My 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?
Category: Plants
photos of plants
The Northwest Flower and Garden Show
Sometimes 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).
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!
Love Lies Bleeding
Valentine’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.
Getting to the Root of the Matter
We 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.
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…)
Pesticide-free? Forget It!
I 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.
What to Grow?
January. The start of a new year. The start of a new garden. As I contemplate my empty veggie beds, I feel like a race car driver waiting at the starting line. “Gentlemen (gentlewomen?), start your engines!”
This year is truly new in another way. We moved last year, and I no longer have a my huge veggie garden. I used to have twelve, 4ˈ x 12ˈ beds, plus four 4ˈ x 4ˈ herb beds, plus a series of 2ˈ wide border beds around the entire area, ideal for pole beans, peas, and perennials (lovage, currants, berries, asparagus). Now I have two, 4ˈ x 10ˈ raised beds. Two. Well, we intended to downsize, right?
Snowy Blankets
We have a lot of snow in our front yard. It may not seem like much to those who live in Minnesota, upstate New York, or Maine, but for us here along the Front Range of the Rockies, it’s a lot of snow. Colorado is dry. Colorado is sunny. We don’t get all that much snow, and what we do get melts the next day. The “real” snow is supposed to stay up on the ski slopes, not in our front yards.
When we picked out a lot for our new house, we were thinking about a longer growing season from our south-facing backyard, the spectacular view of Pikes Peak out the living room picture windows, the warmth of sunshine filling our bedroom. We carefully oriented our house to take advantage of all these.
Colorado’s Iconic Blue Spruce
Colorado has a love affair with the blue spruce (Picea pungens). Perhaps we’re enamored with the striking, steel-blue tint to the needles, and the way the color causes fall’s orange leaves to glow. Perhaps we appreciate the towering, pyramidal shape of a mature tree, or the short and squat dimensions of a dwarf cultivar.
A number of gardeners I’ve talked to added a blue spruce to their yard because it’s Colorado’s state tree. Blue spruces may not be the easiest species for Front Range landscapes, but they’re definitely worth the effort.
Mountain Plover 