Category: Gardening

Posted on in Landscaping, Surviving Winter

Blizzard Gardening

2016-03-23 14.33.18Today (as I write this) is officially the third day of spring, but you’d never know it here in Colorado. I can barely make out the house across the street through the snow hurtling by at up to 70 mph. Cottony clumps of white stuck to the window screen have totally blocked the view from my office (right). Those who can are staying home, businesses are closed, and schools would be too if the kids weren’t already off for spring break. The blizzard warning keeps changing. We can expect a mere 1 to 3 inches of snow. No, we’ll get 6 to 12 inches. And now they’re saying 8 to 16 inches with significantly higher drifts.

My first daffodil bloomed yesterday.

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Posted on in Plant Profiles

Heavenly Blue Wildflowers

Blue Flax_Durango-CO_LAH_2356Who doesn’t like blue? With clouds of sky-blue, 5-petaled flowers that seem to float among the surrounding foliage, Blue Flax is a welcome addition to any garden. A perennial hardy to 9,500 feet, the fountain-shaped plants are comprised of graceful, wiry stems reaching two feet in height, and embellished with blue-green needle-like leaves.

Flax’s open, airy stems tend to go unnoticed, but the abundant true-blue flowers will fill those empty spaces between more vibrantly colored blooms in a perennial border. However, flax is most at home naturalized into a grassy meadow, where it can mingle with blue gramma grass and other short-grass prairie wildflowers.

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Posted on in Gardening, Soils

Dealing with Compacted Soils

20160309_134005Last week I shared how to determine the make-up of your soil. This knowledge is helpful, but it doesn’t solve the problem of soil so hard, you can’t get a shovel into it. That’s what we’ll cover today.

Most often, soil that is rock-hard is mostly clay. Sand can get hard, too, but it’s much more forgiving. They don’t make pottery out of sand. So what do you do with your compacted clay? Here are some do’s and don’ts.

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Posted on in Gardening, Landscaping

Dealing with Compacted Soil

Rocks_Hwy50-BlueMesaReservoir-CO_LAH_8224-001My soil is rock hard! That’s a common complaint along Colorado’s Front Range. Our soils tend to extremes—we find that we’re either dealing with sand and decomposed gravel (the remains of glacial moraines), or clay. Then, to make things worse, soil becomes compacted over time. Roots can’t force their way through compacted soils, plus there’s no place for air or water. How do we turn compacted dirt into soil that nurtures life?

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Posted on in Gardening, Landscaping, Surviving Winter

The Northwest Flower and Garden Show

NWGarden-WA_LAH_2447-001Sometimes I just need to see living plants. Colorado is wonderful; I love the mountains and grasslands, pines and wildflowers. I love the huge blue sky and even the menacing thunderstorms. But I do not care so much for the unending winters. While it doesn’t happen every year, we’ve had snow as early as September and as late as the end of May. That’s a really long cold season!

When all that dormancy gets overwhelming, it helps to spend a week or two where winter isn’t quite so persistent. Last week I wrote about coming over the Sierras into California, green and blooming and full of warm breezes and golden sunshine. But California wasn’t my only destination. From there I drove north to Seattle to attend the Northwest Flower and Garden Show (and spoil my grandkids).

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Posted on in Surviving Winter

California Sunshine

I’ve been on a road trip the past week, driving from our snow-covered yard in Colorado west to a land of broad-leafed evergreens and warm sunshine. Wyoming was cold and windy, as expected. The I-80 corridor is desolate at any season. The slopes around Alta were crowded with skiers, Salt Lake City was smogged in, and Lake Bonneville had an inch of water in it, much to my surprise. Next morning, as I crossed Nevada, I encountered fog in the intermountain lowlands that had left hoar frost on every surface of the ubiquitous sagebrush. It was a desert fairyland. I wanted to grab some photos but there are few places to stop on the interstate, and besides, the car thermometer hovered at 3 degrees!

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Posted on in Plant Profiles

Love Lies Bleeding

Amaranthus_DBG_LAH_7264Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and what could be more appropriate than a post on a romance-themed flower: Love Lies Bleeding (Amaranthus caudatus). You have to wonder about this name, though. I get this mental picture of a jilted lover and a heartless ex. Which one of them did the stabbing?

Thankfully, the flower we call Love Lies Bleeding isn’t quite so melodramatic. It’s a member of the amaranth family from the Andes of South America, where it is known as kiwicha, and is now grown around the world.

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Posted on in Botany for Gardeners

Getting to the Root of the Matter

Phalenopsis orchid roots_DBG_LAH_6672We all know what roots are—they’re the part of the plant that’s usually underground. If we have a mental image, it’s probably a mass of wiggly, white strings poking their way through the soil. We should pay more attention to roots. After all, they’re an essential part of a plant (as well as the only part remaining after some hail storms!). Knowing a little about how roots work will make us more successful gardeners.

Before I get any further, I should point out that I’ll be talking about your average, every day root. Life is an amazing phenomena, so diverse that there are always exceptions. So let’s skip the orchids (left) and other epiphytes, and the mangroves and other plants with roots growing in water, and focus on our garden flowers, shrubs, and trees.

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Posted on in Gardening, Photography, Surviving Winter

Missing Spring?

Muted reds, soft blues, maize yellow—winter isn’t the monotone black, gray, and white that I expected when I moved to Colorado over twenty years ago. But even after twenty years, I still have trouble with January. Like many Colorado transplants, I grew up in California, and I miss the year-round green, the earthy smell of growing things, and the bright hues of flowers. Perhaps you do too.

Today’s post is designed to help dispel those mid-winter blahs. I offer a rainbow of colors to cheer you up and remind us all that spring is coming! (more…)

Posted on in Conservation, Green Gardening Tips

Pesticide-free? Forget It!

059 fruit @PikeMarSea LAHI was at the market picking out some grapes when a large woman ran up to me and grabbed my arm. “Don’t buy those!” She looked alarmed. “They’re not organic!”

Thankfully, I’m rarely accosted in the produce department , but I frequently hear the same lecture from many of my friends. Don’t take man-made drugs. Don’t use artificial sweeteners. Don’t eat food that isn’t organic. You’re poisoning yourself. Natural is safe. Everything else isn’t.

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