Herbs are ready to be transplanted in the Master Gardener’s Herb Garden at the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension, 8050 Paradise Rd., Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017.
Sunday, March 5, 2017 | 2 a.m.
Spring is still weeks away, but Southern Nevada welcomes the warmth early, with the National Gardening Association declaring Feb. 16 the beginning of our frost-free growing season. From there, it’s 285 days of almost guaranteed sun, such that even the blackest thumb might pull off a healthy tomato plant.
If you’ve never had the guts to grow your own, now is the time to dig your fingers into the dirt of Las Vegas. Yes, it may need some amending. And yes, you may need some patience. Not everything was meant to thrive in our climate. But this guide can help you build a garden that will feed your family, and maybe a little piece of your soul.
Tips and tools to get you started
“Maybe you want to be outdoors, or you want to do a project with your children, or you want the best vegetables you can get. You want to be organic, or you just want colorful blooms or scents around you, or you want to look out your window and see a beautiful blooming tree,” said Ann Edmunds, Master Gardener coordinator for the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension. “There’s something about gardening that speaks to everyone who gets involved, and that makes them start.”
The start can feel especially daunting in Southern Nevada, because the soil requires tenderness and the climate can be harsh. Even Edmunds, a garden nymph from childhood, remembers moving from the East Coast and having to figure things out all over again. And it isn’t just about the head game. Gardeners need tools just like chefs, and building a proper arsenal in the shed is like stocking a kitchen.
From botanist Edmunds and Las Vegas’ “Tomato Lady” Leslie Doyle to Star Nursery’s Crystal Gwaltney, local green thumbs offered advice on what you need and what you need to know to make your start a good one.
Don’t assume you’re limited because you’re in the desert.
Gwaltney: “There are desert-adapted seeds for most trees, fruits, etc.: almonds, apples, nectarines, pomegranate, figs, plums, peaches, apricots — all viable options. Other than tropicals, you can pretty much grow anything.”
Don’t worry about shade.
Doyle: “Sunlight isn’t the problem. The problem is you’re not thoroughly watering.”
Still, if you want an extra layer of defense, you can try shade cloth or planting companion plants that block sun (i.e., the three sisters of corn, beans and squash).
Okay, sometimes worry about shade.
Edmunds: “Sunscreen is essential, a hat, eye protection, and also water.”
Be smart about the physicality of the sport.
Edmunds: “You want to take care of your back, your shoulders, because if you injure yourself you can’t garden. So the best present I’ve gotten recently is actually a cart, so I can load up all my tools and pots and roll it around so I don’t have to be lugging things all over the place. I also have an industrial dolly if I need to move a heavy plant pot. There’s a pad you can use as a stool, and you flip it over and it’s a kneeler.
If your soil seems to require a jackhammer, build a raised bed.
Home-grown vegetables and herbs are displayed at Lola's Louisiana Kitchen, 1220 N. Town Center Drive, in Summerlin Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2014. The herbs and vegetables are grown in small gardens around the exterior of the restaurant. The restaurant, the second Lola's location, celebrated it's grand opening on Oct. 21.
Edmunds: “People make it out of wood, half-whiskey barrels, concrete — a lot of (beds) that you buy are different types of plastics. It really depends on your location. Anything that’s on top of the native soil that you can fill with some fertile soil (works), and irrigation, that’s key. A raised bed generally has to be near water and close to where you’re going to use it. If it’s too far away, you’re going to forget about your vegetables.”
Many types of veggies can be grown in the same bed, but be careful to group items by their growth dates. Early-producing crops such as spinach, carrots and onions should be grouped together; perennial vegetables such as asparagus, garlic and artichokes also can grow together. This allows you to harvest and replant vegetables without disturbing surrounding plants that aren’t ready.
Don’t build beds on top of mature tree roots.
Edmunds: “If you have a huge tree, you have huge tree roots, and so if you put a raised bed on top of tree roots and you put water in the raised bed, guess where the tree roots go? And the tree wins.”
Beware of the wind.
Consider protecting your more sensitive plants with trellises and structures.
Pick gloves to suit your type of gardening.
Gwaltney: “If you’re vegetable gardening, you’re mostly using them to stay clean, so you just need something thin enough to feel what you’re doing but grippy enough for your containers. If you’re planting trees or something major, you want leather padded gloves to protect your hands and give friction.”
Protect your hose.
Gwaltney: “That’s one of the most common things we hear. People’s hoses break or crack. If you keep it out of the sun, it’ll last longer. It’ll kink less if you keep it out of the sun on a reel or under a cover. You have to remember the sun is harsh on everything.”
It's about you, not your gadgets.
Vegetables from Create A Change Now's edible garden, "Garden University," at Robert Lunt Elementary School Garden University Friday, May 2, 2014.
Don’t be seduced by fancy products says Ann Edmunds. “You can have old tools and be a wonderful gardener, and you can have brand-new tools and if you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t use common sense, you’re not going to be a good gardener. You don’t need special ergonomic tools unless you have an issue where you can’t use standard pruners.”
And don’t take on too much. “If you want a low-maintenance garden, you pick plants that are low-maintenance. I don’t do vegetable gardening probably for that reason,” Edmunds said.
Call the Cooperative Extension’s help line at 702-257-5555 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. Drop-in tours of its gardens happen at 10 a.m. on Fridays, with Saturday “theme” tours of various plant collections on deck for spring. Check out the Facebook page of the Master Gardeners of Southern Nevada for event information and pictures of what’s blooming.
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Master Gardeners, including Alicia Braswell, left, tend to the Master Gardener Herb Garden at the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension, 8050 Paradise Rd., Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017.
PLANTING BASICS
The most important thing for growing your own food is plenty of sunlight; the good news is you live in Southern Nevada. Another important factor is having nutrient-rich soil; the bad news is you live in Southern Nevada.
Dry climates usually have alkaline soil (you can double-check with a simple pH testing kit from your neighborhood garden center, however). Mushrooms, yams, okra and peppers like that alkaline soil and so may do better in the valley.
If you want the more standard salad fare and have the alkaline soil we expect in the desert, however, mix in sulfur or amend the soil with organic matter such as composted leaves, peat moss or wood chips. (A raised bed also does wonders for alkaline soil.)
Once you’ve got the sun (that was easy) and the soil (still not too hard), it’s time to plan what goes in the dirt. Start from seedlings grown indoors or seeds of plants that don’t transfer well and know the best times to plant.
Horticulturalist Norm Schillings home botanical garden has great soil which partly comes from home composting on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2014.
How to add nutrients to your soil
Many novices tend to overdo it on the fertilizer. We know how dry it is, so we overcompensate with the black stuff out of the bag to lock in the moisture we assume is escaping ’round the clock.
A couple of factors can make this an overreaction. Depending on the size and material you’re planting in — clay, plastic, pot, plot, bed — incorporating some organic matter into your soil once a year may be all that’s needed.
Clay pots are always preferable to plastic because they breath, but if you’re serious about your veggies, a raised bed is your best bet. A better bet for dry or sandy soil (you can do a pH test to be sure using a kit from your garden store) is to work in 3 inches or so of compost, covering it with mulch to retain moisture. Every year, make sure the first 2 inches contain a “fresh” batch of this rotten concoction. This way your soil will stay the perfect host to your future food.
1. Some gardeners keep a bucket under the kitchen sink filled with eggshells, coffee grinds, bits of melon and other organic food wastes. These are great for fertilizing once they begin to decompose.
2. A simple soil amendment that includes organic material, like a compost tea (one part compost of yard waste such as leaves or grass clippings to five parts water) early in a growing season can make a positive impact on an aspiring vegetable patch.
3. You can always pick up a bag of fertilizer. Regardless of which method you choose, remember that you may not need as much as you think. Often a little can go a long way, topping off a healthy pot or bed instead of filling it.
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GREAT THINGS ABOUT GARDENING IN THE DESERT
A lack of sunlight (at least six hours a day) and a lack of drainage are vegetable garden killers.
Enter Las Vegas. If there’s something we have enough of, it’s sunlight. You’d be hard-pressed to find a sunnier spot on Earth. And if you’ve found a puddle, chances are there was just a flash flood.
Aside from the winds, gardening in the desert has some perks. With that sunshine comes two gardening seasons: spring and fall. Many parts of the country only have enough sunshine and warm weather for a single crop, but the avid gardener in Las Vegas can clean up.
Also, the dearth of water can be a gardener’s best friend. Sure, vegetation craves water, and plants, especially the edible kind we all love in our salads, desperately need water.
But other things that also love moisture and humidity are bugs and garden pests. See a big hole in your leafy plant? Chances are a previously very hungry caterpillar is lurking nearby. But our lack of rain discourages their population.
We do see a decent number of aphids here, but soapy water or the introduction of ladybugs can easily get rid of those little leaf-clingers. And you thought ladybugs were just stylishly cute.
Large globe artichokes for sale from the Intuitive Forager at the Downtown Third Farmer's Market in Las Vegas on Friday, July 20, 2012.
The best low-water crops
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the best vegetables to grow in the desert are those that are drought-tolerant. Perhaps surprisingly, this doesn’t mean sacrificing deliciousness for a garden stuffed with turnips (no offense to the world’s turnip lovers).
Some varieties of tomatoes are dry-weather friends. Eggplant, okra, artichoke, chard and chickpeas all like it hot and dry.
For most of us, though, eggplant isn’t a dietary staple. We want the things everyone wants — common greens, “salady” things that you can pick, wash the dirt off and take a bite of, flaunting your gardening prowess while raising your green thumb aloft at the neighbor.
Although a vegetarian or mostly vegetarian diet greatly reduces a person’s carbon footprint, popular vegetables can be water hogs. But there are many other resources, or, to put it more bluntly, planet-killers used in the making of a single ripe tomato than one might assume.
Consider that little “product of Chile” sticker on your grocer’s pint of strawberries. About 11 percent of the emissions involved in food production are actually a result of transportation.
Most of us are cognizant of the slow and locally sourced food movements, started in an effort to eat closer to home for a host of economic, environmental and health reasons. On the other hand, most of us aren’t going to put down our salad forks and forgo eating anything we can’t grow ourselves simply because of the impact we’ve gleaned more abstractly from watching a documentary.
BASIL BASICS
Basil is a lot of people’s favorite herb because it’s flavorful, fragrant and can be used in so many kinds of dishes, from caprese salad and pesto to Thai (not just Thai basil, but the most common sweet basil).
1. Get a small to medium pot. Clay is always best. (Plus it makes a classic and attractive addition to your windowsill.) 2. Start basil plant from seeds. 3. If possible, find some south-facing light. But, if not, basil loves sun and chances are that sun isn’t a precious commodity in our house. 4. Water your plant when soil is dry to the touch. 5. Around 10 days in you’ll see green. 6. In a month, if all goes well, you should have a full-fledged producer. 7. Harvest your larger and greener leaves above the stem where two leaves meet. (This also helps the plant grow.) 8. Enjoy delicious dinners, enhanced and improved by fresh herbs.
Herein lies the rub. We want to do what’s right, but we’re used to eating foods year-round that aren’t grown locally year-round. While it is difficult to do a side-by-side comparison of resources used in eating certain fruits and vegetables from afar, consider that the main offenders are also the ones that hit your wallet the hardest: berries, tomatoes, cherries, bell peppers, asparagus. These little babies are often shipped by air, and hence rack up the food miles and rates of pollution and asthma.
Cauliflower and cabbage, while not usually shipped from far-flung locales, are garden favorites (interestingly from the same mother plant). These types of plants can also be water hogs, however, consuming about two gallons of water a week depending on the weather.
Undoubtedly we live in a place where water is a scare resource. However, if we look at the complete picture of what a fruit or vegetable costs, we can start to see where water might not be the only resource to consider. In a city where water reclamation is as close to 100 percent as you can get, perhaps your well-maintained drip irrigation and strict adherence to the watering schedule can actually help solve the problems created by big-business farming.
Local gardening combats the accrual of food miles. If it can do this while saving you $5 for a head of cauliflower, so be it.
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It may not be immediately clear how our lives are affected by the lives of honeybees and the organisms that harm them, but many of the alarming headlines of today have roots in upsets to the natural balance of things.
SUPPORT YOUR POLLINATORS
Avoid hybrid flower breeds, which often don’t have pollen, nectar and fragrance.
Plant the same species in clumps to make food easier for pollinators to find.
Choose night-blooming flowers to support nocturnal pollinators, including moths and bats.
Leave fallen tree branches or stumps whenever possible — they’re ideal nesting sites for native bees.
Bright color is always a good idea when trying to attract pollinators. And the healthier your garden, the more powerful its appeal.
“Believe it or not, you have a bee to thank for every one in three bites of food you eat.” That’s the headline on Greenpeace’s “Save the Bees” platform, which hammers the seriousness of the collapsing global bee population.
The insects do about 80 percent of the pollination on the planet, including 75 percent of fruits, vegetables and nuts, amounting to 70 of the top 100 crops feeding humans.
Scientists point to a number of factors in the honeybee’s rapid decline, but parasites, habitat loss and pesticides are big ones. Beekeepers lost about 44 percent of their colonies in 2015-2016, according to a survey by the Bee Informed Partnership, an alliance of research labs, universities, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“We’re now in the second year of high rates of summer loss, which is cause for serious concern,” project director Dennis vanEngelsdorp said in a blog post.
Angela O’Callaghan, social horticulture specialist for the University of Nevada’s Cooperative Extension, has joined the movement to aid the survival of pollinators, including hummingbirds, bats and the “lovely flying miracles” known as butterflies.
“If it’s anything that flies to a flower, or flies from one flower to another, it can be a pollinator,” O’Callaghan said. “The most important thing is, don’t go spraying around your house. Insecticides, yeah, they’ll kill roaches — and all kinds of other insects. So you want to be really attentive to that if you’re serious about wanting to help pollinators.”
Here is her advice on what to plant to attract and support our pollinating allies.
• For hummingbirds, plant flowers that are deep-throated and red, such as red yucca or aloe vera, and blossom-crowned desert trees like pomegranate and bottlebrush.
• For butterflies, plant anything with wide, flat flowers where they have a space to land and feed, especially lantana, and the flowers of mature dill.
• For bees, plant herbs. The blossoms of mint, rosemary and sage draw bees in droves. So do the flowers of fruit trees that thrive in the desert, such as peach, nectarine and plum.
The importance of honeybees
According to a 2011 study, California almond growers are forced to import honeybees from other parts of the country to pollinate their trees. California almonds amount to a $2.3 billion industry annually that relies on almost half of all the honeybees in the United States.
Among the pollinators, honeybees are responsible for pollinating the most and the widest variety of crops. A 2014 White House press release about the dangers of declining populations noted that natural pollinators (bees, birds, bats and butterflies) contribute more than $24 billion to the economy annually — of that, honeybees contribute $15 billion.
The United States is home to more than 4,000 species of native bees, and nearly all of them play an important role in our food system. While different bee species tend to pollinate different flowers, the honeybee pollinates the widest variety and does so efficiently.
Without honeybees, the following crops would be drastically affected: allspice, almonds, apples, apricots, avocados, bell peppers, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, cantaloupes, caraway, cardamom, cashews, cauliflower, celery, cherries, chestnuts, coconuts, coffee, coriander, cucumbers, fennel, guava, kiwi, lemons, limes, macadamia nuts, mangoes, okra, onions, peaches, pears, squash, strawberries, turnips, watermelon.
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A student garden is shown at the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension, 8050 Paradise Rd., Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017.
WHAT AND WHEN TO PLANT IN LAS VEGAS
Desert weather patterns mean we have two planting seasons every year: spring and fall. Most springtime veggies can be started inside in February or March, planted outside with seeds or seedlings in March or April, and be harvested by May or June. Here's a quick guide to planting indoors, planting outdoors and harvesting:
Beans: Plant outdoors in March and April, August and September. Harvest in May, June, October and November.
Beets: Plant outdoors in February and March, August and September. Harvest in May, November and December.
Broccoli: Plants indoors in January, February and August. Plant outdoors in February, August and September. Harvest in April, May, November and December.
Brussels sprouts: Plant indoors in August, and outdoors in August and September. Harvest in December and January.
Cabbage (summer): Plant indoors in January. Plant outdoors in February. Harvest in May and June.
Carrots: Plant outdoors in February, March, September and October. Harvest in April, May, November, December and January.
Cauliflower: Plant indoors in January and August, and outdoors in February, March and September. Harvest in April, May, November, December and January.
Celery: Plant indoors in January, outdoors in February and March. Harvest in June and July. Harvest in June and July.
Corn: Plant outdoors in March and April. Harvest in May and June.
Cucumbers: Plant indoors in February and March. Plant outdoors in March, August and September. Harvest in June, October and November.
Eggplants: Plant indoors in January and February. Plant outdoors in March, April, May and June. Harvest March through November.
Garlic: Plant outdoors August through December. Harvest April through November.
Kale: Plant indoors in January and February, and August. Plant outdoors in February, August and September. Harvest in May, June, November and December.
Leeks: Plant indoors in January and August. Plant outdoors in February and March, August and September. Harvest April through June, November and December.
Lettuce: Plant indoors in January and February, and September. Plant outdoors in February, March, September and October. Harvest in March, April, October through December.
Melons: Plant indoors in February. Plant outdoors March through June. Harvest June through November.
Okra: Plant indoors in February. Plant outdoors March through June. Harvest April through November.
Onions: Plant indoors in January and February. Plant outdoors February through June. Harvest March through November.
Parsnips: Plant outdoors in February, August and September. Harvest November through January, and June.
Peas: Plant indoors in January and February. Plant outdoors February through June. Harvest April through November.
Peppers: Plant indoors in January and February. Plant outdoors March through June. Harvest April through November
Potatoes: Plant outdoors February through June. Harvest June through November.
Pumpkins: Plant indoors in March. Plant outdoors April through June. Harvest June through November.
Radishes: Plant outdoors February, March, September and October. Harvest in April, October through December.
Spinach and similar greens: Plant indoors in January, February and September. Plant outdoors in February, September and October. Harvest in May, April, November through March.
Squash (summer): Plant outdoors in March and April, and August. Harvest May through July and November.
Sweet potatoes: Plant outdoors April through June. Harvest July through November.
Swiss chard: Plant indoors in February. Plant outdoors in February, March and September. Harvest May through July, November and December.
Tomatoes: Plant indoors in January, February and August. Plant outdoors in March and August. Harvest May through July, and November.
Watermelons: Plant indoors in February. Plant outdoors March through June. Harvest May through November.
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