Wyoming gardening

nanets

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I live in Wyoming, between Torrington and Douglas, the wind is so bad to garden here and the lack of rain. Plus the critter's want eat everything. I loved in Virginia where I could grow anything and everything. I am finding gardening more than a challenge here. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
 

Dahlia

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I live in Wyoming, between Torrington and Douglas, the wind is so bad to garden here and the lack of rain. Plus the critter's want eat everything. I loved in Virginia where I could grow anything and everything. I am finding gardening more than a challenge here. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I lived in a windy desert location for several years and I understand those challenges -especially the wind and the critters! I ended up growing some of my more delicate veggies in buckets to block the wind and that was helpful.
 

nanets

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I lived in a windy desert location for several years and I understand those challenges -especially the wind and the critters! I ended up growing some of my more delicate veggies in buckets to block the wind and that was helpful.
Thank you, I did plant some vegetables in tomato cages ,and put plastic around them. This did help some. I came here from Virginia. I grew anything I wanted there. But here is a big challenge. So thank you very much for your suggestion.
 

R2elk

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I live in Wyoming, between Torrington and Douglas, the wind is so bad to garden here and the lack of rain. Plus the critter's want eat everything. I loved in Virginia where I could grow anything and everything. I am finding gardening more than a challenge here. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I am just outside of Casper.

1. Fence your garden area to protect it from critters, both big and small.

2. Water regularly.

3. Choose short season vegetables and start your own seeds inside. You can plant lettuce, cabbage, radishes, carrots, beets, onions and other cool season vegetables directly in the garden about the first of May.

4. Tomatoes, peppers, squash and other warm season vegetables can be started in the house in mid March and transplanted into the garden around the first of June.

I start melons and pumpkins in my greenhouse in mid May and transplant into the garden at the same time.

Beans can be direct planted also around the first of June.
 

flowerbug

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welcome to TEG from mid-Michigan. :)

if you are just starting to put in gardens take some time to think about what you want to do and plan your big equipment paths and other aspects which might be hard to work around later. for us it would have been nice to leave access for hauling things in and out and also to not have some hardscape things in the way so now i can't really move things easily at all. bringing in truckloads of good topsoil would have been nice too... too late for that for now...

also try to think about how much you really want to do and leave some room for expansion but also ways to cut down in case you find out it is too much work and nobody wants to help and you can't do it all either.

consider fences and then upwind of the fences you can also put in some wind breaks to help calm things down a bit (plus it will help with evaporative losses).

note if you only use a fence then your fence will catch all sorts of blown debris and need to be cleared and more maintenance. so it is better to have a layered approach to this than to put all your efforts into one aspect.

of course this depends upon what you want to grow and how large an area.

i'm partial to big rocks and stuff like that... :)

for critters a good fence is also important and don't waste money on the wrong fence. we had that happen here and almost 30 years later the fences are still there and not working completely as they should, but we do get by and i do get some harvest even if the groundhogs and once-in-a-while bunny might get in and do some herbivore harvesting of their own.

what creatures do you have to contend with there?
 
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