Category: Gardening

Posted on in Gardening, House Plants

Winter is for Houseplants

philodendron_home_lah_2724-1Are you missing succulent green foliage, fragrant flowers, and that humus-y smell of living soil? It may be too cold to garden outside, but it’s a great time to focus on houseplants.

My indoor plants tend to be a bit neglected over the summer. Wintertime is a different matter. I fuss over them, washing the leaves, moving root bound plants into bigger pots, refreshing compacted potting mix, and just generally tidying up. This is the time of year I notice which plants have thrived, which survived, and which really need to go to that great compost pile in the sky.

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Posted on in Gardening, Veggies

Which Varieties are Best for Colorado?

seed-catalogs_lah_2733Seed catalogs are beginning to arrive in our mailboxes. With all the brightly colored photos of perfect vegetables and flowers, it’s tempting to order one (or more!) of each. Most of us, however, have limited garden space. We need to make some hard decisions.

Which varieties should we order? What will thrive in Colorado? Which ones really taste the best?

Most catalogs have some sort of icon indicating which variety does best across the country. The problem is that we don’t live in the rest of the country. We live in Colorado. Our soils, weather, water, even the quality of light here are all different from most of the United States. When a company recommends a product that grows well in Pennsylvania, or California, or Arizona, there is no assurance that it will do as well here.

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Posted on in Gardening, Plant Profiles

Cultivating Spiders

spider-plant-home-28mar2006-lah-123rHalloween is just around the corner. Spider decorations are everywhere. I don’t like spiders much (rather, I’m terrified of them), but even arachnophobes like me aren’t afraid of spider plants. There are no chitinous appendages, poison glands, and no skittering noises. Instead, they just grow like crazy and produce lots of offshoots.

It’s easy to see where the name comes from. All those strap-like leaves resemble spider legs (thankfully they aren’t hairy!), and the babies hang from stems in the same way that spiders dangle from silken threads. I wish all spiders could look this cute.

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Posted on in Gardening, Surviving Winter

After the Freeze

rime-ice_blkforest_20091012_lah_3992-1We’ve come to the end of another growing season. Now that we’ve had a hard freeze, you can put up your feet, re-grow your fingernails, and turn your attention elsewhere. Or, you can use the cold months ahead to improve your gardening skills.

With the garden in hibernation, it’s time to:

Check out the new plants on the market. PlantSelect has introduced yet another round of recommendations for Colorado landscapes. See which ones should claim a spot in your yard.

Read up on the latest garden news. Learn about new tools, thumb through the new plant and seed catalogs, and catch up on those gardening magazines you didn’t have time for all summer. Which brings us to…

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Posted on in Gardening, Veggies

Saying Good-by to Tomatoes

tomatoes-greenhouse-2008sept08-lah-296

It seems that only yesterday I was picking my first ripe tomato of the season. Now I’m looking at the vigorous vines still full of green fruit and wondering… how long will the warm weather last this year? Is there will time for these to ripen? If not, when should I pick them? How should I store them? Is it OK if they freeze?

It’s early October, with warm, golden days and crisp nights, and frost could come at any time. In fact, October 10 is the average first frost date in Colorado Springs. (Where I am, 1,000 feet higher in elevation than downtown, I have to subtract 10 days (one day per hundred feet), which means that in any given year, my garden has a 50% chance of seeing a frost by October 1.)

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Posted on in Chickens, Gardening, Soils, Veggies

Composting with Chickens

eggs-and-chickens-067It’s time to clean out the chicken coop. All summer my little flock has been happily picking weed and grass seeds out of the straw I spread in their coop last spring. At the same time, they’ve broken down the big pieces of grass stem into finer shreds. And, best of all, they’re balanced all that carbon with some nice, hot chicken manure.

Now that the weather has cooled a bit, I’m willing to venture out to the coop with a rake, scoop, and wheelbarrow. All that compostable material is heading for my veggie garden.

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Posted on in Bird Profiles, Gardening, Humor, Landscaping, Plant Profiles, Surviving Winter

Garden Whimsy

Today is the 5th Thursday of the month, so it’s time for a break. I thought I’d post some fun garden photos I’ve taken over the last few years. No one ever said you had to be serious in your garden! I hope these put a smile on your face, and perhaps inspire you to create your own unique garden feature.

fashionable-gardening-shoes-carnegielib-16apr07-lah-754

To start with, how about some ladybug garden clogs? These are so cute, I’d hate to get mud on them! One of our Colorado master gardeners was wearing these.

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Posted on in Gardening, Surviving Winter, Veggies

Moving Back In

rosemary_blkforest_lah_7190Last night WeatherBug was blinking a frost alert—the first of the season—and sure enough, there was ice on our birdbath this morning. I hate to admit it, but summer is over. I don’t mind the end of the cucumbers; they were overly prolific this year. And the carrots are safe underground for months to come. What I miss are the fresh herbs that we’re still enjoying. So, they’re moving back in with us.

Fresh herbs are pricy at the market, and they don’t keep very long. Yet, herbs are some of the easiest plants to grow. Since our garden is quite a ways from the kitchen, I have several pots of basil, thyme, sage, oregano, and rosemary right outside the kitchen door. With the weather cooling off, it’s time to bring them inside.

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Posted on in Birds, Gardening

By the Birds, For the Birds

blkforest-co_lah_8039This year, the birds planted themselves a garden.

I have half a dozen bird feeders scattered around our yard. Some hold millet, others contain suet, and a small feeder near the house is full of tiny, black nyjer seeds specifically for the goldfinches and Pine Siskins. But the most popular feeders are the ones full of black oil sunflower seeds.

House Finches, jays, nuthatches and chickadees, magpies, grosbeaks—all are attracted to the sunflower seeds. (So are squirrels, but they only get the spilled seeds on the ground.) While the finches sit contentedly on the feeder, munching away, the jays, nuthatches and chickadees tend to swoop in, grab a seed (or three, in the case of the jays), and hightail it to the relative safety of a convenient branch. There they open the shell and extract the seed before returning to the feeder for their next bite.

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