The triple-digit heat is here to stay for a while. We’re also in an El Nino cycle, and it’s been wetter than normal this year.
All of that affects your garden.
Now, you also might also worry about bugs, pesticides, pets and more. But lucky for you, we had two experts on hand to answer all of your gardening and growing questions.
Norm Schilling is the owner of Schilling Horticulture in Las Vegas and Angela O'Callaghan is the social horticulture specialist for the University of Nevada Extension.
There's not much you can do to shield your garden plants in 110 F and higher temperatures, but O'Callaghan said to make sure the soil is evenly moist and hide them from afternoon sun.
Schilling said to plant them in fall: "In theory, your first summer in Vegas is your toughest, although I'm beginning to rethink that. But it's true for plants, if they're planted in the fall, they have more of a chance to establish their root system before they get hit with this brutal heat."
What you get, O'Callaghan said, is "too much green growth and no flowers, because not enough sun gets to the plant to give them that environmental cue. We found that for at least tomatoes, we got … the best yields with 30% shade cloth."
But what if we have an active monsoon season?
"If you have a really good rainstorm, yeah, you can turn off your irrigation for a short period of time, it just depends on how hot it is afterwards. Humidity is actually very beneficial to the plants," Schilling said, but timing is everything. "In Southern Nevada, it's pretty sporadic. Only one part of the valley, typically the west side of the valley, gets more water, more rainfall than the east side of the valley. But it could it could drench and Henderson and North Las Vegas not get a drop."
O'Callaghan suggested checking soil nutrients.
"We don't even talk enough about checking our soils, I mean, certainly from moisture, but even before putting a plant in the ground, it makes sense to have your soil checked. It's because you want to know how much of the essential nutrients are in the soil. How salty is the soil? Because a lot of the soils that we work with and our plants are trying to grow in these salts, these soils, at one point, were under an ocean intermittently for about a half a billion years. It was occasionally an ocean shallow ocean, but still salty water. The water left the salt is still in our soils. So we have to be aware that plants that are very salt intolerant are probably not the best bet here either."
Hear the full interview above, where they discussed what you can grow now, water restrictions from the Southern Nevada Water Authority, invasive species and more.
Guests: Norm Schilling, owner, Schilling Horticulture ; Angela O'Callaghan, social horticulture specialist, University of Nevada Extension
