Undaunted gardens are the future

“Undaunted garden” is Lauren Springer’s term for gardens that stand up to hail, drought and other vicissitudes of Western climate. Photo by Barb Gorges, Gardens on Spring Creek, Ft. Collins, Colorado, on a smoky day.

Undaunted gardens are the future for Cheyenne

Also published Sept. 11, 2020, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, “Hardy gardens: The future for Cheyenne.”

By Barb Gorges

            Lauren Springer wrote a book in 1994 based on her Colorado gardening experience a few years after moving from the East Coast, “The Undaunted Garden: Planting for Weather-resilient Beauty.” The popular, revised second edition came out in 2010 (under the name she used for a few years, Lauren Springer Ogden).

            After our experiences this summer in Cheyenne, damaging hail in July and no rain to speak of in August, local flower gardeners may want to look for this book. (Vegetable gardeners, just put up your hail guards and put down drip irrigation.)

            Luscious photography illustrates nearly every page, including the lists of plants recommended for various circumstances, including hail, drought, deer, sun, shade. There’s even a chapter titled, “Roses for Realists.” The last 45 pages are “Portraits of One Hundred Indispensably Undaunted Plants.”

One of Lauren’s “Indispensably Undaunted Plants,” Amsonii jonesii, Colorado Desert Blue Star or Jones’s Blue Star, is now a Plant Select offering, https://plantselect.org/.

            Lauren designs gardens and gives talks frequently about her favorite plants. I’ve attended two. She takes her own photos and her garden shots are lush with multiple colors. Was her photography telling the truth about her favorite, death-defying perennials, some native, some exotic?

            I decided it was time for a field trip mid-August to see her Undaunted Garden at the Gardens on Spring Creek in Ft. Collins, Colorado. I saw the potted nursery plants laid out a year ago June and wondered what 14 months’ growth might look like.

            A wildland-fire-smoke-shrouded-90-degree-plus Monday morning meant the gardens were nearly empty. Mark and I were allowed to take our masks off outside and saw few volunteers or other visitors.

            The last few years, this botanic garden has been in expansion mode and the largest part of the additional gardens feature the kinds, and their plants, that do well here (and in Wyoming): Rock Garden, Prairie Garden, Foothills Garden, Cactus Garden and Plant Select Garden (Plant Select varieties are chosen for their western hardiness and are available through nurseries).

The gardens all swirl around each other and the Undaunted Garden. Was it colorful? Yes. Was it as colorful as the Color Garden, the one bed devoted to floriferous annuals as thick as sugar frosting, ala Butchart Gardens? No.

Cut-leaf Selfheal, Prunella vulgaris ‘Laciniata’, a European plant, is another of Lauren’s favorites. This one was photographed in mid-July in the Board of Public Utilities Habitat Hero Demonstration Garden. Photo by Barb Gorges.

But if you are tired of high water bills and leaves turning to mush in hailstorms, give the organic oatmeal raisin cookies of flowering plants another look. The flowers are just as bright and sweet, and if sometimes smaller, can be more profuse and much more likely to avoid hail damage as well as their thinner leaves. They don’t need mollycoddling—mostly no fertilizer.

If one of these undaunted plants won’t grow in a certain kind of location for you, reread Lauren’s recommendation and try it in a different kind of spot and put something else in its place.

This morning as I looked over the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens Habitat Hero Demonstration Garden, I was reminded of this. The irrigation system and intervening plants have created dry “rain shadows” where plants have died, but other plants have prospered. Recognizing one of the major dry spots, last fall we put a native rubber rabbitbrush in front of the sign. It is doing quite well without irrigation all summer or rain this last month.

There are a couple drawbacks to reducing your irrigation. One is the health of your trees and shrubs. Even the natives are usually found near the creeks where they can find more water.

And for some reason, weeds grow extremely well and green, even in a drought, so you’ll want to consider covering the soil, preferably with drought-resistant, prettier plants.

It used to be we could count the number of days in Cheyenne with temperatures 90 degrees or more on one hand, maybe two. I’ve lost count this summer.

The trend here isn’t getting cooler. The Washington Post featured a map showing areas in the U.S. that have already exceeded two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average annual temperature between 1895 and 2018 and Laramie County is one of them at 2.1 degrees (3.8 degrees F). Albany and Carbon counties, providing Cheyenne’s water via snowmelt, are 2 (3.6) and 1.8 (3.2), respectively.

You’ve heard that if the global average increase reaches 2 degrees Celsius, sea levels rise. In the West we get more algae blooms, forest fires, hail and less snow to melt for our water supply plus nasty insects and plant diseases that survive a warm winter.

Growing an Undaunted Garden is one way to cope. Along with solar-powered air conditioning.

At the Gardens on Spring Creek, the Undaunted Garden includes the largest collection of cold hardy cactus in the U.S. Designed, built and maintained by landscape designer and author Lauren Springer. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Visit the Gardens on Spring Creek

They are currently open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week. Tickets must be bought online, https://www.fcgov.com/gardens/, for a particular entry time. Masks must be worn in the visitor center to check in and also in the Butterfly House.

Members of the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, a reciprocal garden, can get free admission by making a reservation by phone.   

Washington Post map and article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-america/

Great garden books old & new

“Great garden books to read in January” was published Jan. 12, 2020, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle

By Barb Gorges

January is the traditional time gardeners read seed catalogs. There’s nothing to do outside but maybe prune a few dormant shrubs and trees. It’s also my favorite time to read garden books, old and new.

New “Home Grown Gardening” series

Last year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt started sending me volumes from their new series, “Home Grown Gardening” and I’m finally getting around to reading them. So far, the series has four installments. They are mostly derived from books published around 1999, several from the Taylor’s Weekend Guide series.

All the books feature detailed introductions and pages and pages of lush new photos, on average one plant per page.

“Container and Fragrant Gardens” is derived from two previous works by Peter Loewer, a prolific garden author in North Carolina.

The plants in the container section are all listed as perennials, including small trees, though in our area, those in Zones 6 and up would be considered annuals. The fragrant part of the book includes annuals and perennials. They could be grown in containers, too.

“Best Perennials for Sun and Shade” is another combination of two books featuring two pages per plant—a nearly larger than life photo on one and growing information on the second. What I like is the little box for each plant that sums up growing zone, bloom time, light requirement, height and “interest”—leaf and flower description—in case you hadn’t noticed the full-page photo opposite.

“Best Roses, Herbs, and Edible Flowers” could conceivably have some of the same plants as the previous books. In addition to pages of luscious closeups, there is a chapter on harvesting and preserving herbs.

“Attracting Birds and Butterflies” is a derivation of author Barbara Ellis’s previous work. It is supplemented with excerpts from books published by Bird Watcher’s Digest.

In addition to plant profiles, there’s a page apiece for each butterfly and bird species that appreciates flower nectar. What I like is the critter profiles include a range map so you can concentrate on attracting the species you might see where you garden. However, the western birds profiled don’t include the seed eaters that also visit Cheyenne gardens.

For growing information for perennials—roses, herbs, flowers, shrubs, you would be better off consulting local information—don’t add lime to our soil as recommended in one of the books! And if you are growing our native perennials, don’t try to turn your soil into deep loam as suggested—our hardy prairie flowers don’t think much of luxury.

Old “Garden Gossip”

My favorite winter garden reading is much older garden books. I find them at used bookstores and the local Delta Kappa Gamma annual book sale.

In Houston I found “Garden Gossip, Chronicles of Sycamore Valley” by Dorothy Biddle, editor of Garden Digest, and Dorothea Blom. It was published in 1936 with a price of $1. It was signed by the author as “Dorothy Biddle Johnson” in June of that year.

Informally, this column I write is known as “Garden Gossip” and the online archive is www.CheyenneGardenGossip.wordpress.com, so I couldn’t resist bringing the book home—for $20.

A small book, it has only a few plates of black and white photos inserted, but every chapter heading has a detailed ink sketch. And the chapters seem to be gossip, for instance “Color, Drama and Tomatoes, Mrs. L’s Garden.”

But the cover’s inside flap writeup suggests the people and gardens profiled may be serving an educational purpose, “Through the successes and mistakes of Sycamore Valley gardeners the reader receives a wealth of suggestions, many of which he will apply in his own garden.”

The mythical Sycamore Valley is probably based on Dorothy Biddle’s hometown of Pleasantville, New York, so I take the 85-year-old gardening advice with advisement. But the generalities still work.

For instance, Mr. and Mrs. B manage to make a lovely garden on a very limited budget. Dorothy writes, “Gardeners crave a little money to bury in the soil, but what happened in their garden happened almost entirely from labor and thought blended.” Now there’s a statement that can stand the test of time.

Dorothy Biddle was also Mrs. Walter Adams Johnson. Her co-author, Dorothea Blom, was her daughter. Dorothy founded the Blue Ribbon Flower Holder Company (one of her other books was “How to Arrange Flowers”) and when I checked a couple years ago, her granddaughter still owned the business. Dorothy died in 1974 at age 87, garnering an obituary in the New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/19/archives/dorothy-johnson-wrote-of-flowers.html.

Garden gift & New Year’s resolution ideas

Published Dec. 8, 2019, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, “Gift and New Year’s resolution ideas for Cheyenne gardeners.”

By Barb Gorges

Here at the end of the year you may be looking for gardening gift ideas for you or someone else. And are you preparing to make New Year’s resolutions to learn more about gardening? Here are some ideas.

Wardian case – type of terrarium (Wikipedia)

Gardener gifts

From Garden Design magazine:

How about terrariums? You can make them out of large glass jars or fill antique-looking leaded pane structures with small tropical houseplants. Read up on them at https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Terrarium.

Who knew Crocs come in many rubber-boot styles? But we shouldn’t be out digging in our gardens in the mud because it promotes soil compaction.

Wave Hill chairs, Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center

Plans for the famous Wave Hill garden chairs are available from http://www.danbenarcik.com/ for $25-$35. Even I could build one, just straight cuts and screws.

Bib-style garden aprons exist, made of canvas and with bigger pockets than kitchen aprons. Keep tools handy and shirt fronts clean!

Insect house, Gardener’s Supply

Insect house, beehive house, insect hotel, insect habitat—these are all names for assemblages of hollow sticks you can buy. Insects beneficial to your garden can hide their eggs in them.

Anything with flowers on it will probably appeal to the gardener on your gift list—especially a plant.

Shawnee Pottery teapot, circa 1940s, on Etsy.

Books

There is a cornucopia of beautiful garden books. If you buy a how-to book for you or someone here, just remember to ignore advice to add lime to soil since Cheyenne, unlike many parts of the country, already has alkaline soils. Check out the Timber Press imprint at https://www.workman.com/.

Nature into Art: The Gardens at Wave Hill by Thomas Christopher, Timber Press

Classes/talks/workshops

The 6^th annual Cheyenne Habitat Hero Workshop is all day Feb. 29 at Laramie County Community College. Denver Botanic Gardens’ international plant explorer Panayoti Kelaidis’s topic is “Rethinking Wyoming Landscaping: Learning from the Natives.” His talk is followed by “Native Plant Gardening 101” taught by the Cheyenne Habitat Hero Committee members. Registration is $25 (including lunch) at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/.

Panayoti Kelaidis, keynote speaker, Habitat Hero workshop, Feb. 29, 2020

Register for Master Gardener training taught by Laramie County Extension horticulturist Catherine Wissner. It begins Jan. 6 for 10 weeks, two evenings a week. See https://lccc.coursestorm.com/ (search “Master Gardener”). It’s held at Laramie County Community College. You’ll also find two one-session LCCC non-credit gardening classes taught by Catherine listed at that same website.

The Seed Library will have several events at Laramie County Library. Check details at https://lclsonline.org/events:

–Jan. 25, 2-3:30 p.m., “Pumpkin Growing 101” featuring Andy Corbin, Wyoming’s most recent giant pumpkin growing champ.

–Feb. 27, evening, “Winter Sowing Workshop” and “Give-Take Seed Swap.”

If you are a green industry professional, employed in landscaping, lawn or tree care, attend the free Cheyenne Green Industry Workshop Jan. 24. Register through the City of Cheyenne’s Urban Forestry Division: http://www.cheyennetrees.com/events.

Several organizations schedule lecture series or occasional talks in the spring. Check for updates:

—Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, https://www.botanic.org.

—Laramie County Master Gardeners, http://www.lcmg.org/.

—Laramie County Conservation District, https://www.lccdnet.org/.

—Prairie Garden Club, https://www.prairiegardenclub.com/.

Garden tours

Last year I went on Road Scholar’s “Victoria and Vancouver: Glorious West Coast Gardens” (#2679) tour (I’ll be giving a public talk about it at Laramie County Master Gardeners’ meeting Jan. 16, 409 Pathfinder Bldg., LCCC, 7 p.m.). It runs several times every summer.

Butchart Gardens, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, photo by Barb Gorges.

Another is “Topiaries, Pleasure Gardens and Botanical Gems in Philadelphia and Beyond” (#21967) which runs several times in spring and fall. You can look up the details at https://www.roadscholar.org/. Pop the course number in the search box.

You can also devise your own tour. Did you know that if you are a Cheyenne Botanic Gardens member, they have agreements with more than 300 U.S. gardens through the American Horticultural Society’s reciprocal admissions program, even though they don’t charge admission themselves?

Cheyenne Botanic Gardens conservatory and gardens dedication ceremony, September 2019. The CBG is located at 710 S. Lions Park Drive. Photo by Barb Gorges.

That means CBG members visit free instead of paying $11 at the Gardens on Spring Creek in Ft. Collins which has recently added five acres of new gardens and a butterfly pavilion, or $12.50 at the Denver Botanic Gardens. I spend my savings at the gift shops!

Master Gardener wish list

“What’s on your wish list?” I asked several Master Gardeners recently:

“Narrow spade,” said Kathryn Lex.  It would be handy for inserting new plants in her established garden. She can read up on spades at https://www.gardentoolcompany.com/pages/garden-spades-choosing-the-right-one.

“More seeds,” said Michelle Bohanan. She’s on the Seed Library committee.

“No frost after Mother’s Day,” said John Heller. I think he needs a greenhouse.

“Tomatoes ripe by July 4^th,” said Catherine Wissner. Wait, she has a high tunnel already. Maybe she wants a traditional glass greenhouse.

“No hail,” they all said. Make that a glass greenhouse with chicken wire over it for protection.

Hartley Botanic greenhouse.

Should garden literature be in the fantasy section?

Should garden literature be listed in the “fantasy” section of the bookstore?

This column was published Dec. 23, 2018, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle and also posted at Wyoming Network News: https://www.wyomingnetworknews.com/should-garden-literature-be-listed-in-the-fantasy-section-of-the-bookstore

By Barb Gorges

My book reviews have always been about books I like and recommend. Gardening books are some of my favorite winter reading and gift suggestions.

However, I was disappointed by “Gardenland,” by Jennifer Wren Atkinson. No color photos—only a dozen black and whites! It was described as a book about garden writing. Among other topics she discusses is how over the centuries it hasn’t always been about how-to, but how writers support our garden fantasies. We started dreaming about floriferous and bountiful gardens when industrial agriculture took away the romance of the family farm.

But this is an academic textbook, it turns out, written at 20^th-grade level, compared to this column clocking in at 9^th -grade level. We need a popular literature writer to interpret these very interesting ideas. The 17-page bibliography is a useful list of garden writers like my favorites, Michael Pollan and Eleanor Perenyi, and introduces many more.

For those of us who want to be immersed in fantastical gardens, there is a new book, “GardenLust, a Botanical Tour of the World’s Best New Gardens,” by Christopher Woods. You can justify buying this 8.5 x 10.5-inch, 400 page, full-color, $40 extravaganza as it will give you inspiration for your own garden—if you have a million dollars to spend. At the very least it may count for your recommended daily dose of nature viewing.

You can preview the book at http://www.timberpress.com. I haven’t decided if I want to order it or if I can wait for it to appear at a used book store. Will what’s new today look boring by then because everyone copied it, like Karl Foerster grass and Russian sage today? Maybe it’s best consumed fresh or at least when there’s a good discount.

Atkinson thinks books about vegetable gardening are not in the realm of fantasy garden books. She would be mostly wrong when it comes to Eliot Coleman. He’s come out with a photo-filled 30^th anniversary edition of his book, The New Organic Grower, A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener.”  He’s a successful year-round market vegetable grower…in Maine. If he can do it there, we can do it here.

Coleman does it without a lot of expensive machinery. He’s learned how to appeal to customers and how to handle seasonal employees and he passes that information along to the reader, and the nuts and bolts of growing.

Barbara Damrosch, Coleman’s wife, contributed a section about how she grows and sells cut flowers at their farm store as well.

Even if you aren’t planning to go into business, this is an engaging introduction to organic growing from a farmer happy to share his knowledge. You can just imagine Coleman jubilantly giving you a garden tour of Four Seasons Farm. Successful organic growing might not be as much of a fantasy as you think.

Seed catalogs have long been known to be fantasy literature. Those Burpee babies hold giant tomatoes in their outstretched little hands. It’s an old fisherman’s trick that uses perspective to make the fish, or tomato, in the foreground look huge in comparison to the person in the background.

As I become a plant nerd, I can get excited about catalogs with absolutely no pictures. However, the catalog that gets my vote for most beautiful is Botanical Interests Seed Catalog, 2019 Season. Their seed packets feature original botanical art. It makes me want to cut out the pictures and frame them—both flowers and vegetables.

Botanical Interests is a family-owned company in Broomfield, Colorado. Its seeds can be found nationwide and in our local, independent garden centers. Both the website, https://www.botanicalinterests.com, and print catalog contain a wealth of information, as do their seed packets, printed inside and out.

For instance, in the catalog there is an article about the national movement for local cut flowers. In the last few decades, most cut flowers purchased at grocery stores and florists in the U.S. have been imported from South America, raising concerns about pesticide use and the carbon footprint of travel. Check out https://slowflowers.com/. It’s like the slow food movement.

Here in Wyoming we need fantasy garden literature for the five or six months when nothing blooms outdoors. Besides the catalogs and coffee table books, don’t forget to look for garden shows on Netflix. Several are British and make a nice getaway.

Soil microbes better than rototilling

Endomycorrhizal fungi spores are ready to grow into plant roots, carrying nutrients and moisture. Photo courtesy of Jeff Lowenfels.

Published May 7, 2017, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, “Soil microbes, no rototilling key to next generation of gardening”

By Barb Gorges

Twice in the space of a month this spring I heard rototilling renounced for the sake of keeping soil microbes healthy.

One speaker was Jeff Lowenfels, garden columnist and author from Alaska who spoke at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens/Laramie County Master Gardener spring lecture series. The other was Ron Godin, recently retired extension agronomist in western Colorado, speaking at the Wild West Gardening Conference in Cheyenne.

There are a billion microbes in a teaspoon of healthy soil. The interactions of the whole community of microbes is a giant web of who eats whom and who feeds whom.

Basically, decaying plant material feeds microbes and in turn, microbe “excrement” feeds plant roots.

Microbes include nematodes, bacteria, fungi and protozoa. There are some bad actors, but in general, everything balances and plants grow. For example, prairies and forests have self-sustaining soil microbial communities—no synthetic, chemical fertilizers or pesticides are required.

But when European farmers landed in the New World, they opened things up with the plow and have continued to plow ever since. Regular plowing (or hoeing or rototilling) disrupts the soil microbes. They can’t do their jobs. Farmers repaired damage somewhat with applications of manure and compost. But then came the 20^th century’s inventive use of nerve gas left over from World War I as insecticide, and leftover nitrogen-based bomb-making materials from World War II became the perfect fertilizer.

Except that it wasn’t healthy for the microbes.

Ectomycorrhizal fungi grow close to the surface of roots and grow webs around them carrying water and nutrients. Photo courtesy of Jeff Lowenfels.

Synthetic fertilizers starve the microbes in a way and pesticides kill off beneficial organisms, causing the need for a never-ending cycle of synthetic fertilizer and pesticide application. This was great if you owned stock in the large chemical companies, but bad when you understand the side effects including health issues animals and humans—especially farmers, because the chemicals get into drinking water and food.

 

Lowenfels happily dispensed advice on garden chemicals for years until someone sent him two electron microscope photos, one of a fungus that had trapped a root-eating nematode, and the other of a nematode happily chomping a tomato root unimpeded.

In the first photo, the plant was secreting a substance that attracted the fungus, which in turn attacked the nematode. In the second photo, the fungus was missing due to the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

After his conversion, Lowenfels wrote three books. He said the essential one is “Teaming with Microbes, The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web,” coauthored with Wayne Lewis. You’ll notice the play on words in the title–healthy soil is teeming with microbes, and you’ll be teaming with them.

Put away the rototiller

First, put away your rototiller. It’s still handy if you are turning your lawn into a pollinator garden, but otherwise, annual rototilling is detrimental to the soil microbe community. Godin said this advice translates to farming as well.

It will take time to undo the cultural tradition of breaking soil down into a fine, clump-less and smooth expanse of dirt. But there are two reasons for disturbing the soil as little as possible, even in a vegetable garden.

First, every time you dig into soil, you bring up weed seeds, most of which require light to germinate. You just made more work for yourself. Cut weeds off at the soil surface rather than digging them.

Second, microbes feeding your plants and fending off bad stuff can’t function if you break them up. Keeping them intact means less work for you, less fertilizer spreading, less watering since healthy soil holds water better. Pesticides are a last resort for serious problems. Re-inoculate your soil with microbes soon after.

In windy Cheyenne, there’s also a third benefit to not tilling your soil into fine dust: microbes “glue” things together and the resulting clumpy soil doesn’t blow away.

In this electron microscopic view, Glomalin, stained green and coated with spores, is produced by a group of common soil fungi. It coats soil particles like super glue, sticking them together in clumps. Photo courtesy of Jeff Lowenfels.

To plant seeds or transplants, make an opening just large enough. The roots will find their way without the soil being “fluffed.” Healthy soil has lots of air spaces already. Then mulch.

 

Godin’s rule is 100 percent cover, 100 percent of the time. Cover for large gardens or farms could be annual cover crops later mowed to form mulch. In small gardens use leaves, grass clippings and compost.

Replace chemical fertilizers

In the years chemical fertilizers have been around, studies show fruits and vegetables have dropped in nutritional value. It’s due to the missing micronutrients soil microbes used to pull from decomposing plant material and mineral soils. Synthetic fertilizer is incomplete.

Traditional organic gardening recommends digging compost into the soil, but  Lowenfels says digging breaks up the soil community. Better to side-dress plants, leaving the compost (or mulch) on the soil surface where microbes will get at it and break it down. It works on the prairie and in the forest—there’s no 100-year-old pile of dead grass, leaves or pine needles.

Lowenfels said there are three different groups of plants in your yard. Perennial flowers, shrubs and trees want their nitrogen in the form provided by fungally dominated soils. The compost that promotes this is the brown stuff (mixed with a little green): dry leaves, bark, wood chips, twigs, branches—like the forest floor.

Annuals, including vegetables, prefer their nitrogen produced by bacterially dominated soil. This is green stuff (with a little brown), grass clippings, freshly picked weeds (without seeds) and fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps.

The prairie, like your lawn, falls in between. It appreciates finely shredded brown fall leaves and thin layers of green grass clippings.

Brew compost tea

Compost tea, compost soaked in water, is another way to inoculate your garden with microbes and feed them too. If compost and compost tea smell ugly, that’s anaerobic activity. You need aerobic activity—more air.

Lowenfels gives directions for making a bucket into “a simple actively aerated compost tea brewer using aquarium pumps and air stones.” Fertilizing your plants, and yes, your houseplants too, is as easy as watering them.

While chemical companies made their fortunes keeping our soils addicted to their products, new companies are offering to aid us in bringing our soils back to health. They are building better compost tea brewers. Labs can estimate your microbe population. Our local independent garden centers will sell you mycorrhizal fungi in powdered form you mix with water.

This new era of catering to microbes has gone mainstream. Lowenfels reported that at the 2016 Garden Writers of America conference, none of the tradeshow vendors was pushing synthetic fertilizers or pesticides.

For the last 35 years, my husband, Mark, and I have cared for our lawn and garden without a rototiller or synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. We mulch the garden and use natural lawn fertilizers. I look forward to adapting Lowenfels’ ideas to step it up.

[If you are also adapting to the new era in gardening, let me know how it is going. Contact me at bgorges2 at gmail.com.]

More information:

Besides “Teaming with Microbes,” his first book, Lowenfels has also authored:

–“Teaming with Nutrients, The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition”

–“Teaming with Fungi, The Organic Grower’s Guide to Mycorrhizae.”

 

Garden gifts: books, magazines, classes

Published Dec. 4, 2016, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, “Holiday gifts for the gardener on your list.”

By Barb Gorges

I asked members of the Laramie County Master Gardeners for their top picks for gardening magazines and books to give you ideas for gifts for the gardeners you know.

Gardening conditions in Cheyenne are somewhat unique so advice from these publications must be taken with a bit of local knowledge:

1) We have alkaline soils so ignore advice to add lime and wood ash;

2) We are officially in USDA plant hardiness zone 5 but microclimates can be harsher or milder;

3) Our average annual precipitation is 15 inches. Even if you run your well dry, you can’t reproduce a wetter, more humid location, which some plants require, like somewhere else in Zone 5—say southern Iowa.

MAGAZINES

Most of the magazines recommended are available at local bookstores. Discounted multi-year subscriptions and back issues are available online.

We are lucky that Colorado’s gardening climate is close to Cheyenne’s, making our local choice The Colorado Gardener (www.ColoradoGardener.com, free at outlets, including the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, and online, or $18/5 issues/year delivered). It is a full-color, tabloid-style, 16-page newsmagazine. In addition to articles and a calendar of Front Range garden-related events, even the advertising is informative.

Another option is Rocky Mountain Gardening (www.RockyMountainGardening.com, $24/4 issues/year). Previously known as “Zone 4,” it covers Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. It was recommended by Catherine Wissner, horticulturist at the Laramie County Cooperative Extension office, and several other respondents. Topics in a recent issue included hellstrip gardening (the hot, dry strip along the curb) and frost blankets (written by a Smoot, Wyoming, gardener). Wyoming is well-represented in the news section.

Judy Kowrach was one of two people who endorsed Garden Gate (www.GardenGateMagazine.com, $20/6 issues/year). With no ads, it is full of tips, plant profiles and design ideas. Despite its Iowa origins, much of the information is applicable to Cheyenne. Even without a subscription, you can sign up online for its free eNotes.

Kim Parker and several others listed Fine Gardening (www.FineGardening.com, $29.95/6 issues/year). It does a splendid job of inciting people to commit acts of gardening. I like their warnings on which featured plants are officially classified as invasive in which state and their scientific plant name pronunciation guide. And their deep website full of free garden and plant information.

            I couldn’t come up with an issue of Garden Design (www.GardenDesign.com, $45/4 issues/year), but looking at a preview copy online, it also is sumptuously photographed. Its price reflects the 148 ad-free pages per issue. And its website is also full of free information, even for non-subscribers.

Finally, Rodale’s Organic Life (www.RodalesOrganicLife.com, $15/6 issues/year) is the latest incarnation of Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming. In 1978, that publication printed my interview of a man who built a better bluebird house. These days, think of it as the organic version of Better Homes and Gardens—mostly lifestyle, little gardening.

BOOKS

            My primary garden book, recommended to me several years ago by Shane Smith, director of the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, is The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch (2008, Workman Publishing, 820 pages). Written by a gardener from the cold climate of Maine, it covers every aspect of organic home gardening in well-organized chapters, but with an index for quick consultation.

Another option is Rodale’s Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening (2009, www.rodaleinc.com, 720 pages). Earlier editions have been on my shelf for years. It’s a tad more technical, but both this and The Garden Primer are good how-to guides and problem solvers.

            Tava Collins recommended National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders (1980, Alfred A. Knopf, $20) for help identifying garden friends and foes. Similar guides are available in the Kaufman and Peterson field guide series.

Collins also recommended three books written by Colorado gardeners: Rocky Mountain Gardener’s Handbook, John Cretti (2012, Cool Springs Press); Rocky Mountain Getting Started Garden Guide, John Cretti (2015, Cool Springs Press); and Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West, Marcia Tatroe (2007, Big Earth Publishing).

For special gardening techniques that will work in our area, these next two were recommended.

Marie Madison cited The Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits and Edible Flowers by Maggie Stuckey and Rose Marie Nicholas McGee (2002, Workman Publishing).

Susan Carlson, who I interviewed a few months ago about straw bale gardening, apprised me of a new edition of her favorite book: Straw Bale Gardens Complete: All-New Information on Urban & Small Spaces, Organics, Saving Water – Make Your Own Bales With or Without Straw by Joel Karsten (2015, Cool Springs Press, $24.99).

If your giftee’s interest is in growing native plants that attract pollinators or in identifying plants on the prairie, try these. Keep in mind the definition of “weeds” depends on the situation.

            Carlson listed Rangeland Plants: Wyoming Tough by Smith et. al. (2015, publication B-1265) It is a free download at www.wyoextension.org/publications or $8 at the Laramie County Extension office, 307-633-4383.

Richard Steele found Weeds of the West (Western Society of Weed Science, 2012, $34 at www.wsweedscience.org) to be particularly useful while manning the “Ask a Master Gardener” table at the farmers market this fall.

Collins mentioned the classic Meet the Natives: A Field Guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, Trees and Shrubs: Bridging the Gap between Trail and Garden by M. Walter Pesman. It was revised by Denver Botanic Gardens staff in 2012 and republished by Big Earth Publishing.

            The author of one of my favorites, The Undaunted Garden: Planting for Weather-Resilient Beauty (2010, Fulcrum Publishing), Lauren Springer Ogden, is a firm believer in “the right plant in the right place” and is the originator of “hellstrip” gardening. Her photography is inspiring. She speaks often at garden events on the Front Range.

Her book would be a good accompaniment to the next two books, helping you to pick appropriate local plants to interpret their lessons. These books are about planet-friendly landscape gardening.

Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West (2015, Timber Press). This may be intended to introduce landscape designers to more natural, sustainable plantings. But you can apply the advice to your own yard, such as using groundcover plants instead of shredded bark mulch everywhere.

            The other is Garden Revolution: How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher (2016, Timber Press). Proponents of the “right plant in the right place” too, the authors have designed this book to help you understand their premise: that with knowledge of your eco region and local habitat, you can plant a garden that will evolve over time with a minimal amount of assistance, i.e. chemicals and labor.

LECTURES AND CLASSES

One option: Give your favorite gardener tuition for the 10-week Master Gardener class beginning in January. For more information, call 307-633-4383.

Or give them tickets to the spring gardening lecture series Laramie County Master Gardeners is offering in conjunction with the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens. Call 307-637-6458.