Landscaping and Gardening in El Paso Texas | Is It Even POSSIBLE?

Landscaping and Gardening in El Paso Texas | Is It Even POSSIBLE?

Welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. My name is John Peña and in this video, let's talk a little bit about plants. Specifically landscaping your home and maybe gardening, growing food, if you're into that kind of thing. I was really into that kind of thing when I lived in Wisconsin, but it was really easy to grow crops because there was very fertile soil right in my backyard.

El Paso is a little bit different. So we are of course in the Chihuahuan Desert and basically the ground really doesn't quantify as soil because it really lacks nutrients essentially. It's sand and rock and unfortunately there aren't a lot of nutrients in there. However, landscaping in El Paso can be absolutely beautiful as we're going to show you in some of these cliffs

that we captured here at UTEP because even though we are in the desert, there are still plenty of gorgeous plants that are native to this ecosystem that thrive here. Sage, ocotillo, yucca, cacti of course. So landscaping, it can be a little bit tricky in El Paso because you don't get a lot to start with.

If on a new build, you're going to get a backyard full of just dirt and if you don't put weed barrier and rock over it, it's basically going to get full of like prickers and goat heads, which is not going to be pleasant. Typically a front yard is going to be landscaped, but only to the point where there's going to be rock down over a weed barrier hopefully. Artificial turf is a thing, but again, these are not native plants.

However, we do have some resources that if you're in El Paso, you're definitely going to want to check out. Here at UTEP, they have a beautiful native garden here and there are tons of plants. They're all labeled and you can come here at different times of the year to see what's in bloom and all of that. But this is a really great resource and I think at least once a year they actually sell native plants to the public.

Another cool resource is off of Donovan on the west side. There's a botanical garden there and we've got some footage of that as well. So landscaping can be gorgeous. I've seen plenty of homes and they've really put the time and the effort and the money into a beautiful landscaped yard.

So if that's what you're into, you know, don't fret. You're not going to come to a desert where, you know, nothing is going to grow, but you are definitely going to want to lean towards native plants. And now let's shift to my backyard because I did a little food growing experiment and I want to show you the fruits of my labor.

OK, so now we're in my backyard. As you can see here, I've got some sorghum, which is kind of a grain crop or a cover crop. It could also be two. And I planted this just for fun to see if I could make anything grow. I actually had to dig out the little plant bed here, add soil, add some compost just to make this grow.

This is a very tolerant, heat tolerant and water tolerant crop. But as you can see, like it's it doesn't look super, super great. But like I said, it's a bit of an experiment. Now, you can successfully grow food crops in El Paso.

We're going to show you some footage of a community garden and they're doing really, really well. They've certainly amended the soil and they've got drip irrigation lines running throughout, which is, I think, definitely the way to go. So we're in USDA plant zone 8A, 8B, which means our winter lows maybe are like 15 to 30. We rarely get below 30.

So the good news is if you're into growing plants, whether it's food crops or just landscaping, is that we have a really long growing season. But of course, the two biggest tricks in growing food crops especially is going to be one, the soil. You're going to have to amend the soil with nutrients. And number two, you're going to have to come up with an efficient way to water.

I probably haven't watered this crop nearly as well as I should have. But again, I think drip irrigation would definitely be the way to go. So I hope that gives you a little bit of insight into plants in El Paso. You can definitely grow a lot of really great plants.

You can make your yard look fantastic with landscaping, but it's going to take a little bit of research. Native plants are always best for landscaping. Food crops, you can grow a lot of different food crops, but you're just going to have to make sure that you really dial in all the variables. So we hope you found that one somewhat interesting, and we'll see you in the next episode.