This month’s post feels a bit different. Lately, there’s been a lot going on in my life with my business and personal relationships, I’ve been struggling sometimes to feel joy when it’s time to care for my plants.

And not just my plants, but this is a plant blog and I have over 100 plants. While they usually bring me so much love and happiness, these days the care seems to fall by the wayside, and the next time I get around to them I see them ailing.

So you want a summer garden in the Sonoran Desert? Read this guide to help you know what to plant and how much to water! We’ll go over the duration of the season, when and what to plant, and how much to water. Let’s dig in.

In Phoenix, nearly 50% of home water consumption is used outdoors for irrigation. That’s an insane quantity of water used just to irrigate our landscape! We all know that we are in the midst of a global climate crisis and as desert dwellers, we bear an even heavier burden to lower our water consumption.

Enter “xeriscaping,” the landscape principle of utilizing native plants to irrigate as little as possible.

I am an expert in plants. It is my full-time job—along with design—and I attend graduate school for it. So yeah, I’m as close to an expert as I would say I am about anything at my age (a ripe 23 and a half years if you were curious). And still, I fail miserably, epically, royally at them sometimes.