A Small Sunny Garden Blog

a familiar old blog in a new home

Sweet Acacia (Vachellia farnesiana)

Dear friends,

The small sunny garden has moved… in more ways than one!

Those of you who have followed my adventures and misadventures over the past few years will be aware that I was forced to move abruptly from Arizona to the Midwest in December 2018/January 2019. I have now finally been able to return to Arizona, to my beloved desert country.

It will be a new garden in a new place, as I have gone from the low desert to the high desert, somewhere around 4000 ft elevation. The climate will be a bit different, but this is still unmistakably the Sonoran Desert—complete with my own young saguaro cactus, affectionately known as Bungo.

As I begin a new desert garden, I am reviving the Small Sunny Garden blog, which I had only been able to continue by fits and starts over the past few years. Where to continue it has been a significant question. My main website is not very well-suited to blogging; it’s more than a little awkward for the purpose. I tried reverting to my old Blogspot, but Google has meantime dropped some support for the Blogger sites, specifically in terms of email subscriptions, and I have some concern that that support may continue to erode.

As I was thinking about all of this, I discovered that it might be possible to entirely recombine my blog, all on one site, here on Substack. I’ve been using Substack for many months now for my poetry blog ACM Weekly. It’s a straightforward platform to work on, and has so far been extremely reliable. So I feel it to be a good move to reconstitute the small sunny garden here.

Now, as I write this, there is one ongoing difficulty in this process. It appears that only eighteen of the blog posts on my website are actually available to me through my RSS account. For which reason, I am having to import the rest of them one-by-one-by-one. I copy, paste, publish, then change the date… I’m afraid I just hit the button to send a two-year-old post to each of you by email, rather than simply loading it onto the website. My mistake! There may be more such mistakes; please do bear with me! I shall have it all sorted as quickly and seamlessly as I can.

And of course, if you would prefer not to receive these posts, you may unsubscribe at any time. I imported the email subscribers from each version (I think) of the blog, rather than dropping everyone. I will note that although Substack is known for allowing paid subscriptions, this blog itself remains free. I hope it will be a source of inspiration as to the pleasure of gardening even in a fairly extreme environment, as well as a source of information.

Well, it is still very much summertime here in the desert, with temperatures still swinging upward above 100 degrees on many days. It’s a good time to get the “office work” done before planting begins in autumn. So I am doing exactly that—getting the blog restarted as I look toward the first work with a shovel.

Not quite, though, as I did plant some Salvia and Catharanthus about a month ago. They were on sale as the June and July heat made even the garden centers falter.

I’ve also been doing some exploration and discovery of new plants on the property. It’s a lovely, old-desert place, full of native sweet acacia and other treasures. But that is best saved for a new post, I think!