Festivities at the end of October include more than just Nevada Day; it is also the time to send out young people in great costumes to get candy. Halloween is a relatively tame holiday now, in comparison with its earlier roots. All Hallows Eve was once the night when specters, ghosts, witches and other unpleasant characters were on the prowl looking to torment unsuspecting people.
Several years ago, I sent out a quick survey to gardeners around the valley, asking them a number of questions concerning compost. I wanted to know if they composted, if so, how they did it; and if not, why not?
Last week I described my group of little gardens in pots. Although creating a vegetable garden in pots is often considered a fool's effort in our challenging climate, I decided it was worth experimenting with this system. The salad vegetables were the earliest, having been started toward the end of winter, and were very successful.
The end of summer is the right time to do a roundup of this past season's garden. My garden is always a set of little experiments. These are nothing particularly scientific, more to satisfy my own curiosity.
Once September arrives, many of us forget that gardens will continue to thrive until well into the fall. The end of summer and beginning of autumn are often taken up with getting kids ready for school, and all the busy-ness involved with that enterprise. New classes, new grades, new subject materials – all of these can seem to be a world distinct from the garden or the natural world that surrounds us.
Even though summer is, by the calendar, coming to a close, the intrepid Mojave gardener does not need to stop all gardening efforts until next year. That might be the fate of growers in other parts of the world, where winter is a long series of grim, cold, wet months. In fact, desert autumn is one of the best times to get out and grow delicious vegetables.
Plants that are well adapted to our kind of landscape are a hardy lot – able to withstand lack of water, salty soil and intense sunlight. Once they become part of the landscape design, even these need a certain amount of care, of course.
Late summer in Southern Nevada is generally not anyone's idea of a good gardening time. In fact, it can be somewhat melancholy – looking out at the summer crops showing the ravages of extreme sunlight and searing temperatures. While gardeners in other places are only now beginning to see their crops come in, ours are nearly past.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has finally recognized the great work that Master Gardener volunteers perform for their communities nationwide. This is in the form of a news release entitled “USDA Master Gardeners Available to Help Americans Grow Safe, Healthy Food Throughout the Country.”
When horticultural scientists want to determine which plants among many will meet a particular need — cultural survival, flower color, fruit taste, or vegetable nutritional content, among other qualities — they often perform what are called “variety trials.”
