Design a Party Garden

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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 and cold, so the only gardening things to do has been to read garden books like an old favorite of mine, Amy Stewart’s The Drunken Botanist about “the plants that create the world’s great drinks.”

This started me thinking about what should I grow in a garden near the deck so that when we are making summer cocktails, I can just nonchalantly walk over the garden to pick a sprig or two.

There are the obvious Herbs:

Mint…for juleps and mojitos
lemon balm and lemon verbena for fruity drinks and rums.

For vodkas and gins, you can try some of the more pungent herbs
Rosemary (mix with grapefruit and honey for a “fizz”)
Lavender (also lovely in champagne)
and Vegetables:
cucumbers…Pimm’s cup and all kinds of coolers
cherry tomatoes for finger food

and Fruit
Strawberries: for cocktails and finger food
Lime or lemon in containers
Berries: from juniper to raspberries

and Flowers:
Violas, pansies, nasturtiums.

My favorite party idea came from a 2011 Martha Stewart magazine: floral ice cubes:

Use distilled water to keep the ice clear:
To suspend flowers in the cubes, work in layers: Fill an ice tray (one that makes large cubes so the ice will last longer) a quarter of the way with water, add flowers facing down, and freeze. Add more water to fill halfway, and freeze. Fill to the top, and freeze again.
Summer afternoons are on the way!

 

http://drunkenbotanist.com
Photo credit http://placesinthehome.com/winter-and-spring-flowers/

Minty Fresh Summer Cocktail Recipes

My Number One Secret for Growing Tomatoes

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It’s All in the Soil

by Sandy Swegel

A local grower and I were chatting today about all the ways people grow tomatoes. My friend was laughing at somebody who had an elaborate setup with walls of water in the snow. I don’t necessarily use walls of water, but I understand our local Zone 5 competitions to have tomatoes by the 4th of July. The walls of water help warm the soil and of course, entertain the gardener.

There are many “secrets” to growing tomatoes. Some people put their hope in fertilizers and supplements like Epsom salt. Others do a lot of pruning of “suckers.” And there is no substitute for regular consistent water that doesn’t let the soil dry out.

But for me, the most important part of growing tomatoes is digging and preparing the hole you’re going to plant in. I generally plant little plants…2-1/4 inch pots…somewhere around May 15th. And I do believe in planting deep so roots can grow all along the stem. But back to the importance of preparing the hole you’re going to plant in.

My secret for growing tomatoes is a big humongous hole at least half full of compost.

Step One. Take a five-gallon pot (a bucket can work too) and dig the hole so big that the bucket fits completely in the hole. That usually means you have to keep going back and widening the hole to get the bucket all the way down. And it’s usually a pain digging into that subsoil. If the soil is very clay like, I loosen up the bottom and sides by slicing cuts in both for draining. I fill at least half the hole with finished compost. I put in some finished composted manure if I have it. I throw in some rather unfinished compost too. I mix in an organic fertilizer that includes phosphorus. I’ll also add any other goodies I have like kelp or alfalfa meal. Leaf mulch if I have some. I don’t mind if a worm or two ends up in there too. I then fill the rest of the hole with original soil and mix it well. I water it.

Only now is the hole ready for the tomato. I pluck off its lower leaves and plant the tomato up to its neck. I put the trellis or whatever support I’ll need now. And that’s it. I personally run a drip line with a timer since it’s so dry here and I don’t want my sporadic memory to sporadically water. I’ve done comparison tests year after year with people who dig holes only large enough to squeeze the plant in. They never get the number of tomatoes I get. My large composted planting hole means the tomato puts out a huge rootball that gobbles up all that good compost and fertilizer food produces a huge crop of tomatoes. If you only have a shovel-sized hole in the ground for your tomato, you only have little roots to feed the plant. If you don’t believe me, when winter comes this year, pull up your tomato and see how big your rootball is.

So if you want a lot of healthy tomatoes this year, take out your shovel and work up a sweat preparing that soil!

Photo credit:

World Tomato Society

 

Grow Your Own Food: Best Return on Investment

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The Three Foods You Must Grow

by Sandy Swegel

There are so many vegetables you can grow in your garden. If only there was enough time. If you have limited time or space for your garden, think about what is the best return on your investment of time and money when you grow your own food as well as the best outcome of flavor and nutrition. Three things I grow even if I don’t have time to grow anything else are:

Salad greens.
Loose-leaf lettuces, spinach, kale, chard, and arugula are up and ready to eat in as little as three weeks after planting. You can pick what you need for tonight’s salad, and let the plant continue to grow for another night’s salad. Baby greens and mixed lettuces cost $6 per pound (and up) at the grocery…and they aren’t necessarily that fresh…sometimes they’ve been traveling in a semi-trailer from California for a week already. Grow your own greens to get maximum nutrition and taste for a couple of bucks worth of seed.

Tomatoes.
You’ve tasted one of those grocery store tomatoes that look perfect and taste like absolutely nothing? Enough said. You have to grow tomatoes because home-grown tomatoes taste so much better than anything you can buy. But tomatoes have also gotten really expensive. One or two tomato plants easily save you a couple hundred dollars if you regularly eat tomatoes in your salads and sandwiches. Cherry tomato plants are especially prolific.

 

Herbs.

Fresh herbs are the best way to give oomph to your cooking. They taste so much better than dried herbs and can often star in a simple dish …such as basil leaves served with mozzarella and tomato. Many herbs are perennial (like thyme and oregano) and only have to be planted once. Annual herbs, such as basil and dill produce lots and lots of flavorful leaves.

It’s always fun to grow everything there is to grow, but if you’re strapped for time or space, let the local farmers grow the long-season crops like winter squash, the root crops like onions and carrots, or the water-hogging melons. You’ll be enjoying your own magnificent home-grown healthful salads all season.

Thrills, Fills, Spills

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Flower Pot Rhyme

by Sandy Swegel

These are your clues today to have a container garden that causes people to stop in their tracks. This cute little rhyme is how the professional designers make fabulous flower pots. If you learn how to follow this basic rule, your designs will be breathtaking whether you are using traditional annuals or native plants or succulents.

THRILL

The thrill is the highlight of your pot. It’s tall and commands space and attention. Often the thrill is brilliantly colorful with big flowers or something unusual like red foliage. Some of the thrills I use are

Large tropical hibiscus or canna lilies or castor beans if I’m going for color.

Red grasses if I’m going native, a knockout rose if I’m going for an English garden look.

An agave or euphorbia if I’m going desert garden, big multicolored coleus if you’re in the shade, a mini tree or shrub works too.  A thrill is a big plant that catches your eye from a distance.

You place the thrill slightly to the back of the center of the pot.

FILL

The fill is next. This is several plants of medium flowering height. They provide fullness and reliable color. Don’t be stingy with plants: the secret is to have no soil showing. Geraniums or salvias or shorter zinnias or daisy-like flowers do the job well. Place two or three “fills” around the central “thriller.”

SPILL

Finally, two or three “spillers” are needed around the edge of the pot. Anything from sweet potato vine to creeping Jenny, or petunias or million bells. You want to have overflowing plants soften the edges of your pot…and it makes the planting look twice as big and luxuriously abundant.

That’s it….the basic recipe. Now you can read the container gardening magazines and books and see how most ‘artistic’ designs are just variations on this theme.

Photo credit:

The Simple Formula for a Beautiful Container Garden

Sandy Swegel

No Neonics: Three Easy Ways to Help

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Protecting Yourself and Creatures from Pesticides

by Sandy Swegel

Just a moment to be serious now. Spring has arrived and stores are filling with bedding plants and seeds. At the same time, homeowners are noticing all the weeds in yards and some still go out to buy weed killer.

There are three easy quick things you can do that make a difference to help protect bees and yourself from the “neonic” pesticides.

Learn One Name

Imidacloprid
That’s the neonic most likely in retail products. If you’re an overachiever, the other names are Clothianidin, Thiamethoxam, Acetamiprid, Dinotefuran. These are ingredients in weed killers, especially products marked Bayer or with names like Systemic or Max. Just check your labels and don’t buy these.

Watch For the Label

Customer pressure led Home Depot and Lowe’s last year to agree to put labels on all plants treated with neonics. The label is deceptive….makes it sound like neonics are better…but watch for the label.

Ask Your Retailer

There’s no government regulation (Alas!) that says neonics have to be labeled. The best thing you can do is ask at the garden center if the plants you are buying have been treated with neonics. If they don’t know…then you can probably assume the plants have been sprayed. The treatments can last up to two months in your garden…making your pretty flowers potentially lethal to bees that land on them.

Every time you ask a garden center employee or a grower if their plants have been treated with neonics, you are educating them. That’s what we are after. Nobody really wants to harm bees or the environment. Two years ago when I asked a major grower here in the Denver area if they used neonics, the owner looked at me like I was some crazy Boulder liberal. Which of course I am. He said, “Bah humbug, there’s no way to grow plants without neonics.” But last week, his greenhouse (Welby) had an open house in which they proudly said that most of their plants were grown without neonics and they were continuing to work on how to get neonic-free.

Oh, and of course there’s a fourth thing to do to help the bees. Grow your own plants from good non-pesticide treated, non-GMO, often organic, often heirloom, always neonic-free seeds like ours!
For lots of info on neonics in consumer products, you can read this pdf put out by Xerces.
http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/NeonicsInYourGarden.pdf

Photo Credit
http://ecowatch.com/2015/02/10/global-ban-bee-killing-neonics/

 

It’s Spring. Oh, so Ephemeral!

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The Beauty of Spring

by Sandy Swegel

Spring Equinox is officially upon us. All the joys of the season abound. Birds singing, Crocuses blooming, Baby lambs gamboling in the fields outside of town. Yet one of the dearest and most fleeting of Spring delights is the annual blooming of the spring ephemeral wildflowers.

This is a great season to walk through meadows and along forest trails to catch glimpses of great swaths of these very clever flowers. Ephemeral means lasting a very short time or transitory and these flowers that appear above ground for only a couple of months per year are very crafty. They grow in woodland areas and come to life in the brief interval between the end of winter and the time when the deciduous trees start to grow leaves again.  As the sun streams through the bare treetops, hundreds and thousands of flowers throw out wonderful blooms in celebration of their moment in the sun. Wait two months, and everything will be dark and shady in the woods.  But once you’ve walked and maybe danced among the spring ephemerals, you’ll always remember their hidden presence.

If cherry and apple blossoms are starting near you, make haste to the nearest wooded area.  Lots of botanic gardens and parks schedule hikes during these times. The Great Smoky Mountains are home to an especially large variety of ephemerals from February to April.  But even in your own neighborhood, walk along the creeks to find flowers with delightful names like Shooting Star or Trout Lily, Spring Beauty, Trillium and Bleeding Heart.  Keep an eye out for other spring flowers who aren’t officially ephemerals but thrive in the same conditions like Wild Geranium and Pasque Flowers.

William Cullina, author of Wildflowers: A Guide to Growing and Propagating Native Flowers of North America, suggests planting spring ephemerals in early spring or late summer in the shade of deciduous trees. He says to prepare the site by incorporating four to six inches of compost in four to six inches of soil. Well-drained soil, rich in organic matter is essential. And remember to plant as nature does…in broad swaths of color.

Life is ephemeral…. So get out there and enjoy Spring, our most hopeful season. Or as my favorite (if not most poetic) quotation about the season says:

 “Spring is Nature’s way of saying, Let’s Party!” – Robin Williams

Photo Credits:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mcav0y/166313828/

Saving the Monarch—one yard at a time

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How You Can Save the Monarch

by Sandy Swegel

Native plant advocate Doug Tallamy tells a wonderful story about how the Atala butterfly was saved from the brink of extinction.

“…the Atala butterfly was thought to be extinct in the 1970s. Then landscapers started placing the insect’s food source, a native plant called the coontie, around houses – not to help the butterfly – but because the plant was attractive in home landscapes. The result – a butterfly thought to be extinct found the suburban plants and today appears to be on the rebound.”

 

The greatest challenge for the monarch butterfly has been the loss of habitat across all of its migratory path. The monarch only feeds and lays eggs on one kind of plant: milkweed. Milkweed is considered a weed by Big Ag, and large farming operations have done their best to kill all the weeds including milkweed. Highway departments also have helped eliminate habitat as they found it was cheaper to pour weedkiller on roadsides rather than mow.

It’s difficult for us as individuals to change Big Ag, or highway departments or to stop deforestation in the Mexican winter habitat monarch. But the story of the Atala butterfly suggests that the monarch can be brought back from its hurdle toward extinction. And we, in individual suburban and city yards, can do something. We can plant native milkweed, a beautiful flowering plant, in our own gardens. Our hope will be that the monarch will figure out that the milkweeds are now in a new place…our individual yards…rather than along highways and farms.

For the last couple of years, I’ve lived in the city where my yard has space for maybe two milkweed plants if I smoosh them together. It seems like a pretty tiny impact I can make. It’s hard to buy milkweed plants in garden centers, so I have to grow from seed. What I’m doing this year is germinating the entire packet of seeds in little pots. After I plant my two plants, I’ll give the other baby plants to as many of my neighbors as I can and ask them to grow the plants. With any luck, our entire block (or two) will have milkweeds growing that will be beacons to overflying monarchs. It might be hard for the monarchs to see one or two plants in my yard….but I think they’ll notice a whole neighborhood worth of milkweed.

Habitat restoration on a grand scale is a great idea. But I feel powerless as an individual to accomplish that. But in the meantime, maybe we can offer new habitat in our collective yards. I can grow out a packet of seeds and change my neighborhood.

Another quote from Tallamy:
If half of the American lawns were replaced with native plants, we would create the equivalent of a 20 million acre national park – nine times bigger than Yellowstone, or 100 times bigger than Shenandoah National Park.

If you have more space in your yard, Tallamy tells about a great experiment in Delaware where researches planted Common Milkweed in a naturalistic planting in a 15′ x 15′ plot. That plot produced 150 monarchs in one season.

Let’s create this new hidden monarch habitat in our yards. Whether you have two square feet like me or space for a 15′ x 15′ plot, you can help save monarchs from extinction. One yard, one packet of seeds, one plant at a time, we can provide food and a place to raise baby monarchs.

Photo Credit:

Celebrating Native Plants: A Profile of Doug Tallamy

http://www.butterflyfunfacts.com/atala.php

Early Spring Flowers for Pollinators

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Why to Plant These Wildflower Seeds

by Sandy Swegel

Hungry pollinators are starting to wake up. Well, maybe not this week in Colorado if they are smart. We still have a foot of old snow on the ground, but the sun will come out later this week and I expect to see the first crocuses poke out from the melting snow.

The first warm days of Spring bring out lots of our pollinator friends. In a long winter like this, honey supplies are running short and honeybees are eager for fresh food. Wild bees and bumblebees who don’t have honey stores are very hungry. Ladybugs that woke up a few weeks ago and have been eating aphid eggs in the leaf litter are eager for some sweet nectar or pollen. Everybody’s hungry and are flocking to the first flowers to gather nectar and protein. They need to build up their own strength and to provide food for Spring babies.

 

You can spot some of the first pollinators of the season if you look closely at the first Spring bulbs. Plan to plant more flowers for pollinators in your garden if you want to attract more. You can lure pollinators to your yard by having the first flowers. Then they’ll stay for the rest of the season if you have flowers in bloom all year.

 

Some of the easiest spring flowers to grow are:
Crocus
Snowdrops
Grape hyacinths
Daffodils
Tulips, especially native tulips.

Little bulbs like snowdrops and grape hyacinths re-seed themselves and naturalize a good-sized patch. If you don’t have these in your own yard, it’s easy dig up a few bulbs from a friend’s overgrown patch and transplant into your own garden. They don’t mind the transplanting too much and will bloom as usual…attracting more pollinators to your yard.

So bend down close to those little crocus flowers to see our pollinator friends. Bring a camera. The bees get groggy from gorging on pollen and are often moving pretty slowly, so it’s easy to get a good picture.

 

Photo credits:
Mason bee on crocus: http://www.earthtimes.org/scitech/saving-bees-new-pesticide/2612/

Bee on tulip: http://matthewwills.com/tag/honey-bees/

Bee on muscari and fly on snowdrop: http://urbanpollinators.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/more-early-spring-flowers-for.html

To make your pollinator garden click here!

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What can a Gardener Do in a SnowStorm?

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How to Survive Winter

by Sandy Swegel

Oh my, what a winter. In Colorado we haven’t suffered like the Northeast has…just last week we had five glorious warm sunny days in which I cut back grasses, pruned dormant trees, and started some cleanup. Alas, today, there’s eight inches of snow on top the fence and more coming. What’s a gardener to do?

You can Design a Snow Garden.
OK, come summer you’ll call it a Moon Garden because it will be all white. But I’m been Googling all the plants with “Snow” in their names. One hot summer night this July, I could be surrounded by a field of white flowers that cools me off remembering that snowstorm last February.

My thoughts so far:

Agapanthus SnowStorm
Spirea SnowStorm
Bacopa Giant Snowflake
Alyssum Snowdrift

Then there are the common names: Snow in Summer, Snow on the Mountain, Snow Flower, Snow Drops, Snow Rose, Snow Poppies. There is no end to this pun. But it could be a wonderful whimsical garden that would delight your friends and just glow in the moonlight. Install some garden solar-LED snowmen or snowflakes to come on after dark. You’ll either have the cleverest garden or the most eccentric garden on the block. Either sounds great when you’re stuck in a snowstorm.

 

 

http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/FullImageDisplay.aspx?documentid=35248

Snow Storm agapanthus

 

 Heirloom Vegetable Seed

 

Wildflower Mixes

Grass Mixes

Organic Vegetable Seed

A Valentine’s Day Gift for the Bees

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Bee Love

by Sandy Swegel

Nothing like Valentine’s Day to make us think about who and what we love. If we look at the huge number of Facebook “likes” we get when Mike posts about bees or wildflowers, we know our followers have a special love for wildflowers and for the bees and other pollinators who feast on wildflowers.

So how about we all do something special for bees this Valentine’s Day and plant a special Wildflower Patch for them that is a food source both beautiful and safe. A wildflower garden can be a whole meadow or it can be a tiny corner of your garden. Size isn’t as important as a good source of food that’s grown from seed naturally.

 

We’ve written here before about the dangers of the neonicotinoid pesticides (now more easily named neonics.) The bottom line is that if you buy plants, it is likely they were treated with neonics at some point in the greenhouses where they are propagated and grown for sale. Neonics are good killers and control the aphids, mealy bugs, scale and thrips that plague crowded unnatural greenhouse conditions. It’s much for expensive for big growers to treat pests naturally when mass spraying of neonics takes care of the problem for them cheaply. The cost to the bees doesn’t factor into the budget.

But for bees, it’s starting to look like even small amounts of neonic residue left in plants can hurt them. See the link below for the Harvard study that found that healthy bees that were exposed to even sublethal doses of neonics were significantly less likely to survive winter.

The only way to protect the bees until neonics are outlawed here as they are in Europe is to make sure they have natural sources of flowers that are grown from seeds instead of from purchased plants. And the best plants to grow are the ones bees have evolved with: Wildflowers. Anyone who gardens that knows that Wildflowers are a real “if you plant it they will come” experience. Every pesticide free wildflower you plant will be covered with happy bees.

So our Valentine’s message is this:02.13.15-VDay-FB
“Bees, We Love you. We want to show you our love in a time-honored way humans have always shown love: we want to feed you lots of good food: the pollen and nectar from naturally grown wildflowers. We want you to be healthy and happy and share many more Valentine’s Days with us.”

Harvard study:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/study-strengthens-link-between-neonicotinoids-and-collapse-of-honey-bee-colonies/
Photo credit:
http://www.sweetcomments.net/picture/valentines-day/bee-valentine.gif.html