You're getting a bit of a late start for tomatoes. I've found chili peppers hard to start from seed, they are very particular about heat and moisture. If you have a trellis, try malabar spinach. It loves the heat and puts out pretty flowers in summer. The spinach is tasty too. Also armenian cukes and okra love the heat.

For me, I prefer to lay in a cover crop of black eyed peas for the summer. I'm the only one in the house that will eat okra or cukes so the effort of growing is not worth it. The legumes are soil nitrogen fixers and it's easy to grow. Just toss out the dried peas, water in, keep moist. You got BEP's at summers end. Leave the roots in place to provide air and water tunnels, snip the plant at soil level and also leave the plant debris as mulch, or use it in the compost pile.

Hey CS, welcome to AZ and welcome to this forum. We hope you'll post, and comment, often! Basil loves it here, so good choice there--just keep it well watered and in sun or afternoon shade. LOL @ Leslie about spending so much time pinching the blooms, hah! It sure does feel that way sometimes doesn't it?

There are lots of LOCAL gardening books, CS (try "Extreme Gardening" which is about veggies/fruits and some ornamentals for our area, but there are LOTS of great local books too). Like Mary mentioned, our easy productive times in veggie gardens anyway are autumn/spring with a decent showing in winter. Summar has far fewer options but there are some good ones. Just try to not garden on the same schedule as cold-winter areas (where they grow tomatoes in summer for example and tomatoes really struggle in summer here), and so on.

As far as ornamentals, you can have something in bloom every single day of the year. Happy gardening and welcome again!

Welcome, you got some great advise so far...basil is great, mine lasted until December last year and we got a new one that looks great.

Hello thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions.

Good news for me, today my first pepper sprouts broke through (just one plant so far, but that's miles better than none!) I will also try to start some seeds indoors as a nice backup. My gf and I were at a local nursery this weekend for some good advice.

Basil- So I trimmed back the stems that were budding. If I prune and prune those randy stems, in theory the plants will spend more energy growing right? Sex or growth right?

Cilantro - The guy at the nursery kinda just said to give up on that. At this point the bolting cant be stopped I guess, but I should have nice cilantro next fall.

Has anyone done the hydroponic tulips? My gf got a nice vase full of them at Fry's for pretty cheap and they bulbs all look healthy and the flowers are nice but dying. Any clue on when they might flower again if at all?

Thanks again!

The tulips were most likely forced, so unlikely to rebloom. I don't know about hydroponic tulips, but you could try storing them in a paper bag in the fridge once the foliage dies, and plant them in the fall. Might work, might not, but what have you got to lose?

I pinch the flowers off my basil before they bloom out-takes some dedication, but it keeps the basil going, and once they flower it makes it kind of bitter. When they kind of get away from me, I cut them back, Mine are in pots, so I can move them from full sun in winter to part shade in summer, and if you protect them from freezing, they'll live a long time. I have one that's going into it's third summer, and it looks great.