Winter in most of the country means cold — much too cold for much of anything to grow. But in Phoenix, winter looks a little different.
Melissa Kruse-Peeples, gardener extraordinaire, manages the garden at Arizona State University's Polytechnic campus, helps the university with urban garden education and outreach and she runs her own gardening business, teaching consulting classes and workshops.
The Show first visited her home gardens last summer— she has one in her front yard and another in her backyard. Then, temperatures were in the 100s.
When The Show stopped by in January, it was rainy and cold (for Phoenix). But one thing was the same as it was in the summer: Her garden was overflowing with veggies.
Kruse-Peeples says winter in the desert is, in fact, the best time to garden. She explained why.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Winter in most of the country means cold, much too cold for much of anything to grow. But here in the valley, winter looks a little different.
MELISSA KRUSE- PEEPLES: What I'm growing here is some broccoli and romanesco. I just planted lettuce a couple weeks ago that'll be ready at the end of February. I have some things that will last longer, like the kale, Swiss chard and the peas take a while.
GILGER: That’s Melissa Kruse- Peeples, gardener extraordinaire. She manages the garden at ASU polytechnic campus. Helps the university with urban garden education and outreach, and she runs her own gardening business, teaching consulting classes and workshops. I first visited her home gardens last summer, and yes, that's plural gardens. She has one in her front yard, another large one in her back, then temperatures were in the one hundreds, and we both spent the whole time sweating. Today, it's rainy and cold for Phoenix, and we're both bundled up, but one thing is the same as it was in the summer- her garden is overflowing with veggies.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: And then this is my cauliflower.
GILGER: You have this like a clothespin to shut the leaves are closed, pinned over the vegetable?
KRUSE-PEEPLES: So doing that the cauliflower helps keep the color really good, so it doesn't get the sun on it, so the sun kind of discolors it. But this one, you're like, it's already discolored, but it's actually a cheddar cauliflower, and so it's this yellow, orange cheddar color.
GILGER: Way under there.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah.
GILGER: Oh, look at all those big leaves around it.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah!
GILGER: That's the size of a head.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Exactly, exactly so and fresh, like cauliflower and broccoli just tastes so much better because the sugars are still in the plant. So fresh is good. So we're gonna have this for dinner tonight.
GILGER: Kruse-Peeples tells me winter in the desert is, in fact, the best time to garden here and filling up a basket with veggies with her in her garden. You can see why.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: I have some beautiful dinosaur kale then these curly kales. So we'll do kale chips with those.
GILGER: This is really pretty and huge.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: exactly, yeah, and it'll kind of grow into a tree, almost. So we got some kale. I'm gonna check if this is my favorite way to grow tomatoes in winter. They are sensitive to the frost, and so when it gets cold, I do have to cover them up, but I have these big leaves steaks on here.
GILGER: So I'm surprised, because tomatoes are supposed to be a summer plant here?
KRUSE-PEEPLES: They are but Phoenix winter is about like summer elsewhere. It kind of gives me a head start when it does warm up that the plants are huge and established, and I can get quite a bit. And I have been picking little red red ones off of this guy. Looks like I only have one today.
GILGER: All right should we head to the back? This basket already looks beautiful and full of goodness.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: And in the winter, it's a lot of greens, a lot of green.
GILGER: Less color in the winter.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Less color in the winter. But in the summer, it's just too hot for leafy greens and stuff. And so now's your time to kind of stock up. And some of this, I like to freeze, especially if I use it in soups or different cooked dishes. The freezing it preserves well.
GILGER: I recognize this right off the bat, eggplants.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: So this is frost damage that it's had on it, because I don't cover this. It's about four feet by three feet.
GILGER: It’s really big.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Very big. But look over here, how many eggplants. And so I think actually this is one I was eyeing this week. So it's funny, January is almost the best month for eggplant as far as productivity, and then more tomatoes, carrots, onions, and a lot of great root crops do really well in the winter too. I like to say it's the time you can brag about your bees and so B stands for brassicas, which is like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage. R is root crops. A is the alliums, garlic, onions. G is greens, all kinds of greens, spinach, kale. And then, of course, peas.
GILGER: That pea plant is twice as tall as me.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Exactly. Yeah. So this one, I love these pea plants, so just keep going and going, and all those flowers will turn into a pea.
GILGER: How much of your garden here, do you keep all year, and how much of it do you replant? Because, I mean, some of these plants are just huge, like, this is, is this a broccoli?
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah. So this is actually a romanesco. And you if you peek in there?
GILGER: Wow, look at that.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Barely. So if you see …
GILGER: That’s a huge plant.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yes, it is a big plant. And that's like romanesco, or like a type of broccoli, cauliflower. That's pointy. It looks like Lisa Simpson's head, but it's a huge bite. So when that's done, I'll clear that out. And I'm a year round gardener. I do let some areas go to rest a little bit, or a plant in the heat of the summer, like a cover crop that just kind of covers the soil, keeps it active and alive. But I add a lot of worm castings and compost. Just and so we have to, we're taking, taking, taking, we have to feed, feed, feed the soil too. So I can show you my worm composting.
GILGER: Let's go see it.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah.
GILGER: Oh, it's buried in the ground?
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah so, I have it in the bed, so it's just kind of some chicken wire cage, and it's like a big cylinder buried. And then, and then there's some worms in here.
GILGER: Oh, yeah, there they are. Oh, those are big.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: They’re red wigglers. And so they're eating these strawberry scraps and things. And these, actually, some of them are small. You can see they're Yeah. So then they, what they do is they breed. And so as they breed, they lay eggs and hatch more. And so I spread this good stuff throughout my garden. It feeds it, but it also spreads the eggs, and we get more worms. So whenever I dig a hole, I want to see worms, and that's a sign of active soil. So yeah, there's lots of little babies in here.
GILGER: We talked in summer, I remember about good soil and what it looks like, and how you can tell what's good soil, and how you kind of create it. I mean, so this is so is it easier in winter to keep that going because it's a little wetter and it doesn't dry out?
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah. And so a lot of the microbes and fungi that sort of decompose soil stuff too. When it gets too hot, they can die. When it gets too dry, they also die. So it's a matter of water, air and temperature that makes these things work and keep them alive. And that's why it's important if you kind of give up on a season that you don't just, like, give up, or stop watering, or stop caring for the soil, so that when you're ready to go back to gardening, it's alive and ready for you.
GILGER: That's actually a big point right there, right like, I don't think I would have ever thought of that. Like, even if you're not planting anything, don't let the dirt sort of die.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Sort of the dirt, dye and dry out. So you could put some cardboard or tarps or things to keep the moisture in as well. But, and that's why I encourage people to do cover cropping. So you can do that. A lot of farmers who do big summer crops do cover cropping in the winter, just so that there's something actively growing. It covers the soil. So when it does rain like this, it's not just washing away and sort of damaging the soil. And then when you're ready to plant again, you can just till all that green stuff into the soil. And so that feeds it and gives it organic matter, because all the worms, the microbes, they need something to eat. And so naturally, our desert soils are really low in organic matter. There's no leaf debris. We don't have trees and forests, so there's nothing for them. So there's pretty low in microbes. But then we add that we want to give them something to eat. They're hungry, and so then they're what they excrete is all the good stuff that's already taken something that's nutrients and made it in a form that the plants can actually suck it up.
GILGER: There's such a cycle to so much life.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah, exactly. It is a cycle and things you so then that's what, you know, all the things you when I take that romanesco out, I'm not gonna eat those leaves that are for food, but what I can do is compost those leaves and sort of return them back and make, make new soil and return that back.
GILGER: So that's kind of the beauty of it. It feels like everything kind of has a use and goes back into use in a new way.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: And so you know, we can't just take, take, take. We have to give as well. And so, but, I mean, look at that. Broccoli is like a five pound head.
GILGER: That’s huge.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Maybe that's exaggerating a little, but it's a huge head of broccoli. And so that had to come from somewhere to be built. And so it came from the soil itself.
GILGER: That's amazing. OK, so we're in winter, but you said we are heading towards spring, like, pretty soon you're gonna be thinking about spring?
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah. So we, you know, often January, we get these beautiful 75 degree days, and we think spring and summer is here, but we always have, like, what's called a fall spring, nice and warm, but it's still, like, pretty cold at night, and the days are still relatively short. And so while much of the country, they're in the dead of winter, you know, until March, April, we come, kind of come out of that winter time, in mid February. And so that doesn't mean it's still not going to get a little cold sometimes, because I've had a frost on March 1 once before. But the days are longer, so we get more sunlight, and the soil starts to warm up more, yeah, just more hours of sunlight to grow. And so Valentine's Day is kind of our spring here in Phoenix.
GILGER: I'll remember that, that's easy to remember.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Exactly, but the reason why, you know, we're waiting for that spring is because summer comes even faster. And so summers when we get 105 you know, at night time, it's 95 and just too hot. And so plants never get a break. And so the earlier we can plant for spring, just the more likely we can get some harvests.
GILGER: The last thing I want to ask you about in terms of winter gardening in Phoenix, I mean, I think you've given us a lot of good tips and tricks, and like, the what to plant and the when and the why. But I think what's so interesting about this is that it's so different, like this is actually, as we talked about, in the summer, sort of in the opposite way that it is for the rest of the country, the best time to harvest here?
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Exactly, so if you're a new gardener, looking at the winter season, because we get more rainfall, and it's that low and slow rain that really helps with things, and just the sun isn't so intense, and so things can kind of grow a little slower just because. We don't have a lot of hours of sunlight, but it's just so much easier. Oh, I forgot about that. Those are my watermelon radishes. We're gonna eat one this week.
GILGER: These are cute. Yeah, let’s get it.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: These are watermelon radishes.
GILGER: The kind that's pink in the middle.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah so it's pink on the inside and green on the outside. And so it looks like a watermelon.
GILGER: So look at that. That is beautiful.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: It's about the size of a baseball, which is such a little big for a normal radish, but really great this, sorry, easily distracted by all the stuff growing.
GILGER: She's got much more to harvest. Melissa Kruse-Peeples, thank you so much for having me out.
KRUSE-PEEPLES: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
