The Challenges of Gardening in the High Desert

When we left our long-time home in California and moved to the high desert of Nevada, we knew the soil and seasons would be different, but we were not prepared for just how different! Living out here, we've had to forget all that we knew about growing a garden and we are learning how to garden all over again.  

 

Challenge #1 Growing Fruit Trees

We purchased land that doesn't have any naturally growing trees, so we immediately planted 5 apple trees and 2 pear trees. We didn't just plant them straight into our 100% silt soil, but instead we dug a huge and deep whole and filled it with compost, steer manure, chicken manure, rotting leaves, potting soil and native soil. We wanted to give our trees the best chance at growing big and healthy as possible. However, the one thing we didn't take into consideration was bunnies. It turns out there isn't much for bunnies to eat out here and they sure do love tree bark. This is the damage those bad bunnies did in just a few hours! Our of our 7 trees they nibbled on 6 of them, this one being damaged the worst. We have since added plastic tubing on all the trunks of the trees to keep the bunnies from doing further damage.   

Challenge #2 Less than Desirable Soil 

We did a little science experiment. We took a scoop of soil, placed it in a jar and added some water. We put a lid on the jar and shook the jar up and let it sit for a few days. This is the result. Silt, water and sagebrush. That's basically all our natural soil is made of. No clay, no sand, no decomposing organic matter. Needless to say, it's not the best soil for growing.

We are working on amending our garden plot to make the ground ready for next year's garden, so in the meantime, we tried growing in all kinds of containers! This watermelon is growing in the lid to a croissant box.  

We grew rainbow carrots and radishes in a plastic storage tote.

We tried tomatoes in huge black plastic pots, wildflowers in a cut in half water barrel and we even grew squash in 5-gallon buckets from The Home Depot. We did plant some tomatoes in the garden plot we were amending, and the plants started out slow, but ended up doing much better than the tomatoes in the containers. Go figure!

Challenge #3 A Short Growing Season

People are often surprised when I tell them that we have a short growing season. Just because we live in the desert doesn't mean it's warm year-round. On the contrary, we have more months of cold weather than warm weather. It usually begins freezing (at night) in October, although this year (2023) it froze extra early in September! The nightly freeze tends to continue through the end of May or beginning of June. That means our freeze free growing season is only about 3 months long. 

Unfortunately, for us, we started our seeds outside in April and our tomatoes just didn't have enough time to ripen before the freeze hit. 

This was just one of the two bowls of green tomatoes we picked before the freeze. While a few of them ripened, most of them ended up in the compost. 💔 

Not everything we grew was a challenge. We had some successes, and we have learned things that we will put into practice next year and the year after that.

If you would like to read about the plants that did well in our garden this year, keep an eye out for that blog post.