Open in My Garden Today

Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), my kitchen garden; June 2010

This week's theme for The Sunday Creative (oh how I love these challenges!) is "open," and I've decided to go with that theme all week, in various media, starting with this entry. I added this echinacea to my kitchen garden last week both for its beautiful flowers and to eventually harvest some roots for my herb collection. My evolving kitchen garden is just in front of the house, visible from the kitchen window, and although it's mostly for herbs I've added some perennial flowers to "pretty" it up for myself as well as visitors.

Everything in front and back is now on a drip irrigation system; after 7 years here in the high-mountain southwest, I feel confident I've finally figured out drip irrigation, including how to clean the emitters that inevitably get clogged from our ridiculously hard water. If you garden in a dry climate zone, want to save water and labor, or are just a gardening fanatic and seek a new challenge, I highly recommend drip irrigation. I get all my supplies and most of my info from Dripworks, which has both a catalog and a Web site for ordering, but many other vendors offer equipment and guidance as well. Once you get the system laid out and operational, it's time to mulch the soil... which is what I'm off to do right now....