Resources - Gardening With Soule

Under this menu heading I will share a number of helpful resources – like plant lists, book reviews and more. Things that might help you succeed with your gardening goals. (my personal “mission statement”)

Please check back as I rebuild the site.

The Southwest is Diverse

In the books I have written for the international publisher Cool Springs Press, I divide the Southwest into 5 distinct regions. More about those five regions or growing zones on this page (coming soon).

Here is something I wrote in Chapter 1 of Southwest Fruit and Vegetable Gardening:Revised Edition:

Welcome to growing a garden in one of the most fascinating and diverse places on earth. 

First there is the geographic region itself, with strongly upthrusting mountains, windswept plateaus, and canyons that reach down into the dawn of earth’s prehistory. We have elevations close to sea level in Yuma, Arizona, and some of the tallest peaks in the lower forty-eight states, such as the snow-capped San Francisco peaks outside Flagstaff, Arizona, and the Sangre de Cristo Range in New Mexico. 

Mountains and mesas may be of igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary rock, providing unique parent material for the soils of our region.   With this wide geographic variation in the Southwest comes vast climate variation, as much as you could see in a journey from the tip of Florida to the Alaskan tundra.

So yes – growing anything here might be different than what you might be used to.

We have two very distinct growing seasons across the Southwest. Cool Season and Warm Season. When it comes to growing vegetables – some areas have more like five different seasons!

Since the Southwest is such a large geographic area, including land below sea level (and often the hottest spot on earth) to land that is almost 2 miles high with only about 60 frost free days a year. But people don’t live in those extremes so I mostly focus on cool and warm which works for most of the readers. This is reflected in how I title many of my posts.