This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
Today I have a very special episode for you.
We’re here in the Mojave Desert on the border of Arizona and Nevada, and I mean this is
the desert and check out, behind me you can see the standard person’s back yard.
And this is how most people deal with the desert.
They might have a few palm trees, like two palm trees, and they’ve got gravel filling
their whole lot.
Now man that is an entire and a lot of space that you could grow lots of food on.
And most people will do this for the low maintenance, but you could do that for low maintenance,
but you could also do this, what we have here in this back yard.
So they have a whole bunch of fruit trees, this is the mini-orchard section here going
in, they’ve got planting a few trees at a time, that’s the back fence they’ve
got grapes and even more fruit trees and there’s some rare pomegranates over here.
And they have all these raised beds too, and we’re going to go talk with Ronnie, he’s
been gardening in the Mojave Desert for over 20 years.
I’d consider him an expert in growing here because he’s been doing it successfully
for a long time.
So he has some techniques that he’s going to share with you today so that you can be
successful growing in the Mojave Desert or any other desert around the world.
So now we’re here with Ronnie and we’re sitting in front of one of his actually four
raised beds, and you can see as this kind of galvanized fencing material over the top
with some wood.
And so we’re going to ask him more about why he has this, and before I even get into
that, now is the time to plant your seeds and your starts in southern Nevada, whether
you’re in Vegas or the Mojave Desert or probably even Arizona, definitely now is the
time, it’s cooled down a little bit, and you can get away with planting your winter
crops or your fall crops like they’re doing here.
So Ronnie tell me more about what this is and why you’re using it.
Okay John, what we got going on here is I’ve got some really inexpensive galvanized fencing,
and you can get this at any hardware store, very inexpensive.
And after we’ve planted all our seeds, what we’ll do is we’ll just put this over the
top of our raised bed, and just put something to hold it down, and this will keep the cats
out of our garden, because they’ll come in here at night when we’re sleeping and
they’ll dig up and they’ll do their business and they’ll just ruin everything.
And also birds, birds don’t like flying under here.
Sometimes we’ll get little baby birds, but usually they’ll stay out of here, so it
really comes in handy.
And then, it has a dual purpose because what I do is I take the same little piece of fencing,
and I make an arch like this, and then in the summer, I can shade everything with some
shade cloth, because it gets so hot here.
The ground temperature on these plants in the summer time, this ground temperature will
be upwards of 125 degrees.
So you’ve got to keep them shaded or your plants are only going to last a few days.
But with just a little bit of shade cloth, I can keep stuff growing out here literally
all summer.
And this is a fall garden, so what I’ll do is instead of shade, when it starts to
get really cool in about another month, because we do get a winter here, the desert gets really
cold at night and warm during the day in the winter.
I’ll put some sheets over here, and those sheets will trap the heat in here, and the
plants will do fine.
These are collard greens coming up here now, and I’ll have these collard greens my wife
and I will be eating fresh collard greens for wraps and salads every day, they’ll
be coming up here in about another 10 days to two weeks we’ll be eating them, and then
we’ll be eating them for the next three to four months every day, just coming out
here picking them free.
And this is kind of what I’ve learned, the least expensive way and the way that seems
to work the best out here in the desert, whether it’s the cold winter desert or the extreme
hot summer desert, this little system works fine for me.
By the way I’ve got this bed going down about a foot, so by being in the ground like
that, it keeps a constant temperature.
So as long as I just deal with the above ground temperature with the sheeting or the shade
cloth, the plants will do just fine.
These are mostly greens over here, this is will be some bok choy, some lettuce, collard
greens, greens like that.
Over here we’ve got some zucchini that’s just about to come up, over here some other
kind of Vietnamese vegetables that [inaudible] has.
We plant them now because if you planted the seeds any earlier than this t hey would get
fried and the baby plants won’t be able to make it.
We just ended our summer garden and cleaned everything out about two weeks ago, and so
there’s about a month period between the summer garden and the winter garden where
we don’t get anything, but we still get the fun of growing everything and waiting
for it to come up.
And then we’ve got grape leaves.
We grow the grapes and these grape leaves are so fantastic to eat.
And I’ll literally have these for six months of the year, I’ll take a grape leaf every
morning, put a date in there and a couple almonds, roll it up and you’ve got fresh
fast raw organic food that is some of the greatest food in the world.
These grape leaves by the way, I’ve researched this.
Roman armies, when they would go out on their expeditions, sometimes they would go hundreds
and thousands of miles.
They mapped and they followed the vineyards because they know that their soldiers could
go out there, eat these grape leaves while they’re on their marches, it was free it
was fast it was easy, and it gives them super nourishment because when you just pick something
off the plant like this and you eat it, it doesn’t get any fresher than that and that’s
when you really get those living enzymes and all the good stuff that’s in these plants.
And this grape leaf, this is a Thompson grape, I think I might have paid three dollars for
the original grape vine.
They grow so prolifically out here in the desert you literally can’t kill these things.
They don’t require any attention, any special vitamins or minerals or anything.
I just give them a little bit of water.
Of course when I initially planted it I put some rock dust in there and some organic compost
and minerals, but once they get going they don’t require any kind of work or attention,
and we’ve already eaten the grapes, the grapes are gone, but we’ll have these grape
leaves for probably another month, and I’ve been eating grape leaves for almost four months
now fresh every day.
[inaudible] that they are super-nourishing and they do have a lot of nutrients in there
that you don’t get out of some other plants.
Vining plants have different nutrients than plants that are going to grow in the ground
or trees in an orchard.
Every different category of plants usually offers some kind of different mineral, and
grape leaves definitely have powerful stuff inside there.
So do you have to get a specific variety of grape so that you can eat the leaves or can
you eat the leaves off any kind of grapes and do some leaves taste better than others
do you know?
Absolutely.
You can’t eat all of them.
You want ones that are green on both sides.
Some grape leaves that you’ll find up in the northwest, they’ll be green on one side
and then you’ll turn them over and they’re kind of like white on the other side.
You want what we call greenbacks.
Green on the front and green on the back.
I’ve tried different varieties, these are called Thompson seedless, but they’re not
seedless, they do have seeds so I don’t grow seedless fruit.
But they’re called Thompson seedless because the seeds are so small.
But these are delicious, and especially if you wrap them in something.
You could just cut them up and put them in your salads, but Greek dolmas, you could go
back in recorded history 3000 years, and you’ll hear about people eating raw grape leaves.
Greek dolmas have been in their culture and their food for thousands of years.
You go into a Greek restaurant today and you’ll get dolmas, but they’re using cooked grape
leaves.
We eat them raw.
Now here’s another plant that really does well out in the desert – this is a pomegranate,
and you can see here’s one.
These will be ready in about maybe three to four weeks.
This is a Bulgarian, and what that means is you can eat every part of the fruit except
for the hard outer shell.
Some pomegranates you can just juice them and get the juice out of the seeds and spit
out the seeds and you can’t eat the flesh.
But these Bulgarian pomegranates you can eat every single bit of it except for the hard
outside shell.
And these grow so prolific in the desert, they’re kind of like the grapes.
You cannot kill these things.
I literally do nothing to them except I’ve got a little drip system under there that
gives them a little bit of water every day.
It’s hooked up to my sprinkler system so it comes on on the timer every morning, gives
them some water, and that’s it.
I don’t give them any special anything, they love neglect.
And pomegranates are another one of those foods like grapes that you’ll find references
if you read the Bible, pomegranates were one of the first fruits ever mentioned in any
writings in the Bible.
In Chinese literature pomegranates are one of the first foods thats mentioned in any
writings by human beings.
So when I see these things grow when I hold one of these things in my hand, it’s like
I’m going back in history, and I’m thinking that 3000 years ago this is what people ate,
this is what they lived on, and Min and I we juice them, we eat them, we love them.
And this tree is literally – this is the third year, and I think right now there’s
probably 20 big pomegranates that are going to be coming off of this tree, but I have
some at our farm that we have seven different varieties of the pomegranates, and we have
some that literally, you’ll get two to 300 pomegranates off of one tree.
And again when you think about something that requires no work that gives you so much, it
also gives you beauty.
This thing is a beautiful flowering plant before it sends out the fruit.
It’ll flower for about a month, and look at it every day it’s great to look at, it’s
just a great, great plant to have in the desert.
So now we’re in another area of Ronnie’s garden off their sun room and they have a
little area, a little raised bed area against the sunroom, and besides growing in a raised
bed next to the sunroom, they’re also growing in pots, so we’re going to talk about two
important crops that they grow here that they actually like a lot.
So we’ll let Ronnie talk more about it.
Well one of the things that we really like growing is aloe vera.
And I don’t know how many different types we have growing here, I’ve got one back
here, a Japanese aloe vera that John, you gave me at your place about a year ago, and
this one is totally edible.
You can eat the skin, you can eat all of it.
This aloe vera here is another variety, and what we do with it is we make a juice.
Min will skin the aloe vera, make some orange juice, then take the meat from the aloe vera,
mix it with the orange juice in a blender and you’ve got like an Orange Julius, a
fizzy raw aloe vera Orange Julius type of a drink and it’s fantastic.
And we’ll drink that once a week.
And sometimes I’ll just chop up some aloe vera and throw it in a salad or whatever,
little bits and pieces.
Aloe vera is very great for you.
Tastes good, it grows prolific without having to do anything to it.
We really like finding those things that take the least amount of work out here in the desert
because for one thing, there’s only a small window of opportunity in the summer to work
out in the desert.
Once it gets past about 8:30, 9:00 in the morning in the heat of the summer, it’s
too hot to work out here, everything needs to be shaded.
But things like aloe vera, they just do fine by themselves.
This – I guess it’s a vegetable, I’ve heard it called Chinese chives, and I think
it’s a member of the chive family, but Min actually brought these in, smuggled them in
on an airplane about 15 years ago for her garden in California.
In Vietnam every house just about has these growing alongside their house or in a garden
somewhere.
It’s called he, and it’s written H-E, Vietnamese, just like you would say “he,”
but it’s pronounced “ha.”
And it’s kind of like a chive, it grows like grass.
You can just clip it and it will just keep growing and growing literally forever.
I’ve got some back here that’s gone to seed, and once it’s gone to seed you can’t
keep cutting it and it won’t keep growing back, but you can plant the seeds.
So Min grows a few and lets them go to seed so she can give those to friends so they can
take them home and start growing their own.
But this stuff is so fantastic in salads and in wraps.
You can put it in anything and it tastes good, and we usually let it hang out of the end
of a wrap so you’ve got the visual effect of it also.
But this is another example of what I would call a real superfood because it’s super
easy to grow, it’s super prolific, once you plant it you can literally grow it for
years and years and years, and it works well in almost any raw recipe, this stuff is great.
I suppose you could cook it and put it in stir-fries and things like that, but since
Min and I don’t cook anything, we just eat it raw.
But you could eat it right out of the garden like that and it’s great, it has such a
wonderful taste.
It’s a member of the chive family but it doesn’t taste like an onion, it doesn’t
taste like a chive it’s a little sweeter.
The texture is nice, and again, look at what we get here in the desert with almost no care.
And you can see John, here again we’ve got the protection from the cats, because if I
didn’t have this fencing in here, none of these plants would be in here.
A cat would get in here at night, dig up everything and leave with a smile and I’d have no food
left.
So we’ve got the fencing in there for the cats, I’ve got my little drip emitters all
over here that I use to water wherever I need it, and the thing that I like about the drip
emitters is that I’ll come out here and I’ll see a dry spot, and then I’ll know,
I’ve got to move the emitter over here, it’s not getting enough water or put it
in another emitter.
It’s so inexpensive and easy to do and fun.
So I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, learning more about what is growing on here in the
Mojave Desert.
Once again, you can be like over here and you can grow pebbles or have rocks in your
back yard, which I believe is a terrible waste of space, why not grow something in that space,
even things that are going to grow easily without much care like a fruit orchard?
Grow pomegranate trees, grow fig trees, literally plant the trees, put some water on them, and
you can have a fruit orchard instead of just plain rocks.
I mean after all, that is what Ronnie and Min have done here in their amazing backyard
garden in the Mojave Desert.
Would you guys like to say anything else?
I’d just like to say thanks John, thanks to all your viewers to giving us a chance
to show and share our gardening tips or methods with you, and whatever you do enjoy your garden,
find some way to get outside and have some fun, and keep on growing.
Once again this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, and remember keep on growing.