Celebrate 2009 by growing your own vegetable garden

Thinking of turning over a new leaf for 2009? Try growing your own salad bar and other choice vegetables.

"Lettuce" show you how to get off on the right foot, then sow and reap the benefits at 8:30 a.m. Saturday at the Springs Preserve. To make a reservation, call 822-7786.

Native soil is the main reason why so many Las Vegans fail at gardening. Our soils are hard, compact, high in salts, high in pH, low in organic matter, hard to spade or till, hard for roots to grow, it won't drain and crusts over when applying water. As a result, vegetables struggle. In essence, our soils are dead.

Forget trying to work your soil and rise above it; go to raised-bed gardening. Things are hard enough, so plant your garden above ground.

"By planting in raised beds, you take complete charge of your soil!" master gardener Don Fabbi says.

Highly organic soil will conquer the above problems, and your vegetable roots will go crazy gathering nutrients, and it happens without spading or tilling.

And don't think I am just talking about building a confined area full of enriched soil. No, do some dreaming, use recycled tires, bags of compost, abandoned toilets, old wheelbarrows, wagons, bales of straw or anything that will hold soil and provide drainage. These ideas will be on display at the seminar. Your nursery sells the enriched soil, you install a drip irrigation system and plant your favorite vegetables.

Here is an added benefit: Raised beds bring plants closer to you so you won't bend over as far. In fact, you can sit on the bed edges to plant, thin, inspect and harvest produce.

I often ask people where they spend the most time when gardening. They usually say weeding, but that isn't so. With enriched soil, weeding becomes a thing of the past. I was involved in a study measuring time to do different tasks such as soil prep, planting, thinning, weeding and harvesting. The study revealed gardeners spent 65 percent of their time harvesting, and even then they wasted much of the produce.

You'll also find enriched soil brings with it natural nutrients, so you won't need chemical fertilizers. If you must fertilize, use bone meal, blood meal, cottonseed and other organic products.

When developing a raised bed or some other kind of container, make it no wider than you can reach; any wider becomes difficult to care for plants. And never walk on your garden soil to avoid compacting it.

Make your bed as high as you want, but never lower than 12 inches off ground. This is especially true if you want to grow foot-long carrots.

Leave yourself enough room to freely work between beds. One ingenious gardener gathered carpet samples and carpeted the areas between beds. The carpet controlled weeds and sopped up moisture draining from the beds. Focusing on containers, what if you have limited sun exposure? Place containers on dollies to move them with the sun for maximum exposure.

Go for bigger containers, they take less care. I find containers smaller than five gallons heat up and kill roots as they encounter its walls. And to take it a step further, select lighter-colored containers to reflect heat.

To conserve water, place containers inside larger ones and fill gaps with organic matter. It also keeps soil cooler, and plants function better. And to improve appearance, group three to five pots of varying sizes together; it makes a great display.

Keep these special beds close to your kitchen door. I find the further your garden is from your kitchen door, the less diligent you are maintaining it and may miss picking produce at the peak of quality.

NATIVE PLANT GIVE AWAY

Celebrate winter with a selected native plant from the Springs Preserve. The Preserve wants us to use more water-conserving plants in our landscape. The giveaway is Friday from 10 a.m. to noon at 333 Valley View Blvd.

ROSE PRUNING

The Las Vegas Rose Society will present a rose pruning demonstration from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at 1112 Oaktree Lane. For more information, call 646-6048.

CHRISTMAS TREE RECYCLING

If you haven't already done so, give your community a gift and recycle your tree back into the environment. Take your tree to a drop off site by Thursday. For a site near you, visit www. springspreserve.org.

Linn Mills writes a gardening column each Sunday. You can reach him at linn.mills@springspreserve.org or call him at 822-7754.