I realized that Phoenix soil was the opposite and I needed to use NONE of it if I wanted to grow anything. This was in the middle of my YW-leader-zealot stage, and I built a raised-bed garden as part of a personal progress project. In 2008, I even screened off the freshly planted bed with a plastic mesh to keep birds off the plants until they were big enough to tolerate leaves being bitten off.
Stuff grew, but it was an ongoing competition between us and the other creatures who inhabit our yard to see who could get to the produce first. I couldn't figure out why tomatoes were disappearing from the plants until I saw a squirrel running past the back door with something small, round, and green in its mouth. Squirrels: 1 Humans: 0
You know how some seeds say to plant in full sun? If you live in Phoenix, whenever you see that, you should think to yourself: "Full sun = Full shade." After seeking guidance on the internet about raised beds, I had read several times to make sure the garden got about six hours of sunlight a day. THEY LIE. Six minutes is plenty. As soon as the 100+ temperatures showed up, all the plants in the garden seemed to say, "I didn't sign up for this. I'm leaving." I don't think we ate anything from that particular raised bed. Except maybe some radishes. (?)

2009
OKAY, since raised beds in the sunlight don't work, how about raised beds in the shade? We moved the walls I'd constructed and most of the store-bought dirt from the first raised bed and even put a second garden together. We put them in the shade of the fig tree, right over where I first started planting. I was so sure this was going to work! We planted all kinds of things. I got little miniature sprinklers from the irrigation aisle at Home Depot and rigged up a watering system for the garden. That was kind of fun to put together. 2009 ended up being the best growing season. The plants grew quickly and we got an extra month of reasonable weather before the heat wave hit. Plenty of tomatoes started out, but I think we only got enough to mature that we used them once for hamburgers. We also had cucumbers at dinner one time, using two at once since they were small. Two cukes and a handful of small tomatoes. Don't ask me how much those were per pound. It's best not to think too hard about some things.

2010
We continued with the raised beds, since they sort of worked. But this time, stuff would sprout and not get very big. I don't think we harvested anything. That year, I finally decided that I would plant early, since "spring" could be construed as early as February in these parts, and then when the heat got too bad, gardening was over for the year. I wasn't going to fight the heat and I certainly didn't want to be out gardening in the summer. But by the time the heat set in, the garden hadn't gotten anywhere. The growing season was such a flop I thought I would try again when it cooled off in the fall for a winter garden.
I was getting the raised beds cleaned up for another feeble attempt when I realized that I couldn't even draw the bow rake through the soil. It would get caught on something. I pulled hard, and a hundred tiny, hairlike roots came with the rake. I found that the soil was completely bound up in both gardens by the roots of the fig tree. Figs are survivors. We read in the scriptures about figs growing in the Middle East where Christ lived. The Mideast is no rain forest. It's a desert, much like Phoenix. Our fig tree flourishes with no effort from us. But that means it takes what it can find. In this case, the rich, regularly-watered soil of the gardens right above the main roots was a gold mine for the tree, but the thousands of roots in the garden stole water from the vegetables and pretty much constricted the growing space. Since I didn't feel much like shoveling out both gardens and almost re-constructing them, I left them alone and the following year, the raised beds sat empty.

2011
I've come to the conclusion that there isn't an ideal spot in our yard to grow a garden. It needs to be mobile to catch some rays while the rays are friendly, and then move into the shade when it gets too hot. Enter the Potted Garden. It's been two months since we planted it. The tomato plant was the only thing that didn't grow from seed, and it started producing almost right away. We had three small green tomatoes. Then one day I noticed one tomato was turning brown from the bottom up. It also had a hole in the bottom, indicating some intrusive creature. Another tomato was also browning from the bottom. I looked at the third and largest tomato to see if it was doing the same. It wasn't, but looking under it caused the stem to snap off. The other dozens of tomato blossoms are blooming, but no fruit is coming on. (time to quit?)

It's not that Phoenix is an agricultural black hole. Our backyard neighbor grows all KINDS of stuff, IN THE GROUND, on the west (REALLY REALLY HOT) side of the yard. Over at the school, I can't help feeling inferior as I walk past the huge, happy plants, putting out veggies like crazy, when those plants are YOUNGER than ours, which are not even thinking about producing yet. And I'm not the problem either. I grew stuff at our old house, a mile and a half north of here.

I know the definition of insanity is repeating an action and expecting a different result. What if you repeatedly change what you're doing and still get the same result?