Dubai is at best divine for about 6 months, where everything grows well and you can truly enjoy your garden but come May it becomes harsh and hot and your beloved garden dries up to a crisp. The window to grow vegetables especially is quite small and has its share of challenges.
The first thing one needs to figure out while planning a Gulf garden is the Sun. How much sun comes from what direction and how does the sun change over the seasons? My suggestion is that for the first season try to stick to container planting. This enables you to move your plants to their best advantage and learn the movement of the sun.
After a year and a half in my new villa, I think I have my Ixoras sitting right finally. But it did take a lot of adjustments before we found the best place.
That was just an aside, mainly to illustrate how difficult it is to find a spot, that suits the plant summer and winter here.
So I moved into my villa in September and spent that season trying to bring life to the area and putting down a lawn. My vegetable gardening was an unmitigated disaster last year with Tomatoes getting constant pests and not enough sun. The bottle gourds finally gave fruits towards the end of the season after struggling with rain, pests, and general problems. The only thing that really worked was my chili plant which was generous and bountiful and luckily was planted in the right place for it.
This year, I was more prepared. I grew the vegetables from seed and lots of the flowers too. Only I made mistakes again. I planted too much and transplanted the saplings too early. What I realized is for vegetables, don’t plant more than 6 seeds per vegetable. Vegetables like radishes and beetroot need to be planted in the area where you are growing them. Transplanting these resulted in lost saplings and not enough fruit. And the same thing happened with other root vegetables. You need loads of sun during the winter here so place your vegetables accordingly. Less is more so pick the vegetables you eat or would like to share.
Also, make sure you spray your vegetable saplings regularly with neem oil to prevent leaf miners, etc. I did not do that and it made some of the vegetable saplings look terrible and they flowered and fruited much later. For flowers, my suggestion is to spray a weak solution of chemical pesticide as the bugs and pests are often harder to get rid of, and the window for flowering is again small. Again the sun is the key.
Buy supplies like soil, fertilizer, and pots in the summer months(June, July, August) where you are not spending so much money on the garden. Of course, this depends on whether you have a place to store them. For your vegetable areas turn the soil regularly and then a month before you plant remove 8 inches of the soil, add cuttings, grass clippings etc, and cover it with the topsoil. This will ensure nutrients will slowly release into the soil over time. A good idea is to add cow manure to the mix and leave it for at least a week before planting the vegetables. The timeline for this would be the end of August. This would also be a good time to add humic acid to the soil along with seaweed fertilizer. This you can do to all your plats including perennials.
Another mistake I made was not to add any fertilizer at all during the three months of summer. A good idea is to use a good quality overall fertilizer but only as a soil application. No foliar sprays are to be used during the three harshest months of summer. Alternate that with a seaweed fertilizer once monthly and you should have strong plants coming into the season.
Of course the most crucial decision one has to make to have a beautiful garden in the UAE is the kind of plants one puts in the ground or pots. Try a mix of the usual suspects, the frangipanis, Jatrophas, and the Adenuims as your backbone as they survive summer well here and as you learn the sun and the peculiarities of your area you can add more plants over the season.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the sun and its wanderings are the KEY.
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