- You know me, I'm always here talking to you about gardens.

But I want to introduce you to Miss Chloe, who's gonna be doing a takeover.

Yes, you heard right.

Host takeover happening with Miss Chloe who happens to work at the Youth Garden Project here in Moab, Utah.

So Chloe, give us a little bit about yourself.

Who are you and why are you taking over my show?

- So I'm Chloe, I am a senior at Grand County High School.

And I've been part of the Youth Garden Project for quite a long time, ever since elementary school I've been doing youth programs here.

I am now volunteering here every week during the school year.

- So you are like true veteran style here, right, Chloe?

You know this garden inside and out.

You have been raised, born, grown just like that beautiful sunflower over there.

- Yes.

- Okay, awesome.

So Chloe is gonna tell us, not only about this incredible project, which I'm obsessed about.

But she is also gonna teach us the ways of growing in a desert climate, which frankly is all of Utah.

All right, Chloe I know you're gonna be absolutely fantastic, you've got the garden aura.

I'm sending all the good vibes your way.

So now I'm going to pass the non-existing torch of "Modern Gardener" to you, ready?

Power stance.

(Cynthia grunting) Got it.

(Chloe cheering) - Emily, I wanted to start with you to let everybody know how cool the Youth Garden Project is.

So please tell me about yourself and your role here at YGP?

- Yeah, so I'm Emily, I am the executive director of the Youth Garden Project, which we sometimes refer to as YGP.

The Youth Garden Project, our mission is to cultivate healthy children, families, and community through educational programs.

And connecting people with food from seed to table.

We grow food, kids, and community.

We serve over 1,100 kids per year, pre-K all the way through 12th grade.

We also grow anywhere from 3 to 6,000 pounds of food each season.

About 20 to 25% of that food is distributed to low-income households, which is something I'm really proud of and happy to be doing here at the Youth Garden Project.

So the Youth Garden Project is adjacent to Grand County High School, which is a great location.

We're on about one and a half acres here.

The Youth Garden Project site is so cool.

We've got an orchard, we've got a rabbitat, which is where we keep the rabbits, kids love it.

We've got two outdoor classroom spaces for learning.

We've got a a commercial kitchen.

Our office is actually in an old historic home from way back in the day.

And then about 80 garden rows where we grow all of our veggies.

- That is so awesome, we do so much here.

I think one of my favorite parts is just the ability to bring community members here in so many different ways.

It feels really awesome, especially to be a part of those events.

- I like to say that the Youth Garden Project runs on volunteers, we have lots of volunteers.

Some show up to our biweekly Weed 'N' Feed volunteer nights.

This is where they can come for an hour.

They don't have to RSVP.

They help us take care of the garden and then everyone shares a fresh free, garden fresh meal at the end.

Most of our youth programming is either free or very low cost.

So our summer camp programming is on a sliding scale for families to make it affordable.

It's a huge need in our community.

But then any of the programs that are happening during the school day are free both to kids who are visiting the garden for field trips and things like that.

As well as their families and for the school district.

So it's something that thanks to our supporters, we're able to offer for free.

And I think it's really important to ensure that all kids have access to spaces like this where they can connect to their food system.

- Thank you so much for telling us about Youth Garden Project.

- And I'm so happy that you're involved too.

We love having you here.

- Thank you.

Sarah, as the produce manager here at the Youth Garden Project, you've learned a lot about adapting to this hot dry climate.

And so before we get into all that, just tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do here at the garden.

- I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania where I did all of my growing and gardening.

And so coming here it was really different and it felt like I had to start from scratch with learning how to grow here.

My role here is the produce manager.

So a big part of my job is making sure we're selecting crops that are going to do really well in this area and making sure we have enough of them.

- So what was it like moving all the way from the east coast out here to Moab, Utah?

- I just realized it was very different and you have to choose all sorts of different crops.

There's a lot of techniques that you do really differently and I suddenly realized I had a lot to learn even though I thought I knew a lot about gardening.

And so I realized I had to do a lot of research about how to grow in this climate and I was Googling things.

And just couldn't find a lot of information.

And I found really the best way to learn was just to learn from other growers who were doing it here already.

- So since you've learned so much, tell us about the climate here and how to grow.

- So Moab, Utah sits at just above 4,000 feet sea level and we're at a growing zone of 7b.

But luckily, we have lots of different little microclimates that we can really use in our favor here.

So over by our nibble garden, we're right by the creek.

So it's cool and shady and we've got lots of big cottonwoods.

So it's quite a bit cooler there.

But then in our orchard we're surrounded by lots of blacktop and asphalt, so that's a whole different little growing microclimate over there.

So we have a lot of different zones to work with and we can use that in our favor.

- To get into more detail, tell us about irrigation and how that all works.

- So one of the big things to know about gardening in the desert is it's really dry here.

So there's all sorts of ways that moisture can be sucked out of the soil.

So through the hot sun beating down on it and also through the really intense winds.

So there's a couple things we do here to try to keep as much moisture in the soil as we can.

One is that we put all of our irrigation drip line underneath a heavy level of alfalfa mulch.

So that way we're not losing all of that moisture to the wind.

And then we also are really strategic about the times that we water.

So we water when it's dark and cool.

So we'll water kind of like low and like slow and heavily in the really early mornings.

And then really late at night just to reduce the amount of evaporation that we're getting so we can keep that moisture inside the soil.

Make sure you're watering really deeply and watering really slowly over a long period of time.

Because the soil dries out so quickly that if you just do a really quick water on the top, it's not really getting all the way down into the roots of the plant.

And you're getting so much evaporation so quickly that it will evaporate off of that top couple inches of soil before it actually gets all the way down and soaks in.

So you wanna make sure you're watering all the way down by sticking your finger in the soil.

It might look like it's wet on top but it may not be getting moisture down to the roots.

So you wanna double check that.

- What about planting schedules?

When do we plant certain plants?

- For our planting schedule, one of the things that I learned coming here is there is really short spring seasons.

So we wanna select crops that mature really early before it gets too hot.

And making sure we're choosing crops that have a really quick turnaround time.

- So can you give me an example of when you start a seed and everything?

- So for our lettuces, we start them really early in the greenhouse and then we get them out even as the ground is still really cold.

And then what we'll do is we do low tunnels with plastic.

So we'll plant them all out into the low tunnels to try to get them started before it gets too hot.

So they get a little bit of a head start and then as the temperatures start to warm, we can pull the plastic off.

And the plants are already established in the ground rather than starting them when the ground is warm enough.

And then having it get really hot really quickly and having them bolt too soon.

- So you've explained a bit about the spring time, so how does the fall season work out here?

- So again, we do have to start, all of those fall crops we actually start them indoors instead of in the heat.

In the greenhouse, we actually start them indoors in the air conditioning.

So that way we can get them established and ready to go, but we wouldn't be able to plant them in the ground that soon.

Because it's so hot that if you put a tiny little lettuce plug out in even September, we can still have temps in the upper nineties.

So that would be just way too hot for that tiny baby lettuce.

So we start everything inside to get them established.

And then as it starts to cool down in like mid to early October, then we can get all those fall crops in the ground.

But we do have to start them inside where it's nice and cool.

- So with your experience here at Youth Garden Project, what have you noticed that works really well here or doesn't?

What type of plant varieties?

- Yeah, so something that grows really, really well here is any type of New Mexican green chili.

They just put on so many peppers really, really easily.

And tomatoes do really well here.

We don't have problems with blight like places that have more moisture so we don't need to prune our tomatoes.

So we can just let all of the suckers go for the most part.

And it just gives us so much more fruit, than if we had to worry about pruning our tomato plants and keeping them really neat and tidy.

We can just let them grow wild and get a ton of fruit.

Things that don't do as well here.

Like I mentioned with our really short spring season and it getting so hot so quickly, having nice tender salad greens is definitely a difficulty here in the summer.

So we grow as much lettuce as we can in the springtime when it's nice and cool.

But in the summertime even though we would love to have fresh spring lettuce, we just can't really grow it here.

- So do you guys use like shade cloths to keep plants shaded?

- We actually used to.

We ended up moving away from doing that just because of the cost of shade cloth.

It can be really expensive.

It's really bulky to store that and it rips easily in the high winds that we get here.

So we've actually moved towards doing more strategic planting rather than putting the crops where we want them and then trying to protect them.

So one of the things that we're doing this year is growing our basils, they like full sun.

But they can get really stressed out and wanna bolt really quickly in this type of full sun.

So we're growing our basil underneath the shade of our tomatoes this year.

And we're having really great success with that.

It keeps it a little cooler under the tomatoes and shaded.

It creates this really nice little microclimate under the tomatoes.

The bell peppers tend to be really prone to getting really bad sun scald from the really intense sunlight we get here.

So one of the things that we do is we actually plant all of our bell peppers at a little bit of a tighter spacing than is recommended.

And so when they start to bush out all of the foliage helps protect the peppers from the sun scald.

So the pepper next to it is the one that's protecting that pepper from the sun.

So we've had really good success with just tighter spacing and stacking and layering things.

And creating little microclimates within our planting areas.

So we're doing that now instead of shade cloth and we're getting more crops that way.

And also saving a ton of money on the shade cloth that we would normally be buying.

- All right, Sarah, so do you have any final thoughts or tips for people who are new to desert gardening?

- Yeah, I would say one of the most important things I've found is really being a good steward to your soil.

And that can take years of building up the soil.

But what we have to start out with here oftentimes is a lot of sand and a lot of clay and lacking a lot of organic material in the soil.

So just making sure you're really treating the soil well and feeding it what it needs with compost.

And making sure you're mulching, keeping it protected from all of the erosion here.

'Cause we get erosion from the wind and the water.

So just really building up your soil is gonna give you the most amount of success here.

Yeah, and if you wanna know more about what we do here and how we garden in the desert, you can check out what we do on our socials.

And check out our website and we'd be happy to chat more.

- Awesome, thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge.

- Yeah, thank you, Chloe.

- Are you a successful desert gardener?

If so, please leave any of your tips in the comments just so everyone has more information.

Thank you so much for watching my "Modern Gardener" episode.

Peace out.

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