Community garden in Clark County town cultivates connections and produce

SEARCHLIGHT — The community garden in here grows magic. Not really, but residents of the southern Clark County town like to think so.

Kyle Myers has lived in Searchlight his entire life. He, like other residents, uses vegetables from the garden to help cut down on lengthy trips to the nearest grocery store.

Searchlight, an unincorporated town of fewer than 500 people, has no supermarket. The town sits about halfway between Boulder City and Laughlin, about 40 miles to either one.

“I have so many roots here,” Myers said. “I just love my town and I grew up that way — going to town to get food. … I’m pretty accustomed to it.”

Plans for the community garden were drawn up on paper in 2018. It opened in April to help alleviate the burden of living in a so-called food desert.

The garden is at the Searchlight Community Center, near the only school in town.

Besides providing fresh produce, the garden offers horticulture programs for students and other residents, said Clark County Commissioner Michael Naft whose district includes Searchlight.

“It provides a safe place for people to come together and to have a community outing and a community bond around doing something productive,” said Naft.

Michele Brown, a member of the nonprofit Searchlight Betterment Organization, helps tend to the garden, watering it during the summer. Crops include carrots, cucumbers, peppers, beets and zucchini.

Myers, president of the Searchlight Betterment Organization, put aside $7,000 for materials for the garden.

Clark County lets the town tap into its water line to irrigate the garden. The next step is to install irrigation spigots in each of the garden beds. During the summer, the garden has a temporary shade structure.

When it comes to pests, those tending the garden have found that the best way to deal with them is to fight through it, said Devon Tilman, who was a master gardener for 15 years and is now a community-based instructor.

The garden does not use any pesticides, and the fence keeps out rabbits and other animals.

As part of the educational program, students learn about growing by season.

Cucumbers, for example, are not traditionally a fall crop, but they can be in Southern Nevada, which gets a “second grow season.”

The children were able to observe the produce they were growing progress over time.

“That’s probably the coolest too,” Tilman said. “(They) got to see it from nothing to this.”

The horticulture department at UNR Extension has done a class on irrigation, and Nevada Plants, a tree-planting, advocacy and education nonprofit organization, did a tree pruning class in September.

The fall and spring are the best times to grow, Tilman said. Summer is the worst season. In the winter, gardens are covered.

“A lot of Searchlight families were already growing gardens,” Tilman said. “Now they’ve got a central port to talk and better their own gardens.”

Residents who are interested in a plot at the community garden must agree to take care of it and not grow any invasive species, said Kelly Lehr, a community coordinator with the UNR Extension.

Having the community involved is fun, Lehr said. One day, Lehr showed up at the garden and discovered the rabbit fencing was already up.

“That’s not UNR Extension, that’s community members,” Lehr said. “People are stepping up and getting it done.”

Lehr and Tilman live in Boulder City and visit the garden once or twice a week.

“It’s really kind of magical to watch it come (together),” Lehr said. “I know they needed this ­— and if we could provide some type of avenue to get it going, I’m excited to be a part of it.”

Searchlight is also working with Nevada Plants to add fruit trees outside the garden, Lehr said. They are planning a day in November to plant the trees.

“A lot of people were hesitant to plant in the spring because of the brutal summer and no shade,” Lehr said. “But we did have some other community volunteers come out and do shade structures over the summer, which is why some of this stuff is alive.”

The community garden’s vision is to have something like a food fair where residents are notified when fresh fruits and vegetables are available, Lehr said.

“The beauty about this location is that people have to come pick their kids up from school at the end (of the day),” Lehr said. “But also, there’s so many things going on with the library, the museum and the community center. This is a catchall.”

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