Beneficial Insects by Sandy Swegel Protect our friends. So many butterflies in our area have laid their eggs and their baby caterpillars are getting big and fat and chewing up plants. Be sure you know who your friends are before you squash any of them! You’ll love having the butterflies. Swallowtail caterpillars I found these […]
by Sandy Swegel After weeks of rainy days, we were rewarded with a week of hot sunshine. This is great news for the tomatoes, but it means all those cool-season veggies started to bolt and are going to seed. When summer temperatures warm, all the cilantro and spinach, and lettuce put out lovely seed heads. […]
Save Your Crops by Sandy Swegel Kids love roly polys. There is no end to the fun of having these cute little non-biting bugs roll up in their hands. So cute. Teachers love roly polys too. It’s a great teaching opportunity for a critter that is everywhere and the kids can open the rolled-up bug […]
How to Help the Bees Feel At Home by Sandy Swegel Ever feel like you’re doing all the work and everybody else is getting all the credit? That was the great scenario I watched unfold yesterday. It was a warm sunny day and there were hundreds of honey bees buzzing loudly in a hot […]
Buffalo Bird Woman by Sandy Swegel I learned the story this week of Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa Indian born around 1839 in the Dakotas. She and the women of her tribe were the ones who did all the farming from breaking hard ground to heavy harvesting and transporting. Toward the end of her life, […]
Tips for Handling Fungus by Sandy Swegel We’ve had crazy amounts of rain this season and a sad consequence of this is plants are plagued with leaf diseases of every sort. Organic treatment of black spot and rust and powdery mildew usually starts with useless notes like air the plant out, provide adequate drainage, pick […]
Flower Arrangement Tips by Sandy Swegel One of my favorite jobs each year is designing twenty-two flower pots for an urban condo. The homeowners are real garden lovers but they live in the middle of the city on a high floor. Rather than be content to just look at the amazing mountain vistas their elevation […]
A Bee’s Life by Sandy Swegel You have to watch this Ted Talk. It’s a time-lapse video of the first 21 days of a bee’s life and how bee babies turn into what looks like slime into a bee. http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/05/an-extraordinary-glimpse-into-the-first-21-days-of-a-bees-life-in-60-seconds/ I think promoting bees is the real key to reversing the dumping of pesticides in […]
All About These Important Pollinators by Sandy Swegel “The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them.” — St Francis de Sales, 16th c. I spent a restful weekend in a […]
Fill Your Garden With Color by Sandy Swegel Nope, a party garden isn’t a garden in which to have a party. This is a garden to make sure your parties are more fun and flavorful. It has been raining in Boulder for two solid weeks. We, fair-weather gardeners, don’t like to garden in the drizzle […]
