Grow Tomatoes in Las Vegas
How to Grow Tomatoes in Las Vegas, Tomato Gardens in Las Vegas, Desert Gardening
Las Vegas Garden Soil
Las Vegas Garden Location
Raised Bed Gardens
Container Gardening
Gardening in Las Vegas Dirt
Growing tomatoes in Las Vegas is not impossible. Learning how to grow big, juicy, flavorful tomatoes in a Las Vegas vegetable garden is certainly a challenge, but it can done! People who have kept beautiful backyard tomato gardens in other areas of the country are often disappointed with the results of attempts to produce flower gardens, vegetable gardens and tomato gardens here in Las Vegas. I will share on this page some tips on growing tomatoes when gardening in a desert climate. that may help you from our experiences with our bit of a tomato garden here in Las Vegas.
Unfortunately, in order to grow tomatoes in Las Vegas you can not just go down to the local plant store and get a few tomato plants drop them in a hole and expect a tomato garden in Las Vegas to florish in the desert. You need to work on each of these major issues with tomato gardens in Las Vegas area:
- Really bad soil (highly alkaline / high ph)
- Extreme heat (temperatures can hit 120 degrees)
- Very limited rain (must be water smart)
The average tomato gardens in Las Vegas soil just sucks. Turning a couple shovelfuls of the soil will show nothing but rock, sand, caliche and clay. Anyone who has ever planted a tomato garden or vegetable garden in other parts of the country knows that when you dug that hole, the soil was often dark, loamy, essentially ALIVE from the cycles of decaying leaves and other organic matter worked back into the soil, and even smelled 'earthy'.
The folks with degrees can tell you all technical bits about the desert soil in Las Vegas, but as a basic gardener I knew that soil without organic matter was DEAD and tomato plants don't grow well in dead soil. Bad soil is something you can work to improve! But first things first.
Tomato Gardens in Las Vegas Location.
In learning how to grow tomatoes in Las Vegas or vegetable garden, location matters, just like in real estate! The intense sun and extreme heat of the Las Vegas summer can be brutal on tomato gardens in Las Vegas. It stands to reason that the location you choose to grow tomatoes in Las Vegas will make a huge difference. Our first attempt to grow tomatoes in Las Vegas was a complete failure by simply choosing the wrong location.
When we first attemped to grow tomatoes in Las Vegas, we bought bags of compost for this six foot square area, laid in underground drip lines but those four tomato plants didn't stand a chance because they were baked every day with a full exposure to the afternoon sun! I am sharing our mistakes and every how to tip we learned on this page so you don't have to experience the same disappointment.
Walk around your yard in the middle of the afternoon and find which areas are getting some shade. The shade may be a small area on the east side of your house or perhaps near the block wall on one side of your backyard has a few feet of shade. That very well may be a good spot to begin a tomato garden or vegetable garden. Even if where you grow tomatoes in Las Vegas or your vegetable garden area is only a patch of a few square feet of ground you want to have morning sun and afternoon shade if possible to help your tomato plants and vegetable plants beat the heat.
Building Up or Digging Down?
Raised Bed Gardens
Once you have decided on the best location to grow tomatoes in Las Vegas or grow a vegetable garden, you have to decide if you will be building up or digging down. Many people growing tomato gardens in Las Vegas have opted to skip the digging of the awful soil here and just build up a tomato garden area by making raised beds.
In making a raised bed tomato garden you need something that will hold the soil while still allowing drainage. The raised bed tomato garden in Las Vegas or vegetable garden should be no wider than you can reach so that the soil is never compacted by being walked on. If you are making more than one raised bed tomato garden in Las Vegas or vegetable garden, then paths can be made of gravel, pavers, left over tiles or whatever fits the style of your garden.
Gardeners in cold northern parts of the country have long recycled tractor and truck tires for their raised bed tomato or vegetable garden since a raised bed vegetable garden has the soil warm up sooner in spring and the black rubber even more so. This is an important point to consider when deciding what material to use in building a raised bed tomato garden in Las Vegas or vegetable garden in Las Vegas. The last thing I wanted for my desert garden in summer was more heat.
Stay away from creosoted railroad ties or treated wood when making a tomato garden in Las Vegas or vegetable garden since those chemicals could leach into the soil and then into the vegetables. Retaining wall blocks are very popular here in Las Vegas and can be stacked so that you can fill the area with 10 to 12 inches deep of rich soil for growing your tomato plants. You will spend some bucks on the soil, but at least it will be good soil. Next lay in your irrigation and plant the tomato plants or vegetable seedlings. Remember to top off soil with several inches of mulch to keep soil cooler and to retain moisture when gardening in the Las Vegas desert.
Consider checking sites like Las Vegas Craigslist or Las Vegas Freecycle to see if anyone could be giving away old bricks, stones, cinder blocks or scrap wood when making raised bed tomato garden in Las Vegas or vegetable garden. The sideboards of an old waterbed are really thick and will last quite a while if you like to recycle. Paint the boards white if you want to avoid having different colors of stained wood.
Container Gardening in Las Vegas
Since we have some patio area that gets morning sun and is shaded in the afternoon, we decided to do both container gardening and some in the ground gardening for our tomatoes. I used six 5 gallon sized pots for some container plantings of tomatoes and even put drainage holes in the bottom of a couple of old 10 gallon storage containers for other tomato plants. I also put the lids underneath the containers to protect the patio from staining. Then I added some gravel in the bottom of the containers for drainage.
The nursery had a special soil mix for container planting and the pots were filled and the tomato plants and the green pepper transplanted by early March. The wire tomato cages were added to help support the tomato plants in containers. I planted herbs in smaller pots to have parsley, chives and basil. This is what we planted on the patio.
- Two Sweet 100 tomato plants (5 gallon size pots)
- Two Patio tomato plants (5 gallon size pots)
- Cherry tomato plant (5 gallon size pot)
- Green pepper plant (5 gallon size pot)
- Two Early Girl tomato plants (10 gallon size pots)
What were the results of our different types of tomatoes in container gardening?
- Sweet 100 tomato plants - Excellent! (could hardly keep ripe ones picked)
- Cherry tomato plant - Excellent Again! (larger that sweet 100)
- Patio tomato plants - OK (1st fruits good but issues)
- Early Girl tomato plants - Won't Repeat (issues below)
- Green pepper plant - Won't Repeat (issues below)
I was very happy with the results of the small cherry tomato plants and the sweet 100 tomato plants holding up in the Las Vegas heat. They were supposed to be 65-70 days and we had transplanted the tomatoes in March and sure enough in May we had ripe tomatoes. The sweet 100 tomatoes and cherry tomatoes we used in daily salads and recipes since the smaller tomatoes ripened first. These tomatoes really had a good taste and did not seem to mind growing in containers on the patio. Thumbs up on these guys!
The Patio tomato had a stockier plant than the cherry tomato and the sweet 100 tomato plants so I had high hopes. I will say that its first fruits had good taste and the tomatoes were larger than the cherry tomatoes but many of the tomatoes in the next weeks kept developing that blossum end rot (bottom of tomato looks rotted). That is supposed to mean that the plant was stressed between the heat and the amount of water. The Early Girl tomato plants in the larger containers did the same thing! Quite disappointing. The green pepper did develop peppers but they were small and not as thick as I like.
Got to say I watered all the tomato plants the same every morning and the small cherry tomatoes and the sweet 100 tomatoes were happily growing and produced like crazy while the larger tomato varieties got blossum end rot. So in my humble opinion, it seemed that the smaller tomato varieties were the best bet in handling the Las Vegas heat for patio container plantings.
Tomato Gardening in Las Vegas Dirt
The 2009 tomato and vegetable garden plan was to put some tomatoes in containers on the patio and try a few more tomato plants in the ground again in an area of the backyard that would get shade in the afternoon. Gardeners wanting to grow tomatoes in Las Vegas or vegetable gardeners must be optimistics to the core. I wanted to try an experiment, in the category of he**, nothing to lose.
In January, I began to dig up the 9 foot by 3 foot area that would be our new tomato garden patch. I began shoveling all the terrible Las Vegas dirt out to each side of my tomato patch till it was just over a foot deep. You know the soil is dead when in digging an area that size and there was not a single worm! I wanted to try some trench composting but a bit more area. With the trench method, the compost area is usually left unplanted while it is decomposing. In this experiment trench, I laid in all the leaves from the neighbor's tree, grass clippings, and kitchen scraps and several bags of used coffee grounds that were free from the Starbucks down the street.
Then I put several inches of that really bad Las Vegas dirt back on top of our 'would be compost' that we gathered. I wanted that original dirt which was mostly sand and rock to be a buffer while the compost was decomposing.
On top of that dirt, I mixed in a couple more bags of the ready made compost from the nursery about half and half with the some of the remaining original Las Vegas dirt on the sides of my tomato patch. Then just for good measure, I went back to Starbucks and got a couple more big bags of coffee grounds. I used a garden rake to work the coffee grounds into the soil mix.
We laid the lines of drip irrigation, which have small holes about 12 inches apart, down into this top layer of soil a few inches below the the soil surface.
I laid a couple of inches of bark mulch on top of it all and called it done until March. Why did I add mulch since the tomatoes plants would not be planted in the garden until March? I wanted to prevent that lovely compost I had just bought from blowing away. I have been using bark mulch in hopes that the acidic nature will help balance this highly alkaline soil in Las Vegas as it decomposes. We'll see how it works in time.
In March I made 4 holes in our tomato garden, spaced about 2 foot apart and about 8 inches deep by pulling back the back the bark mulch and being careful to feel under the soil to locate the irrigation lines first. Then I gave each hole a good watering and transplanted in two Early Girl tomato plants and two Champion Vent tomato plants. I also planted some Oriential lilies behind the tomatoes in the garden. I repositioned the mulch a couple of inches space from the stem of the tomato plants. The irrigation lines would automatically water the area underneath the mulch. So I walked away and left them alone. No aboveground watering! No weeding! (I love mulch.) By mid May the picture above shows the tomato plants had been growing well. These tomato plants in the Las Vegas ground were slower than the containers on the patio to have ripe tomatoes.
The hope was that we wouldn't waste water overwatering with aboveground hose and the mulch might keep the ground cooler. The water for the tomato plants were from the automatic drip lines under the soil.
Those 4 tomato plants produced baskets of tomatoes, even when it was supposed to be too hot in Las Vegas for tomatoes to set fruit. The combination of deep trench composting, underground soaker dripline watering and thick layer of bark mulch definitely worked. These tomatoes were sweet, full of flavor and juicy. Nothing like the tasteless tomatoes from the store. We even put one tomato on our postage scale and took a picture of it because no one really expects to grow a 12 ounce tomato in Las Vegas.
Sure some of our tomatoes from our tomato garden did have splits, but they still tasted great. And who knows, maybe next season will be even better. Why do I think that? Because when I pulled out those tomato plants after a frost in late November, there were worms in the hole, really big worms. Next season's patch might be a little bit bigger....only one cherry tomato on the patio for early salads....
Trench Composting in Las Vegas
The best thing about trench composting is no smell. The Las Vegas area has quite a few housing associations that will not even allow compost piles perhaps due to odor issues or as a fire hazard since compost piles can heat up.
When it comes to the kitchen scraps, I keep one of those airtight coffee canisters under my sink. So when I am trimming the ends off the stacks of celery or peeling potatoes, the canister is handy. I never put any meat scraps in my compost container. You will be surpised how much these kitchen scraps will accumulate in a week. You can be improving your soil insteading of adding more to the landfill every week. More benefits of living green.
- fruit peelings
- vegetable peelings
- used coffee grounds with filters
- used tea bags
- egg shells
A Garden Plan
If you rush headlong out to the garden department buying those pretty plants without making a plan you will make those stores very, very happy with the impluse shopping.
You might find yourself going 'Oh boy' and trying to remember just where you thought you were planting that one. Smarter move is to draw out a garden plan before you go shopping.