Growing your own vegetables in the desert

There's no better way to celebrate Earth Day than by getting your hands down into the dirt and starting a vegetable garden. The last couple of years, there's been a lot of interest in "local food" - knowing where your food comes from, and how safe it is to eat. 

It doesn't get any more local than 20 feet from your kitchen door. And these days, with more people watching their budgets, it's good to know that even a small home vegetable garden will cut down on your food bill. 

Best of all: you're going to love the taste of fresh ripe vegetables straight from the garden. 

It's simple and inexpensive to get started. And go ahead and start small: even a 5 foot by 5 foot garden plot will supplement your kitchen with a few fresh and home-grown vegetables. And once you see how easy it is, you'll want to grow a bigger garden next season. 

You don't need to build raised beds or buy a lot of equipment or a lot of chemicals, or even install an irrigation system. Making it too complicated keeps a lot of people from growing their own vegetables and the key is to keep it simple. 

The one tool you need is a spading fork, and, if you don't already have one, you'll need a watering hose. You'll need compost to dig into the soil, and seeds or plants, and that's it: you're ready to grow a garden. 

The Three Simple S's: Sun, Soil, and Season

Sun: 
Pick a spot in your yard that gets at least 6 to 8 hours of sunlight a day. You can grow lettuces and greens with less sun, but our fruiting vegetables need that sun. If you have an unused patch of lawn that is growing well, that's the perfect spot for your vegetable garden - and there's nothing more "green" than taking out the lawn and putting in vegetables. Be sure to get rid of the grass before you start digging, or it will grow up into your vegetables and make a mess. 

Soil: 
Most of our soil here in the Valley is great for vegetables, once we amend it. The number one mistake people make in growing a vegetable garden is digging out their existing soil and replacing it with artificial soil. That rock-hard clay soil in your yard? That stuff that's so hard to dig? Congratulations: it's actually the best possible stuff for your garden. It holds water and is chock-full of important minerals. The key is to add organic matter to loosen it up. 

Here's what you do: 

1. Give the soil in your new garden area a good soaking with the hose, to at least a foot deep, then wait a day or two until the soil is still moist and easy to dig, but not wet. 

2. Use your spading fork to dig up the entire area to a depth of one foot.

3. Spread a six-inch layer of home-made or commercial compost on the surface, then use your spading fork to dig that in, mixing it well. 

4. Get your hands dirty breaking up the clumps, smooth it out, and you're ready to go.

5. Repeat the digging and amendment every season when you re-plant and in no time you'll have great garden soil. 

6. Remember: don't waste your money on soil mixes or recipes or artificial soil. 

Season: 

We can grow vegetables year-round here in the desert, but we grow different vegetables at different times of the year. If you try to grow spinach in the middle of the Summer, it won't work. As a general rule, we plant the true vegetables, where we eat the plant itself, like lettuce or cauliflower, in the Fall months; and the fruiting vegetables: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, in the Spring. 

Even in the heat of Summer, you can be harvesting from your own home garden: cantaloupe, watermelon, black-eyed peas, and eggplant are some of the highlights of the Summer months. 

How about right now? Right now you can plant Black-eyed peas, cucumber transplants, radishes and green onions, small-fruited tomato transplants, pepper transplants, eggplant, and best of all: cantaloupe. This is peak season for getting cantaloupes in the ground, they love our summer heat, and there's nothing like the flavor of a home-grown ripe cantaloupe. 

Tomatoes!
Everyone wants to know about growing tomatoes. It doesn't get much better than standing in the middle of your own garden and eating a just-picked tomato still warm from the sun. We can grow tomatoes here, but there's a few things to keep in mind.

1. Start early. As soon as the temperatures start to climb to 100 degrees, the tomatoes will stop forming new fruit.

2. Look for small-fruited varieties. The large, Beefsteak-type tomatoes just don't do well here. Their outsides mature faster than their insides, and they tend to split. Cherry tomatoes, plum tomatoes, paste-type tomatoes, and the smaller round tomatoes, all do well. 

3. Look for short-season varieties. The earlier they mature, the more crop you'll get.

4. As the weather heats up, drape some shade cloth over your tomato plants to prevent sun-scald, and to give the green tomatoes a chance to ripen fully on the vine.