Tag: garden

Posted on in Gardening, Green Gardening Tips, Veggies

IPM: Resistant Varieties

dbg_lah_6794Is your garden being bugged? While 95% of all insects are either beneficial or benign, that last 5% can eat us out of house and home—or at least out of cabbage and broccoli. If insect invaders are on the attack, sometimes you just have to fight back.

Pests may be persistent, but we gardeners are not helpless. I like to remind myself that I am smarter than an aphid and more cunning than a flea beetle. When it comes down to a battle for the harvest, there are lots of tools at our disposal. As a master gardener, I was taught the principles of Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. Rather than just reaching for a spray can, this approach is multifaceted. There are many ways to outwit a weevil.

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Posted on in Veggies

Having a Row to Hoe

veggie-rows-dianapicchietti-monument-22july05-lah-025rEarth Day is this weekend, and what could be a more appropriate celebration than starting a vegetable garden. And for those of us in the Pikes Peak area, it’s finally time to get some dirt under our fingernails.

If this is your first year growing veggies, the first order of business is finding a promising spot for the garden. I talked about this in a previous post. Next, you need to decide how big to make the garden. This involves not only your desired yield, but also how you lay out the garden. Will you have traditional rows, wide rows (pictured here), beds (raised or otherwise) or a combination of these? Today I’m going to talk about rows… next Thursday I’ll cover beds.

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Posted on in Gardening, Green Gardening Tips, Soils

Do I Need Some Fungi?

Amanita-type mycelia
Amanita-type mycelia

I was thumbing through a gardening supplies catalog, looking at the assortment of “things you can spend your money on that your plants will probably do fine without” when my eye was caught by an offer for “mycorrhizae.” The catalog was extolling the many virtues of this fungal spore mix—it would improve plant health, make the plants more drought resistant, increase yields, protect against diseases, reduce the need for fertilizer, and cure my great-aunt’s bunions, all for $16.95 per pound.

It sounded too good to be true, so naturally I was highly skeptical. (It also sounded pretty expensive until I learned that you apply it by the teaspoon. Phew, not so pricey after all!)

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Posted on in Gardening, Veggies

CSU Veggie Trials

veggie-garden-student-run-csu-perc-lah-094-nx-1How many times do we read a description in a seed catalog, order the seeds, then find ourselves disappointed with the results? Our Colorado climate and soil conditions make for some challenging gardening, and varieties that thrive in other parts of the country just don’t do as well here.

Thankfully, we have a state university providing us with research-based information especially suited to our high and dry gardens. From 2004 through 2008, CSU trialed an assortment of potential commercial crops, comparing varieties to discover which, if any, do well here. The results are available on their website under the heading “The Rocky Mountain Small Organic Farm Project.”

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Posted on in Gardening, Landscaping, Xeriscape

A Garden Catalog for Colorado

high-country-gardens-catalogLast week I was complaining about catalogs full of tempting, desirable plants that simply will not grow here in Colorado. Today I want to introduce you to a catalog full of tempting, desirable plants that love it here.

Most experienced local gardeners already know about High Country Gardens, but if you don’t, you should. Based in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, this company specializes in perennials suited for the high, dry gardens of the western U.S. In fact, a lot of their stock won’t do well in “average garden conditions” (a phrase that means “conditions in gardens that are not in Colorado”).

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Posted on in Gardening, Landscaping, Veggies

Gardening in the Zone

usda-zone-mapAfter all the bustle of the holidays, I finally have a chance to brew a cup of tea, snuggle into my favorite chair, and open that stack of garden catalogs I’ve been accumulating. As I skip past the annual seeds and browse through pages filled with gorgeous photos of lush, evergreen shrubs and flowering trees, the frustration begins to build.

See, they have this little box, usually inside the front or back page, or perhaps on the order form. It has a map of the U.S., with colored bands forming a predictable rainbow in the east, but looking a bit more chaotic in the west. This map tells me that most of the plants in the catalog will not survive my Colorado winters.

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Posted on in Gardening, Surviving Winter

Planning Ahead

garden-dreams2

It’s the beginning of a new year, and time to dream about the upcoming growing season. Do you want to add some permanent plantings?  Are you imagining flower beds brimming with annuals? Will you be buying from catalogs? (Get that order in early before they run out of that must-have variety.)

With the Christmas decorations packed away for another year, I finally have time to take a deep breath, brew a cup of tea, and begin to think about spring. I start by making a list of topics, and then mark down what will need doing, and when.

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Posted on in Gardening, Surviving Winter

A Garden Retrospective

snow-at-home_lah_762

With the bustle of Christmas over and the new year just ahead, it’s time to take stock of our lives, and that includes our gardens. Now, when the ground is frozen, plants dormant, and hopefully under an insulating blanket of snow, we have time to catch our collective breath and consider our garden from a broader perspective.

Let’s start with the positive. What worked this year? What do we want to do again? In my garden, I trialed a new variety of carrot (my old standby was no longer available). It was an unqualified success. ‘Prodigy’ is a terrific carrot, a uniform bright orange and amazingly tender considering how huge each root is. I cooked the ones I’ve pulled so far (the rest are tucked under mulch in the garden, waiting their turn), and they were tender and delicious. I intend to grow it again.

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Posted on in Humor, Landscaping

Merry Christmas!

xmas-lights_colospgs_lah_5805

How to decorate the yard for Christmas? It seems that every neighborhood has a few residents who go all out. They must spend days putting up elaborate displays to ensure that theirs is the most illuminated house on the block. We only hang a string of white “icicles” across the front of our house, so one of our Christmas traditions is to drive around and enjoy the lights around town.

The last photo is not one I took. It actually appeared last year on a blog called “I’ll Treasure This” but is once again making the rounds of the internet. Maybe you haven’t seen it yet—it sure made me laugh. Now why didn’t we think of that?

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