Hi: I live in Peoria Arizona.....so I'm familiar with the climate! I have a raised bed as well as a small in ground area and also use containers. In the fall and over winter I always grow carrots, lettuces-all kinds- peas, radishes and beets. I've also had some luck growing beans and have successfully over wintered tomatoes. I grow the tomatoes in containers that I can bring indoors if we have a frost, otherwise they live just off the patio. It probably wouldn't be practical for you with having the surgery to drag plant pots in and out of the house though. But the carrots, lettuce, peas and beets are pretty easy and low maintenance if you want to give it a try. Best of luck with your surgery and heal well.

Lettuces (they can handle the shady bed best), spinach, chard, bok choy all handle the Phoenix winters. They may droop after a freeze but always fluffed right up when the day warmed up.

Less common: corn salad and mizuna

E'toi onions and garlic are both incredibly easy as well. I agree about chard, beets and also kale and arugula, plant it once and it will keep coming back if you let some go to seed. Parsley is the same way. Good luck!

Thanks for the suggestions. My wife will be thrilled to here about the bok choy, and the root vegetables are a must. I could do an entire bed of carrots and be happy.

Worryzone - I've tried E'toi ontions with no success. I'll try again, because I'm sure I did something wrong. I split a bunch with a buddy two years ago, and we planted them under pretty much identical conditions. Mine died, and his did little to nothing the first year. In fact he thought they were dead until they started to sprout after months of neglect. Now he's got a good size bunch that I'll be using on my next attempt. But yeah. Long story to tell you that I managed to kill one of the toughest onions on the planet.

Shhhh, you must whisper, very very quietly, the words bok choy within hearing of my little dog Maggie. She LOVES bok choy. Rip 'em right out roots and all - cabbage too. Silly girl Maggie. Yes, if you can keep Maggie out of the garden, bok choy and wandering onions can do really well in winter here. ;-)

Yeah. I had a French Bulldog that felt the same way about pumpkins. I hadn't bothered to fence my garden until that little twenty pound beast came trotting up with twelve feet for pumpkin vine following behind her. She was very proud.

Have any of you tried Fava Beans? I know that they handle cooler weather better than other beans, and I do love them with bacon on a slice of toast.

I just planted some for the first time. Don't know how they will do. I love an experiment.

Thanks for the fava bean idea, I've never tried them but I'll give them a go.

For me the Roots have been the easiest: I'm doing a full 10x4 bed of red & purple carrots this year. Beets (Detroit red & Bulls Blood are faves) are easy-peasy. Turnips - easy. Radishes: easy, but the only ones I like are the watermelon variety (round, sweet & crunchy - great w/hummus). Pumpkins are pretty easy as well (I do winter luxury and musquee de provence both work very well) though they do get attacked by aphids (as does everything above ground for me). I usually get a lettuce-mix, two red russian kales and two lacinato/dinosaur/tucscan kales as well. Fancy garden-lettuce beats the crap out of *anything* you can buy at the grocery store.

Well, we go through 8-12 carrots per week in our house easy, and I'd like to pickle a bunch of them again (they turned out great last year), and I give some to neighbors/friends/family, so, yeah, piles of carrots. :) Might do another same-sized bed w/just beets this year. NEVER have enough beets! So, this year it's 1 big bed of carrots, 1 big bed of beets, 2 small (4x4) beds for the pumpkins, and one big bed split half brocoli/romanesco, half kales/lettuces. Uh-oh, where am I going to put the onions and garlic? shoot, I need to re-think.

Hi awtarrant1

I didn't see your comment back until now. I got my e'tois from a native plant site 5 years ago, they sent me 5. Of the first 5 two died, don't know why but the 3 made 18 or so, and I planted all of them the next year, and then I had about 80, finally tasted one as I felt I had enough for "seed" and now I had probably 200 this year. I keep 50 or so to replant, gave about 15 away to a few people who wanted to try them and ate the rest. Some places say you can leave them in year round and they will just keep multiplying. I did keep about 15 of them in ground after the tops died back about 2 months and dug them up about a month ago and they were beautiful so you never know. I would try again, They don't need great soil or a ton of water. Good luck this time!

Just wanted to say thanks again to everyone for the input. Sat down with the wife yesterday and came up with the fall lineup. Not sure just how many of each, but here's what we came up with. Wish me luck.
Fava Beans
Avalanche Beet (White Beet)
Boldor
Beet (Gold Beet)
Broccoli
Raab
Carrots
Swiss
Chard
Dino
Kale
Red
Ruffled Kale
Green
Onion
Purplette
Onion
Pac
Choi
Parsnips
Snap
Peas
Cherry
Belle Radish

Well that formatted poorly :(

Looks like a great list! If you do encounter aphids (they LOVE cruciferous plants), there is an organic product called "Safer Soap" that does a reasonably good job of annihilating them - it's available at Ace or Amazon. Good Luck!

Just wanted to update this thread with my fava beans trial. They seem to work very well here if you start them in the fall. They grew through the winter like it was summer (had a few sub 30 nights too).

Here's a few pics of them today:

The fava bean plants grew much bigger than I thought they would. They are about 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide. BTW, that plant on the left in the 1 gallon container is another trial plant I started in the fall: an Ice Cream Bean (Inga Edulis). which handles the cold a lot better than they were supposed to. 9 germinated from 10 seeds and they all stayed outdoors without any real issues. Being very young plants, I still gave them overhead protection but the sub 30 nights didn't phase them. (Same with the new Moringa trees)

This is a close up of the fava bean flowers. You can see some bean pods started in the lower end. The pods are very small now but by the size of the seeds I planted I think they'll get pretty big if I let them. One thing that's cool about the fava beans is they draw a lot of bees to the yard, including some big carpenter bees that are yellow (I had never seen the yellow type before).

Here's another plant that's reseeding from last year and is very welcome. Last year someone on this forum made a post about a type of mexican swiss chard (I believe that's what it was called) and gave a link, so I bought some seeds and let it go to seed last year, and it grows all over the place. It tastes really good, very similar to fresh spinach.

I figured I might as well include this pic of a Loquat tree I started from a cutting last year. It also stayed out in the cold, but with no overhead protection, and did completely fine.

What fall plants did you try and were they a hit?

I too tried Fava Beans this year and have a few pods going around the yard. They have grown really well and aren't very fussy.

I don't know how many pods you need for a meal, or when the pods are big enough but that is what I like about gardening, learning something new. I look forward to trying them as I have never eaten a fava bean before.Right now I am busy eating Mulberrys and lots of Kale, three different kinds.

Shannon

Hi Shannon, I've cooked fava beans twice so far from my plants. They are very good! I followed a video on youtube on how to cook them and it was more work than normal beans but it was still very easy.