Design Your Garden with Collages

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Decorating Your Garden

by Sandy Swegel

The snow is still deep. Temperatures still below ten degrees. Seeds are ordered. Poppies and wildflowers were strewn on last week’s snow. Garden magazines are read. It’s starting to get hard to occupy the impatient gardener. My irritation with being bored is at about the same level as my neighbor’s 3-year old whose delightful need for attention and distraction sends her knocking on all the neighbor’s doors. Oh to be a pre-schooler again.

I’m past the age where I’m happy playing with crayons or Barbie. But as I watch the clever neighborhood moms coming up with a million games and projects to occupy snowbound children, I decided there was a way I could almost be a pre-schooler again. I could make a collage.

Only in the grown-up world, it’s not called a “collage.” It’s called a “visioning board.” The movie “The Secret” made visioning boards popular. I’m not too big on just having pictures of a perfect garden because, well, I know me. I’m never going to have a perfect garden. I’ll get too distracted by turning the compost pile or watching the bees or running off to do errands to get my garden perfect.

 

But a Garden Vision Board or Garden Collage is great for keeping track of new ideas and creating imaginary gardens. And all my pretty seed catalogs and magazines have perfect-sized pictures for cutting out small images of flowers and plants that I can paste on my board.

It’s easy to get started.
*Piece of paper, poster board or old cardboard. An old dry erase board and magnets work too
*Scissors (you’re grown up…you can have the pointy ones now)
*Gluestick or tape.
*magazines and catalogs.

So simple but the whole point of visioning is that the process does make your ideas happen. This year some of the favorite flowers or vegetable you collage with now will be growing for real in your yard or pots.

Collage Ideas:
Flowers. Everybody wants more flowers and more color in their yard. Gather pictures of your favorite flowers. Put pictures of flower arrangements so you can remember to grow those flowers.

Garden design. You can collect photos of designs you like. One day you’ll get around to it. My father collected pictures of gazebos for twenty years before he finally retired and had time to build one. I know I will make an herb knot garden one day.

Tweak your mature garden. If you’re ambitious with a printer you can print out a picture of your garden to use as the base of your collage and try out what flowers bring some added pizazz to the nice garden you already have.

Vegetable gardens. The preschooler next door has an electronic game that lets her plant carrots and tomatoes. She’s too young to know we used to design our vegetable gardens with pen and paper in the olden days. Gather pictures of your favorite foods.

Gardening Friends. Or you can just cut out pictures of bees and dragonflies and hummingbirds and all the other pollinators to remind you of your gardening companions.

Vacation Gardens. A collage of all the gardens I could have had if I hadn’t moved to Zone 5 Colorado. Bananas and tropical flowers.

Mostly, I’m collaging to have a little tactile fun and inspiration in the middle of a snowstorm. We have to remember that the reason we started gardening is that it’s fun and beautiful and creative. Not just work to be checked off a to-do list, but a place to nurture our spirit.

Photo credit: http://simplehomecraft.blogspot.com/2012/07/garden-collage.html
http://mamaslittlemuse.blogspot.com/2012/05/designing-garden-from-pictures.html

Pick More Daisies

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Daisy Love

by Sandy Swegel

Every January in the middle of some snowstorm, I find a good reason to wander the BBB Seed warehouse to marvel (and covet) huge sacks of seeds waiting to be sorted into packets. There are big sacks of grasses and tiny bags of rare alpine wildflowers. I noticed this year that a whimsical employee who loves daisies had created a shelf of shoeboxes of different seeds that all looked like daisies. What a great idea for a cutting garden!

I started a simple search on our website to see how many daisy or daisy-like flowers we carried and I soon discovered that we are quite obsessed with daisy-type flowers. I found eight flowers named “daisy” and the number soon reached over 25 when I included flowers that look like daisies.

There are good reasons to love daisies beside the fact that they are adorable. Many daisies are also drought tolerant, native, not subject to many pests or diseases and are favorite nectar sources for butterflies and bees.

A short list to get you started on a daisy garden are the flowers with a daisy in their names:

Yellow Daisy (Chrysanthemum multicaule)
Daisy, Shasta – (Leucanthemum maximum)
Daisy, Painted – (Glebionis carinatum)
Daisy, Gloriosa – (Rudbeckia hirta, gloriosa)
Daisy, English – (Bellis perennis)
Daisy, Aspen – (Erigeron speciosus)
Daisy, African – (Dimorphotheca aurantiaca)
Orange Mountain Daisy (Helenium hoopseii)

Then you can move on to the daisy-like flowers such as
Orange and red gaillardia,
Purple and pink echinacea,
Blue and purple asters, and
Two annuals much beloved in American gardens:
Cosmos in pink and white and candy stripe and Zinnias in all colors and sizes.
Finally, cap the season with Sunflowers!

All I can say is, “Hey, Head Honcho Mike! We have a seed mix of poppies (Parade of Poppies). Maybe we need a seed mix next year, “Field of Daisies!”

Photo credit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteraceae
http://www.visualphotos.com/image/2×3894130/a_child_picking_daisies

Pick More Daisies
Best Heirloom Vegetables
Wildflower and Grass Mixes
Native Grasses
Wildflowers

 

Gardening as Winter Looms

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How to Keep Up Gardening in the Winter

by Sandy Swegel

Nothing like the first deeply freezing temperatures followed by a warm day to get people in Zone 5 areas asking if the gardening season is really over if they can still tackle their garden to do lists even though winter looms with Thanksgiving is around the corner.  We have two conflicting impulses…the really good bulbs are on sale at our local garden center AND there’s an inch of snow and refrozen ice on the garden bed.

What does happen to our soil in winter? Once soil temperatures are in the forties, all the creatures and denizens of the soil put themselves to sleep through dormancy or through laying lots of eggs or spores that will hatch when temperatures are warmer.  Seeds stop germinating or else require weeks and weeks at low temperature to come up.  They’re smart…no point in germinating if sub-zero temperatures in another few weeks are going to kill young growth. So the soil goes into stasis until the temperatures warm.

Here are some of the questions I hear people asking as our soil begins its freeze:

Can I still plant bulbs? Can I transplant daylilies now? Yes, if you can pry the soil open and get water to the plant, there’s a good chance your bulbs will bloom and the daylily will be fine. Daffodils especially prefer getting planted earlier to have some time to make roots. Sometimes blooming is delayed the first season, but I have had good success in planting bulbs too late…especially if I throw in some compost in the hole and don’t plant too shallowly. I’ve also had years when the bulbs just ended up being frozen mush…so plant earlier next year.

Can I put in a cover crop? In Zone 5, it’s too late.  The temperatures are too cold for seed germination.  Put lots of mulched leaves over the soil to cover it.

Do I have to water? Ideally, you got the garden well watered sometime in Fall through rain or irrigation.  If not or if there are long dry sunny spells, you should winter water.

What do I do with my Fall greens that are freezing solid? Keep eating…they get better every day.  Spinach frozen at 8 am is delicious at room temperature.  If you cover greens with row cover or a cold frame or even throw big bags of leaves over the plants, you can keep harvesting easily through January or longer if you haven’t eaten them all.

Can I still use herbs? Yep, remember where your herbs are and you can put your hand through a foot of snow for snippings of intensely flavored frozen thyme or oregano leaves.

Can I still fertilize? You can, but the soil organisms won’t be processing it.  Organic fertilizer like alfalfa meal stay on the soil and will eventually be used when things warm up next Spring.

Is there something I should plant?  Winter hardy violas and pansies don’t mind a little snow and ice.  In a sunny location, they’ll keep throwing up blooms all winter long…a surprise of color in a white or brown winter-scape. Plant well hardened off plants and keep them watered.

For more details on the science of soil in winter, check out this article from the Bountea compost tea company. http://www.bountea.com/articles/lifeinwintersoil.html

Photo Credit:

http://indianapublicmedia.org/focusonflowers/year/;

Truffles – Orange Frost Fest

Seeds are the New Hollywood Celebrities

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Seed Stories You Need to Check Out

By Sandy Swegel

Seeds are the New Hollywood Celebrities

The importance of seeds to life on Earth is growing in our consciousness. Have you noticed there are a number of new movies and other media about seeds? “Seeds” and “Sustainable Farming” are definitely “IN.” Many films are now available online for free and others are being screened in local communities.

Here are a few that I know about.

“Seeds of Time” 2013
SEEDS OF TIME follows agriculture pioneer Cary Fowler’s global journey to save the eroding foundation of our food supply in a new era of climate change. The reviews rave about great nature photography.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2962826/

“Open Sesame” 2013
This film tells the story of seeds by following the challenges and triumphs of some of their most tireless stewards and advocates.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2962826/

“Bitter Seeds” 2011
These are sad stories about farmers in India
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2306473/

“Harvest of Fear”
A Nova, Frontline PBC special about the GMO debates.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/harvest/

“The Vanishing Seeds Film Project.”
about seeds and deforestation in Africa.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vanishing-Seeds-Film-Project/127333317308892

 

Here are a few of the TV Programs:

“Farm Kings” about farmers in Pittsburg
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2962826/

A Reality TV program “The Farm” is popular in Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_(TV_series)

And the newest show, Chipotle has sponsored
“Farmed and Dangerous” on Hulu
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2852872/

Photo credit:http://www.mindful.org/the-mindful-society/activism/sprouting-seeds-of-compassion

More Wildflowers

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All About Wildflowers

by Sandy Swegel

The fields and meadows of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado are awash in wildflowers this year.  Lots of moisture in the Fall and Spring has turned our mountains into riots of color that started early and keeps going and going.  We, gardeners, keep playing hooky from our weeding tasks to hike along mountain meadows and enjoy the beauty of nature that doesn’t have to be weeded or watered.  We also get excited about how wildflowers make us very happy and we try to plant more of them in our gardens.

There’s a deeper story to the wildflower bloom.  It’s that we’ve actually been having longer wildflower seasons for years now.  I look at a good wildflower season as a reason to rejoice and do more wandering and hiking.  Scientists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory looked out their windows in Crested Butte, CO forty years ago and said, “Hmmm. What’s that about?” “Let’s collect some data.”  So for the last 39 years, they sent out scores of graduate students to count wildflowers.  They recorded when the flowers first bloomed, how many flowers were produced, how long the flowering lasted, etc. Now many years later, the wildflowers are telling an important story about climate change.  Turns out we do have more wildflowers.  Almost a full month’s worth more.  The flowers bloom earlier in the Spring and last longer in the Fall.

It’s still too early to know exactly what it means that we have an extra month of wildflower season.  Clearly, this is evidence of climate change. But what it means is less clear.  We get the first bloom six days earlier than 40 years ago. That means birds and pollinators have food earlier.  But we still get the same number of flowers which means the actual amount of nectar hasn’t changed.

Up in Crested Butte, the scientists still look out and ask “Hmmm? What’s that about? Let’s collect some data.”  Graduate students still count the number of flowers in little 30 foot plots across the mountain.  A new study is putting tiny radio transmitters on hummingbirds to see how their feeding is changing.

Meanwhile, the wildflowers give us abundant beauty …and… hard data that climate change is happening, rather rapidly.

Photo Credit: www.constantinealexander.net/2014/03/rocky-mountain-wildflower-season-lengthens-by-more-than-a-month.html

 

Hooray for Hummingbirds!

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Support These Amazing Creatures

by Cheryl Soldati Clark


Hummingbirds may be cute little-winged creatures, but really they are tough as nails! These extremely important pollinators have the highest metabolic rate of any other animal on earth. They also have a high breathing rate, high heart rate and high body temperature. Their wings flap up to 90 times per second and their heart rate exceeds 1,200 beats per minute. In order to maintain their extremely high metabolism, hummingbirds have to eat up to 10-14 times their body weight in food every day for fuel. In preparation for migration, they have to eat twice this amount in order to fly thousands of miles.

A huge portion of a hummingbird’s diet consists of sugar that they acquire from flower nectar, tree sap and hummingbird feeders. They also have to eat plenty of insects and pollen for protein to build muscle. Hummingbirds cross-pollinate flowers while they are feeding on nectar because their heads become covered with pollen and they carry the pollen to the next bloom as they continue to feed. Several native plants rely on hummingbirds for pollination and would not be here today if it wasn’t for these efficient pollinators.

Hummingbirds are found in several different habitats, including wooded and forested areas, grasslands and desert environments. They also occur at altitudes ranging up to 14,000 feet in the South American Andes Mountains.

The male hummingbirds are usually brightly colored while the females are dull colored in order to camouflage them while nesting. Female hummingbirds rely on males for mating only and after that, they build the nest and raise their young as single parents. They have been known to fearlessly protect their young against large birds of prey, such as hawks and have even attacked humans that get too close to their nests. They usually lay up to two eggs which hatch within a few weeks. Hummingbirds can live 3-5 years in the wild, which varies by species, but making it through their first year of life is a challenge. Fledglings are particularly vulnerable between the time that they hatch and the time that they leave the nest. Larger species may live up to a decade.

In order to conserve energy at night, because they lack downy feathers to hold in body heat, hummingbirds enter a state of semi-hibernation called “torpor”. This allows them to lower their metabolic rate by almost 95% and also lower their body temperature to an almost hypothermic rate. During this time, hummingbirds perch on a branch and appear to be asleep. When the sun comes up and starts to warm the earth, it takes about 20 minutes, but the tiny birds will awake from their torpor state and start their feeding rituals.

Planting a lot of reds and purples in your garden and hanging hummingbird feeders around your yard will attract and help feed these little pollinator friends. In fact, BBB Seed has a Hummingbird Wildflower Mix specifically designed with these little guys in mind.  Please help to support these amazing creatures in your own backyard!

Hummingbird Favorites:

• Penstemon
• Columbine
• Delphinium
• Autumn Sage
• Four O’clock (Mirabilis jalapa)

• Scarlet Monkeyflower (Mimulus spp.)
• Texas Sage (Salvia coccinea)
• Chuparosa
• Ocotillo
• Tree Tobacco (Nicotiana glauca)
• Baja Fairy (Calliandra californica)
• Bottlebrush
• Desert Willow

• Scarlet Gilia (Ipomopsis aggregata)
• Lantana
• Agave
• Lily of the Nile

FUN LINKS:



Video on Hummingbird Tongues

Hummingbird Coloring Pages for Children

 

 

 

Wildflower seed mixes

Wildflowers for pollinators

Bee flower mixes

Bumblebees Love Purple

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Why Do Bees Have a Favorite Color?

by Sandy Swegel

 

I visited one of my favorite suburban lawn alternative gardens yesterday.  It’s a true pollinator’s heaven of nectar and pollen, right on a neighborhood street. Full of perennial gaillardia and rudbeckia, and reseeding annual larkspur, cleome and sunflower, the garden uses about the same amount of water as your average lawn.

Bees were everywhere.  Neighbors stop by in wonder at what can be done with a front yard instead of plain old grass.  In the median strips in front of the flowers, kales and lettuces produced greens for the neighbors. This time of year, gaillardia and rudbeckia are dominant with their yellows, oranges and reds.  But something different this year was a plethora of purple larkspur.  Curious, I  asked community urban farmers Scott and Wendy about the variation.  They and the landowner are all careful gardeners, unlikely to throw in something different without a reason.  Scott explained matter-of-factly, “Well it’s for the bumblebees. They prefer purple.”  I was skeptical since I see bumblebees all day on different colored flowers.  He assured me they had watched the field the last couple of years. The bumblebees always went for the purple flowers.  And walking on the path, huge fat bumblebees were on the purple larkspur, gorging away.

 

I couldn’t resist a little more research and sure enough, studies in Germany showed that baby bumblebees love purple flowers. Purple flowers are thought to contain more nectar than other colors and that baby bumblebees who chose purple flowers had a better chance of survival…they then passed the purple preference onto their offspring.

I’m not sure what most piqued my curiosity this day…I loved learning that bumblebees like purple flowers best.  But I think I was more intrigued by Wendy and Scott just noticing all season that the bumblebees liked one particular color.  In the end, though, I’m most impressed with the bumblebees who somehow got the humans to plant their favorite food.  Very clever bees.

Photo credits:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/21/bees-can-sense-the-electric-fields-of-flowers/

 

Bats are Beautiful!

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Learn More About These Important Pollinators

by Cheryl Soldati Clark

There are so many misconceptions out there about bats. Bats are not evil, blood-thirsty creatures that fly around at night trying to get caught in your hair. Bats are graceful and fascinating nocturnal creatures, which benefit humans by pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, and feeding on insect pests. In fact, we have bats to thank for pollinating over 300 species of fruits that we eat, such as, bananas, mangoes and guavas to name a few. These aerial mammals fly from sundown to sunrise, visiting flowers in the darkness and ingesting their sugary nectar and protein-rich pollen. They are also excellent pest managers eating up to 1,200 mosquitoes in one hour. A long-lived mammal, in the wild, bats can live for up to 20 years.

As pollinators, bats are attracted to green, purple and dull white flowers with very fragrant, fruit-like odor. They are also attracted to musky, fermented smelling flowers because they have an excellent sense of smell. They choose to feed on large, bell or bowl-shaped flowers (1-3.5 inches) that are open at night and have copious amounts of dilute nectar. The bat forces its head into the flower, trying to reach the nectar with its long tongue. Several species of night-blooming cacti are perfect candidates for bats to pollinate. Bats may eat the pollen, stamen and anthers of certain flowers while at the same time carrying large amounts of pollen on its face and coarse fur from flower to flower. Bats travel long distances every night thus making them effective cross-pollinators of plants that are widely spaced.

Bats can be found in almost every part of the world except in extremely hot and cold climates. They live on all continents except Antarctica. You can find more species of bats where the weather is nice and warm. Bats like to roost in groups in dark and humid environments.  They also roost in different structures, such as the underside of bridges, in caves, inside buildings, in cracks in between rocks, in mines, and in tree hollows.

Unfortunately, due to disease as well as human misunderstanding, many bat species are endangered and some have already gone extinct. Through the misuse of pesticides and habitat destruction, in the United States alone, nearly 40% of the native bat species are endangered. It is our job as human beings to protect these important pollinators by educating our children, friends and neighbors about the importance of bats and trying to eliminate the fear factor associated with these nocturnal mammals. Pollinator Week is a great time to start!

Great Bat Links:

A great video on how to safely & humanely remove a bat from your home

Build your own Bat House!

Bring a Bat program into your School

Beautiful Bat photos

Bat Facts

 

 

Wildflower Seed

Heirloom vegetable seed

Is It Time?

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Is There Still Time to Plant Seeds?

by Sandy Swegel

Is it time? Is it too late?  Can I still plant seeds?  These are the questions I heard this week.  In our Zone 5 area, garden centers are already starting to discount plants and seasonal workers will get laid off by the 4th of July. Does that mean it’s too late to plant seeds and you should just buy the biggest plant you can find?

Generally, the answer is, of course, there is still time to plant seeds…It’s only June!  For gardeners, the truest answer is always, “It Depends.”

There are a few seeds that it is too late to plant. In Zone 5 or other short growing season areas, it’s too late to plant watermelon or winter squash or tomatoes by seed.  The “days to maturity” info on the back of the seed package tells you that you need 90-100 days before the plant makes its first ripe fruit.  100 days from now is mid-September before you might get a watermelon…that doesn’t work when we might have frost by then…or at the very least cold nights.

The flip side of this question is, “Are there seeds I should plant rather than buy plants?”  Absolutely.  It makes no sense to buy a broccoli or cauliflower plant now for $4.00 when it’s just going to bolt in the summer heat.  It likes cooler weather.  And you could probably buy the broccoli itself cheaper.  But in a couple of weeks, market farmers are starting their broccoli seeds to get their fall crops going. Planting broccoli and cauliflower soon is a great idea!

Annuals are still a great bargain to plant.  I went into sticker shock when I went plant shopping this year.  Plant prices are up about 30 percent in my area.  For less than the price of a 4-inch pot with a marigold, I can get one seed packet of marigolds and have dozens and dozens of plants in bloom in only 45 days.  They’ll be super cute all over the garden and in the vegetable garden, they’ll help repel pests.

It’s the same for cosmos and California poppies and zinnias and all the annual wildflower mixes.  There’s still time.  For perennial seed, some plants might not bloom till next year, but the plants will be strong and it’s a lot easier to start seeds now in the garden where you want them to grow instead of inside under lights in the middle of winter.

Buying bedding plants is great for instant gratification, but gardeners know that if you want a garden full of hundreds of flowers (without breaking the bank), SEEDS are the way to go!

So there IS still time. Lots of time for annual flowers like cosmos and zinnias and sunflowers and bachelor buttons and zinnias and for big flowery herbs.  Then there all those vegetables to seed.  And the perennials you are admiring in bloom now. You get the idea. There is plenty of time to plant by seed and enjoy them this year.

 

Heirloom vegetable seed

Wildflower Mixes

Pollinator mixes

A Year of Surprises

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A Stellar Wildflower Year

by Sandy Swegel

People often ask how long do seeds last, but they usually are referring to seeds in packets.  The question I’m astonished by this year is “How long do seeds last in the soil?” Colorado is a pretty dry place and there aren’t that many plants that reseed prolifically the way that happens in warmer, more humid places.  But this year is a year of surprises.  Most years we are lucky if we get 20 inches of rain all year. But last September we had 17 inches of rain in one month and the highest annual precipitation ever recorded here.  All that moisture refilled our underground water reservoirs, remoistened soils desiccated by recent years of drought, and awakened seeds and roots that had long been dormant.

Since September, gardens have been a constant surprise for me. It started in October when Naked Lady bulbs I planted 6 years ago appeared. The bulbs had bloomed the first year I planted them and then never again.  I assumed they died….but somehow those small bulbs were deep in the ground just biding their time for the right conditions.

Yesterday I watched new blooms on pink columbines that were first planted 14 years ago. Those hybrid columbines gradually all reseeded to yellow but yesterday, about 20 feet from the original bed of pink columbines, a seed that had waited patiently in dormancy suddenly lept to life.  Pink! That seed had been brought by the wind or birds to a spot where it was just waiting for its moment.  Near the asparagus bed, tulip bulbs that had been planted too deep many years ago found their way to the surface and are now late bloomers blooming with the iris. A strawberry patch that had dwindled to just a few puny plants exploded three feet in every direction. Even weeds seem like old friends.  I thought I had successfully weeded horsetail out of the rock garden years ago but ten shoots are poking up through the snow in summer.  There is something so abundant about this year that I’m even happy to see the weeds.

I can’t wait to go hiking in the foothills this weekend.  Reports from around the state suggest that we are having a stellar wildflower year. All of Colorado is going to look just the pictures on our wildflower seed packets!!!

Photo Credits
Todd Caudle http://outtherecolorado.com/gallery/1735/pictures/281747