Our first blog post – by Austin Lynn

Welcome to our Horticulture in the Sonoran Desert blog, a space where Garden Social landscape horticulture experts, master gardeners, urban farmers and environmental sustainability advocates come together to bring unique insight, excitement, intriguing facts and new discoveries to light, with real-world experience growing beautiful plants and curating incredible spaces in southern Arizona’s blazing heat, intense sunlight and extreme drought conditions.

My name is Austin Lynn, owner and founder of Garden Social AZ LLC, and president of non-profit Garden Social Community Impact. My journey with Horticulture in the Desert began a little over a decade ago, like many others in the desert gardening space, with a passion for lush, green foliage and vibrant flowers, dreaming of a space teeming with vegetables, pollinators and thriving plants – my little oasis.

My dream was coming to life as my first few seedlings sprouted in little peat pods, comfortably nestled within their plastic greenhouse tray, growing tall and scrawny, as if reaching for light at the center of my dimly lit kitchen table. I read somewhere that plants need natural sunlight, and my 72-count plastic greenhouse tray of peppers and tomatoes was starting to overflow with lanky, sunlight-starved sprouts. So, I had an idea!

You see, I started my table-top garden at the perfect time in the season, (from what I had believed at the time), right around the first week of April! My mind fluttered with the thought of planting my seedlings in the garden by Easter weekend, a time best known for representing new life, right? Teeming with images of lush grass fields, blooming flower bulbs, gardens filled with butterflies and the precious addition of baby chicks and little bunnies. A great time to plant in southern Arizona, right?

My vision was clear, a lush summer garden and an abundance of produce. The third week of April, I had invested about half of a paycheck on all of my supplies, including 4″ peat pots, steer manure (to use as soil), compost, fertilizer, garden tools, decorative pots without drainage holes, the list goes on! My trip to my local garden center was a mystical adventure, I didn’t receive any help or guidance at the garden center, but I did have google and some helpful summer gardening guides from a fantastic source in central Michigan.

I brought my seedlings outside for their first hour of natural sunlight while I had excitedly set up my new garden space, taking time to fill my larger pots, build a small raised-bed garden for my dozens of seedlings, and daydreaming about my future oasis – only to be met 30-minutes later with the reality of an April afternoon in southern Arizona (hot, dry and windy), and my unfortunate demise – a patio filled with dozens of dead, withered tomato and pepper seedlings.

My broken heart had led to a fiery determination to uncover the secrets of how to grow and maintain a healthy garden space in the southern Arizona Sonoran Desert, to identify the best materials to use, how to navigate the nuances of our local climate’s unique weather patterns, when to plant according to our USDA/Sunset zones, when to set myself up for success, as well as when to expect my plants to die back at the change of seasons.

This energy eventually grew into a insatiable passion to learn and grow in my understanding of horticulture, leading to the start of my career at a local family-owned nursery in Maricopa County’s east valley. Throughout my experience, I was challenged to learn the names and environmental requirements of hundreds of perennial plants, including sunlight and watering needs, the challenges of planting in different soil types, the remedies to soil deficiencies and treatments to common pests and diseases. In my time within my role, I had additionally taken the opportunity to independently study landscape horticulture and xeriscape design, soil microbiology and permaculture. This aided me in my interactions with visiting customers, from identifying trees by their leaves or bark, to helping with pest treatment, recommending best-practice tips for planting and watering habits, and even getting hands on with the elderly who

needed a young-man’s help with physically planting their new trees and shrubs. This was so personally fulfilling and such an enriching experience for young me, especially thinking back to my personal struggles with growing little tomato seedlings on my dimly lit table top.

You see, this may sound normal to experience for any individual working at a local nursery and garden center, however, in today’s world, fewer and fewer garden centers actually employ people with knowledge about the plants they sell, or the environment they intend you to grow them in, let alone do they even value training new employees on such subjects to aid in educating new buyers on the needs and requirements of their purchase. In fact, many ‘big box stores’ don’t even grow the majority of the plants they sell, they simply lease out retail space for other growers to sell their plants, oftentimes (in southern Arizona) to growers outside of our region, residing in mild-climate California, or large greenhouse growers producing beautiful shrubs in climatized, humidity-controlled spaces.

Those plants should be totally acclimated to our environment, right?

I mean, they’ll definitely perform well if planted directly in full-sun exposure, right?

My mission was defined by this fallacy alone, bridge the educational gap that has seemingly disappeared from the horticulture space, which has since exposed new gardeners, homeowners and even landscape tradesmen to misinformation and investment risk. Although my journey was filled with hard-earned lessons, loads of failure and personal discovery, theirs doesn’t have to be.

This is where Garden Social came to be.

Read more about the start of Garden Social in my next blog post!