Posted on in Garden Myths, Veggies

Pennies—Good for Thoughts, but Not Tomato Blight

Tomatoes - cherry Sunsweet @home LAH-001I recently ran across an article claiming that a penny can help your tomato plants fight off blight. Apparently, the reasoning goes like this:

  • Copper is known to kill molds, algae, fungi, and microbes.
  • Pennies are made out of copper.
  • Therefore, inserting a penny into a tomato stem (or burying it at the roots) will keep your plant from succumbing to diseases caused by molds, algae, fungi, or microbes.

Since I’ve lost tomato plants to Early Blight, a common problem in Colorado, I’d love for this idea to work. I have some pennies lying around; let’s put them to good use, right?

Well, not really.

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Posted on in Birds, Photography

Focusing on the Bird

Yellow-breasted Chat_FCRP7w-EPC-CO_LAH_3270

Why wouldn’t the camera focus on the bird?!

I was trying to finally get a decent picture of a Yellow-breasted Chat. They’re not all that common in this part of the country, and I was thrilled to find one. In fact, we’d been hearing it call since we’d arrived at one of my favorite birding spots. But where was it?

After much searching (my ears aren’t very good at recognizing direction), we finally found the noisy bird sitting in a bare treetop, far overhead. It was in plain view, if you discounted the multitude of leafless twigs surrounding it. Praying it would stay put long enough for me to grab the shot, I aimed my lens and partly depressed my shutter button to activate the autofocus. (more…)

Posted on in Gardening, Landscaping

Not Exactly Xeric: Plants for Wet Spots

Daylilies, Hemerocallis
Siberian Bugloss, Brunnera macrophylla
Turtlehead, Chelone oblique

Colorado gardening is all about saving water. Classes offer advice on how to group plants in your landscape according to their need for supplemental irrigation. Garden centers highlight species that tolerate drought. This year, Colorado Springs has placed restrictions on how we water our yards, and how often we are allowed to do so. We’re forever being told how to use less water in our gardens.

But there’s one part of our backyard that defies all the prevailing wisdom. It’s wet. It’s soggy. In the spring and during wetter summers, an entire hillside of rainfall drains through this spot. And if there’s no rain and we have to water our lawn? No matter how careful we are to avoid runoff, this one area still stays wet. (more…)

Posted on in Garden Myths, Gardening, Soils

Probiotics for your Lawn?

I recently received this ad in the mail:

Lawn Doctor ad 09.47.51

While I noticed the baby crawling on the grass, the dog,  and the blurbs—“Better for you, your loved ones & your pets” and “50% less synthetics”—all designed to convey safety (with even more health references on the back), it was the word “Probiotic” that really caught my attention.

Probiotics are a hot topic. Research is constantly discovering how important our gut biomes are. But a lawn is not a digestive system. It looks impressive on the advertising, but is there really any point to putting probiotics on your grass?

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Posted on in Botany for Gardeners, Gardening, Landscaping

Committing Tree-icide: Planting

20200522_101626

It’s spring. Perennials are emerging from underground. Spring bulbs are in bloom. The buds on are bare branches are bursting into leaves. Except for those that aren’t. A look around indicates that a lot of my neighborhood trees didn’t survive the winter.

Trees are not cheap. There is a significant cost when it comes to purchasing and planting a tree, especially one large enough to satisfy the HOA. It’s easy to blame their subsequent demise on Colorado’s notoriously capricious weather. Easy, but you’d be wrong. By far, the primary reason our new neighborhood’s trees don’t survive is improper planting.

It’s not the weather that’s killing the trees. It’s us.

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Posted on in Gardening, Landscaping

Gardening Mania

Nursery display_Snohomish-WA_LAH_10.06.35-1

The calendar may claim that spring arrives in March, but those of us with high altitude gardens know that it really only begins after Mother’s Day. Even now, there is still a danger of a late frost, but at this point, we truly don’t care. We want to garden, and we want to garden now!

This is the dangerous season. We have so much pent-up enthusiasm just waiting to burst free that when the weather appears to be warm and settled (hah!), we can no longer control ourselves. Just look at the loaded shopping carts lined up (six feet apart) at the garden center check-out. I’m admit it, I’m as guilty as the next gardener—which is why I’ve learned to hand my wallet to my husband before entering a nursery.

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Posted on in Backyard Birds

“Safer at Home” Birds

American Avocet_ShorelinePark-MtnView-CA_LAH_8894r

While some states are beginning to open up, Colorado just instituted a new rule—we have to “recreate” within ten miles of our homes. No hiking in the mountains, unless we already live there. No driving out on the plains to look for raptors. No chasing rarities in other parts of the state. If the bird isn’t in my immediate area, I’m simply out of luck.  I can’t even walk the trails at our county’s nature centers, as they’re at the other end of town, far past my ten-mile radius.

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Posted on in Landscaping, Plant Profiles, Public gardens, Xeriscape

A Public Garden to Visit Now

Eastern Bluestar (Amsonia taberaemontana)
Partridge Feather (Tanacetum densum)
Salvia ‘Rose Queen’

This is National Public Gardens Week. I was all primed to write about all the public gardens we can visit, but as you know, many (most?) are inaccessible. For example, there are currently ten thousand tulips are blooming at Denver’s Botanic Garden, and no one can go see them. It breaks my heart.

I was feeling a bit despondent—I desperately crave flowers by this time of year—when I considered that not all public gardens are surrounded by walls. I typically drive to Denver because spring comes earlier at  5,280 feet than it does here in Colorado Springs (with our 6,000 – 7,000+ foot elevation). But we have gardens right here in town that I can visit any time.

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