the Low-Desert Vegetable Garden: Real Frost Dates, Two Planting Seasons, and 53 Crops for Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Yuma, Sonoran Mojave Low Desert

Plant tomatoes in April here, the way the national gardening books tell you to, and by June you will have tall green vines and almost no fruit. Nothing went wrong with your gardening. You planted on a calendar that belongs to somewhere else. The low desert runs an inverted year. July and August are the dead season, not the peak. September and October are the two best planting months of the year. The most productive garden most people here will ever grow runs from October through March, and it is full of lettuce, broccoli, carrots, and onions. The Low-Desert Vegetable Garden is the reference that spells that out, with the numbers behind it. - Freeze dates for 37 low-desert weather stations - spring and fall, at 10, 50 and 90 percent probability, from NOAA's 1991-2020 Climate Normals. Towns that never appear in gardening books: Sacaton, Eloy, Quartzsite, Mecca, Overton, Brawley.- Eight sub-regions, each with its own dates - because central Phoenix is frost-free while Maricopa, 25 miles away, has a median last freeze on March 2 and 28.8 freezing nights a year.- 53 crop profiles - planting window, sowing depth, spacing, germination soil temperature, varieties that actually finish here, and the specific way each crop fails in the desert.- The heat wall - why your spring window closes in May, and how to count backward from it to set your own planting dates for any crop.- A month-by-month calendar, a full planting-window master chart, and troubleshooting by symptom for when it has already gone wrong. Also inside: why the USDA hardiness zone is not a planting date, caliche and how to test for it, alkalinity and salt and why you water deeply instead of often, the summer shutdown and what to do with the beds, and how the monsoon changes late-summer planting in Tucson but barely touches Yuma. Written for Phoenix, Tucson, Casa Grande, Yuma, the Coachella and Imperial valleys, the Colorado River towns, and the Las Vegas Valley.