Ah, gardening in Colorado! The lack of water, the flash floods, the hail storms, the rocky soil, the clay soil, the cold nights, the late and early frosts… We live in such a beautiful state that it’s hard to complain, but man it’s hard to garden in Colorado Springs!
I have a small raised bed, a decent sized box planter, and a very wet area built into our landscaping that I make attempts to grow things in! I’ve found that chives do awesome in my very wet area, but not much else will grow there. This year I’m trying to plant daises in that spot with the intentions of starting them there and then moving to other parts of the yard next year or the next.
In my box planter I planted two packets of basil, one packet of marjoram, and one packet of parsley. And, in my small raised bed I plan to plant snow peas, green onions, and one or two other things – haven’t decided yet.
My goal this year was to plan things that help me make quick, flavorful meals. I thought about planting some “guaranteed producers” like zucchini or cucumbers, but decided that they are so cheap at the store during the summer that with my limited space, it made more sense to grow things that are more expensive at the store.
Do you plant a garden? What are your best tips for gardening and landscaping? What do you plant each year? What have you tried that’s worked and what failed miserably?
Let’s see if we can help each other out by posting our success stories, failures, and tips and tricks! Below is a “linky” that allows you to insert a link right here on this post. Please feel free to link to your own blog posts about gardening in Colorado, other sites that you’ve found helpful, perhaps information about local gardening clubs and classes – anything to do with gardening in Colorado: link it up!
You can also comment on this post with your questions, stories, comments about gardening. I’m hoping some Springs Bargains readers like Laura and well, the other Laura, and the rest of you experienced gardeners chime in with your expertise!
I have 3 4×8 raised beds in my yard. I harvested very little last year. With the cool start of summer, the growing season was sooo short. This year, my husband built a greenhouse over the raised beds. He used PVC pipe and durable plastic. I’m hoping we’ll have more success this year. I started some tomatoes indoors and am transferring those outside. I’ll put in some corn, pumpkins, peas, and strawberries, too. Wish me luck!!! Can’t wait to read some tips.
Rebecca, Have you started your pumpkins indoors now and transplant after Memorial Day? (Don’t forget to take a week to harden them.) That’s how you get them to grow longer. If you get dirt and seeds, you can even use a cut down milk container that you punch holes in the bottom for a pot. It can be simple. You CAN pick green pumpkins and put them in a sunny window and they will turn orange. But, I’m not sure of the taste quality – I like to decorate with them and not really eat. Since you said your garden wasn’t that successful – are you doing less than 75 day seeds? I figure our “real” season is from June 1st to *maybe* October 15th. The lower the days on the seed packet the more chances you will have to of getting a harvest. Stores sell you all types of seeds, but very few grow well here. The Front Range gardener (above) had temps for peas, I never knew that info – now might be the time for your peas. (I used to plant them until I realized I was the only one in our family that ate them. :0)
We are planning to do just a couple vegetables – more for educating our kids, than anything else. The one thing I’d like help on – we live close to a creek & therefore get a lot of snakes slithering through our yard – what can I do to deter them? I hate the thought of one flying out when I am trying to weed! We have no long grass in our yard, no hidey holes for them, but they are very fond of our front door step!
Have you grown basil before? I have no luck with it. Mine has been wimpy. Any tips? I can get chives, thyme, mint and oregano to grow well.
Any tips on growing lettuce? I can’t get it to grow outside and I tried it in a pot indoors to no avail. In a past house where we had sandy soil, my strawberries were wonderful – but it took 3 years from 3 plants (that I kept planting the babies from) to get enough to eat. I do love to grow zucchini, pumpkins and corn. I have guaranteed harvest for the effort. I do tomatoes but get different results each year because I forget what kind of seed I planted the previous year. :0) Anyone plant tomatoes from seed and get a good harvest? What’s the name of the seed? (I’ll write it down for next year.) I don’t do onions or carrots because I can get them really cheap at Sam’s (carrots $1.88/5lbs, onions $6/10lbs). And even with a green house for two years I never got one good melon (watermelon or canteloupe).
My Mom grows rhubarb in the middle of her flowers and makes peach-rhubarb or strawberry-rhubarb jam all year with one plant. My two favorite gardening books are “Herb Gundell’s Complete Guide to Rocky Mountain Gardening” and “The Vegetable Gardeners Bible” by Edward Smith
I’ve grown basil the last two years. Never had what I’d call a “bumper crop”, but last year’s was better than the year before so I’m hoping for continued improvement! I need to figure out how to get my basil to be “bushy” – I pinch it, harvest it before it blossoms… but it’s still really skinny.
Yeah, that was my problem too. I grew basil in IA and I’m not joshin’ when I say it was waist high by 3 ft wide. It was coming out of my ears then. Now, it’s just straggly.
@ Dawn, For 2 years, I’ve planted large red cherry from seed and it has done tremendously well! However, that’s the only variety that did well from seed. However, I started them in late March and didn’t transplant until late May.
Also, for lettuce, I find a Mesclun mix does best. Romaine seems to flake out on me. I plant into the garden from seed in mid-April. I’ve also had best luck in partial sun.
This is such a timely post for my family! I have around 275 seedlings started in our sun-room currently waiting for transplanting into the raised beds we’re building. Some are already starting to throw flowers!?!
Last year I was VERY successful with the 3 plants I tried last year (5 ft tall tomato plants that had a tremendous yield which were finally taken out by the bad storms we had in October and an eggplant) that I decided to branch out and well, we got a little carried away! Today we had 10 yards of dirt (garden mix actually) dropped onto our driveway to fill our 25 raised beds (2′ x 12′ each). We are also adding some organic compost, cotton seed meal, and seaweed meal.
We have automatic sprinklers that over shoot the grass in many areas which is where I situate the beds so they get watered a couple time a day, but still have time to drain.
As for cost, we’ve been using Home Depot gift cards “purchased” with reward points to finance most of the venture.
You can see our progress on our blog :) Comments and advice are welcomed with open arms.
We do tomatoes in 5 gallon buckets with holes for drainage drilled in the bottom. Can sometimes get free buckets from restaurants or bakery’s at grocery stores. The tomatoes grow well in them and I’ve had good harvests unless we get hail. We don’t have a lot of yard space so this has been a good option for us…have done it that way for probably 15 years. I do an herb garden each year just off the deck where it’s fairly handy for cooking: sage, thyme, oregano, dill, spearmint, lemon balm, and basil. Also have a strawberry patch and was hoping to put in some squash seeds tucked between some of the shrubs in the back yard and maybe get something to grow…
I am so glad that carrie opened this blog :o). Thanks so much! Last year we had great zuccini, parsley, jalapeno and bell peppers. Also peppermint, I love to make tea out of it. My problem is that I don’t know when I will be able to plant them outside. I forgot when we did it last year and that was our first time :). Does anybody know?
Also where can I buy cheap veggie plants? Lowes prices are BAD!
Hope to read a lot here, I am so happy that summer is just around the corner! Have a good weekend.
We have had good luck with rhubarb, chives, mint (very invasive, I recommend a container), strawberries (ours keep spreading every year), lettuce and spinach (you can plant two crops, plant about now and then harvest until the sun makes them bolt and then plant again at the end of summer), tomatoes (cherry tomatoes do really well, the Early Girl variety of the larger ones do well, but I aways have to start mine from plants not seeds and use walls of water while it is still cool), peas ( I really like Oregon Sugar Snap, you eat the pod and all), carrots, zucchini.
Last year I went with the Square Foot Gardening method because it can produce 100% of the crops in 20% of the space. I made a 4′x4′ raised square foot garden last year and this year I am going to do two. Everything grew really well last year until the really bad, early freeze that killed everything!
I started my seeds about a month ago (we’re growing about 30 different plants, herbs and flowers) indoors, with a warmer and grow light and am hoping to avoid losing a lot of my crop from the crazy weather. I also used a plastic cover last year that worked well to protect the plants during really windy days or hail storms!
I also have two gigantic planters and I was thinking about growing some dwarf apple trees in them? Has anyone had success with this before?
Well, I am off to the Home Depot to use my B1G1 coupon on the apple trees!
How is the square foot gardening working for you? I just set up 3 square foot garden beds as an experiment this year.
We’ve done square foot gardening the last several years and it has worked out great! I barely ever have to weed and since I’m starting with good soil, they are super easy to pull out if I do get a weed. There is a book to get anyone started, very helpful.
Another two questions: 1 – IF it does freeze early, what do you do to save what you can of all your hard work? I know that you can turn tomato plants upside down and they will ripen and pumpkins can be put in the sunshine to turn orange. Any other tips?
2 – Has anyone grown potatoes? I tried them for two years with no success. Trivia: Did you know a 100 yrs ago Monument, CO was a potato capital like Idaho is now, but they had a blight that lost the business. (from “Palmer Divide trilogy” DVD by Jim Sawatski at PPLD library)
Carrots, onions, lettuce and strawberries will survive the early frosts pretty well. For a very early freeze last year, I covered all of my tomatoes and peppers with beach towels during the night (it was a last minute resort because I hadn’t been keeping proper track of the weather…). They all survived just fine and the tomatoes and peppers produced for a few more weeks before we had our first snow. The day before the first semi-heavy snow was forecasted, I pulled all the tomato and pepper plants and harvested everything from all but two plants. Then put all harvested in a large bowl on my counter. Keeping the ripening fruit in with the unripe fruit, helps them ripen faster because those that are already almost ripe give off a gas that starts the others ripening. Out of 200+ cherry tomatoes in that bowl, I probably lost less than 20 to rotting, etc. For the two plants that I left the fruit on, I hung them upside down from some shelving in my garage (I just rigged them up with some rope I had lying around!) and they ripened VERY well and much faster than those in the bowl in the kitchen! If you have space, I would definitely recommend giving it a try.
My potatoes did OK for a first year. Enough for about 2 large meals from 3 plants. I used organic red potatoes as my “seed”. I didn’t hill them properly because I was out of town for a while, so I figure if I had hilled them better they might have produced much more.
Also, I posted one of my garden updates from last year as link #10 above (in the linky section).
I’m looking at this first year of gardening here in CO as a pure experiment, hoping that I at least get a FEW treats from the work I put in. :) I’ve started lots of plants indoors, but I started them way too soon. They’ve been in a few weeks and they are going CRAZY. I’m going to experiment with my own starter plants, some from the store, and then some seeds, and see which ones work the best. We’re going to build up a long raised bed along our side backyard fence, and see how that works. We’re also going to get some starter raspberry bushes started too. Yum. It’s just so hard for this North Dakotan farm girl to not just throw seeds in the ground and have them grow. But I’ll try my best at CO gardening. Thanks for this discussion…very helpful and encouraging!
Thanks for this post. I have been thinking about doing a little container gardening this year, but have done nothing more than think about it. Maybe this will get me motivated to get something started!
So when do you plant your plants outside?
And where do you get your plants if you don’t use seeds?
I bought my starters from Home Depot last year and was very happy with them! I didn’t plant them until the 1st week of June, but this was also because I knew I wouldn’t be able to tend to them in May.
Some people say after mother’s day, others say after Memorial day.
I’ve been gardening in Co for several years and always have a good yeild on Tomatoes, zuchinni, basil (plant in between your Tomato plants for a healthy plant), peppers of all kinds, sage, strawberrys, ruhbarb, pumpkins, pole beans, sugar snaps… the best advice I could give is to get your soil tested and ammend, ammend, ammend! I also rent a good tiller and till in whatever our soil needs (changes each year) a good 6-12″deep. For smaller gardens, think outside the box and plant herbs and veggies in your flower and border beds.
BTW: I also teach canning classes, if anyone is interested in learning how to can your harvest (or from the farmers market) it’s very healthy and soooooooo cost effective. You can e-mail me at lnmhassell@q.com if your interested.
When you start your plants inside, does anyone get little bugs flying around?? I did this last year and decided not to do it this year for that reason…if you get them, is there a way to avoid them or make them go away while still keeping the plants inside??
We get them inside too! I’ve heard a small bowl (2oz) of apple cider vinegar helps get rid of them. I tried this last year, and while there weren’t as many of them it didn’t get rid of all of them. I’ve also heard putting dish soap around the outside of the planter will keep them away, but I’ve never tried that We have ours in the sun room this year and the little bugs seem to be content staying in that one room so I’m not worrying about it this year.
There is a recipe online for getting rid of the flies. We had them several years ago and they were awful! The thing that I found working best was the mixture of the cider vinegar, water then cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Take a toothpick and make little holes around the outer edge of the bowl and the middle. The flies will be attracted to the water, get in through the holes and not be able to get out. Make the holes a little bigger than the toothpick by wiggling them around a bit, but not too big that they can get out.
Thank you, thank you!!
Lisa, thank you! That info was and is a great help!
Happy gardening. :o)
We’ve been gardening here for a little while, out in Falcon. We have great success with potatoes, green beans, lettuces, carrots, beets, turnips, rutabaga, onions…other things I’m probably forgetting. I have a hard time with tomatoes here – it’s really open, and I think it gets too cool at night for them to set fruit well. We get some, just not tons, like with the stuff listed above. I use ‘wall o waters’ for the tomatoes, and that helps. I watch for them at goodwill or on clearance end of season. We’re going to put a few tomato plants up against the house this year on the s. side hoping that the heat given off by the house is enough at night to keep them a little warmer.
I also struggle with cucumbers an melons, but I have a friend who grow lots of tomatoes and cukes…we trade back and forth. She gives me her extra tomatoes and cukes in the summer once she’s done canning and pickling, and then I keep her in potatoes and eggs in the winter. :)
We ‘plant’ soaker hoses, then plant seeds along them, and we mulch the entire garden really well, It keeps the soil more even in regard to temperature and moisture, plus it keeps weeds down. We use the pine mulch from the slash/mulch site in Black Forest, and we rake it off in the fall if we’re tilling. Works great.
We also dress the garden with homemade compost, composted manure from our hens, horse manure from a neighbor, rabbit manure from another neighbor and alapaca manure from a friend. Over time, we’ve developed some really nice soil.
We also side dress our fruit trees with manure to keep them happy and healthy.
-Laura at TenThingsFarm
the CSU extension site is great for info about planting times. each veggie is different…each requires different sun.
To keep my garden going once we start getting a threat of frost, I take those big blue tarps and cover everything. We use tent stakes (or u-shaped wires) to keep it from blowing off, as well as several well placed heavy rocks. I’ve managed to keep lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, peas, beets, turnips, and herbs going for sometimes another month. You have to make sure to cover all parts of the plants and not just the fruits. You also need to remove the tarps in the mornings and make sure to do light watering early in the day to make sure it has time to soak in and not freeze. Some things last longer than others and they don’t yield as well once it starts getting cold.
Dawn left this comment earlier in the week on a different post and she said it was ok to copy and paste over here – I wanted to make sure it was archived with this post because it’s a great tip!
Dawn said, “Carrie, That’s a fantastic coupon! I love buying fruit trees. I could go crazy purchasing them. However, I do have one thing… if you buy a fruit tree plan on either bringing a list of trees that grow in Colorado or bring it back. I didn’t realize a couple of years ago when I bought them at Home Depot that just because they sell them doesn’t mean they grow here. (I returned one after researching and before it was in the ground. They were fine with replacing it with another one.) Another thing is if you buy one fruit tree (ie. apple, plum, pear) make sure that you have the correct second one to pollinate or you won’t get fruit (unless you have alot of neighbors with fruit trees to pollinate yours.) :0)… A good book for all trees here is “Herb Gundell’s complete guide to Rocky Mountain gardening”
I posted a link above as #10 in the linky section. It’s one of the updates I posted during last year’s gardening season.
I have had great success with Large Red Cherry tomatoes (but, unfortunately, no other variety I’ve tried), jalapeno peppers, green bell peppers, cilantro, lettuce (Mesclun/salad mix) and carrots. My strawberries produced only a tiny amount last year and that was the 2nd year they’ve been in my garden, hoping this year they are stronger and will produce more! My onions and Elite White peas were a complete flop last year. And I had GIANT pumpkins from a pumpkin plant my son planted at preschool!
I believe my biggest help has been consistent watering – especially for the tomatoes. They can get blossom end rot if they are watered inconsistently. I water every day during the hottest weeks and every other during the cooler weeks. I make sure to water either very early in the morning (8-ish) or late in the afternoon once the sun has moved beyond my garden. This prevents the leaves of the plants from getting burned from the water “cooking” on the leaves.