How to be a vegetable gardener in Cheyenne

My beginner’s garden included green beans, cherry tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and summer squash.

• Check out Laramie County Master Gardeners’ Virtual Plant Sale at https://www.lcmg.org/ now through May 31, 2020.
• The Seed Library at the Laramie County Library will mail you seeds, https://lclsonline.org/?s=Seed+library (spring 2020).

Also published May 15, 2020, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

How to be a vegetable gardener in Cheyenne

By Barb Gorges

Mail-order seed companies report that they are running out of seed—vegetable seeds primarily. Seems like we’re all wanting to take a step towards self-sufficiency this spring when there are so many other aspects of life beyond our control.

Catherine Wissner, University of Wyoming Extension horticulturist for Laramie County, assured me Cheyenne’s garden centers, including the big box stores, have plenty of seeds. And the Laramie County Master Gardeners plan to have their annual plant sale, one way or another, May 31, including a virtual plant sale already in progress, https://www.lcmg.org/.

The UW Extension folks have a variety of videos and recordings about Wyoming gardening available at https://www.uwyo.edu/barnbackyard/live/recordings.html.

While my book on how to garden in Cheyenne won’t be ready for several months, the contents are currently available online at https://cheyennegardengossip.wordpress.com/ as an archive of all my Wyoming Tribune Eagle garden columns since 2012. You can search for information about growing vegetables and it will be suited to Cheyenne and in more detail.

If you’ve gardened elsewhere in the country, there are three things you need to know about vegetable gardening in Cheyenne: use drip irrigation, prepare hail protection and never add lime to our alkaline soils.

If you’ve never gardened before, well, it’s mostly about choosing the right vegetables for our climate and season length, giving plants the right amount of water, and mulching.

Cheyenne gardener Barb Sahl uses several kinds of raised beds. Raised beds can also be made with wooden boards or cinder blocks.

Step 1 – Find a spot for a vegetable bed or containers.

It should be sunny for at least 6 hours a day, preferably morning, and relatively level and within reach of a hose or a drip irrigation system.

Keep the veggies close to your back door so that it is easy to saunter out every day to admire them and pull a couple little weeds.

If the site currently doesn’t even grow weeds well, it could be subsoil left behind by the builders. The soil can be amended and over time, become productive. But for success this season, think raised bed or containers (see my archives).

Also, if this is your first attempt at vegetable gardening, keep the size of the bed reasonable, maybe 4 feet wide (what you can reach across from either side) by 6 or 8 feet long.

Step 2 – Prepare the bed.

I have never used a rototiller. I prefer the (husband with) shovel method. Digging by hand will keep you from creating a bed bigger than you can manage, especially if this is your first garden.

If you have any compostable material, like last year’s tree leaves, lawn mowings not treated with pesticides, vegetable debris from the kitchen or any old plant materials that don’t include weed seeds or invasive roots, you can dig that in.

Dedicated gardeners will send soil samples out for analysis on exactly what the soil needs for growing vegetables. Think about doing that later this season.

Some gardeners work their soil until it’s as fine and chunk free as cocoa powder, but that isn’t necessary—in fact, it’s hard on the soil microbes that can help you. You might want to smooth a row a few inches wide for planting tiny seeds and make sure there aren’t any canyons that will swallow the cucumbers.

Gold Nugget cherry tomatoes are an early (55 days to maturity), determinate variety. These were grown with seed from Pinetree Garden Seeds, a mail order company in Maine.

Step 3 – Shop for seeds.

If you know any successful gardeners in our area, see if they will gift you some seeds.

Otherwise, you need to read the seed packets carefully. Keep in mind our average last day of frost is around May 25 and our average first day of frost is mid-September. It’s a short season. You need to look for short season vegetables.

Each packet will tell you how many days from seed germination until maturity (harvest). Remember, some seeds take a week or more to germinate. Look for vegetable varieties that are in the range of 45 to 70 days. Next year you can try starting tomatoes indoors or growing them with some kind of season extender like a hoop house or row cover.

Meanwhile, look for tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and peppers ready to transplant.

Easy to grow from seed are the squashes, beans, kale, chard and leaf lettuces (not head lettuce).

Step 4 – Plant seeds and transplant plants.

Follow the seed packet directions on when and how to plant. Make sure your soil is moist already.

For transplanting, normally you plant the plant so it sits at the same height as it did in the pot. However, if it’s a tomato that looks a little leggy, you can bury a few inches of its stem.

Step 5 – Mulch.

We use old tree leaves and pesticide-free grass clippings at our house. Straw is good, but not hay or anything with seeds. An inch or two of mulch will keep down the weeds and keep the soil from drying out too fast.

Step 6 – Water.

Catherine said consistency is most important. Once the plants are established, you can let the top inch of soil dry out (test it with your finger) in between thorough waterings, but if you are not consistent with providing enough water, you will not get good yields.

If you seem to have impenetrable clay soils, try watering for a couple minutes, then water elsewhere and then come back 15 minutes later and see if the soil will absorb the rest of the water it needs.

Step 7 – Fertilize.

Seedlings don’t need fertilizer for a few weeks, but vegetables are soon hungry. Organic gardeners use compost—like your mulch as it decays, or “teas” made from soaking compost—read up first. Avoid all manure, Catherine recommended. It tends to be salty (bad for our soils), full of weed seeds and may harbor pathogens. Avoid chemical fertilizers with too much nitrogen too—nitrogen grows great leaves but little if any fruit. Do not use weed and feed products—they will kill your veggies.

Step 8 – Weed.

If you mulch and don’t overwater, you shouldn’t have much of a weed problem. Visit your veggies every day and pull them or use a dandelion digger (don’t hoe) on any little green interlopers. It’s much easier than waiting until the weeds grow roots to Earth’s core and shed seeds across the continent.

Step 8 – Protect.

Everything is out to get your veggies before you can harvest them: frost, wind, hail, antelope, rabbits, insects, diseases. There are preventative and non-chemical actions you can take. Check my archives.

Step 9 – Harvest.

I remember the first summer after I became a Master Gardener. I told my husband, our family’s vegetable grower, that I wanted to try to grow vegetables myself from start to finish. I did, and they had the most incredible flavor.

Cheyenne gardener Sandra Cox used large amounts of compost when starting a garden at her new house and had fantastic results.

Soil Testing: Preparing the Samples

Colorado State University’s soil testing application and instructions

Published April 21, 2013, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, “Get the dirt on soil: Maximize your lawn and garden success by finding the exact concoction of nutrients they need—with a little help from CSU.”

By Barb Gorges

You might be used to putting fertilizer on your lawn and in your garden.

But do you really know what nutrients they need and how much?

Yes, the major nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the three big numbers you see on fertilizer bags, are important.

But the balance may not be right for your soil. You could be adding too much of a good thing.

Besides the fact that you might be wasting your money, consider the bigger picture.

If the concoction of fertilizer has more nitrogen than your lawn needs, the excess washes into the ground water, polluting someone’s future drinking water.

Excess phosphorus washes into local streams and ponds causing algal blooms, possibly suffocating other aquatic life.

Unlike your plants’ other needs of water and light, it’s not always obvious when your plants need more or less food. In extreme cases, you’ll see yellowed leaves or stunted growth in malnourished plants.

And too much nitrogen, for example, could spur the plant into producing an overabundance of leaves but no blossoms—no flowers, no fruit.

To get ahead of these issues before the growing season, you may want to test your soil.

Luckily, sampling is fairly easy. Unlike my Soils 101 class back in college, I don’t have to dig a 5-foot pit to find out what my soil is made of. This time, I only had to send in samples from the top 6 inches of the areas I wanted the lab to examine.

What a soil test tells you

Soil texture will tell you something about its fertility.

Is your soil sandy? If so, water (and dissolved nutrients) will percolate through it quickly.

Is your soil clayey like so much of Cheyenne’s? Water moves through it slowly. The lab can recommend how much water and what rate you should apply it to your garden or lawn.

Testing for electrical conductivity sounds odd, but that’s the way to find out how salty your soil is, which can affect the availability of nutrients to plants. Some soils are naturally salty, but often here they become that way because too much fertilizer has been added over time, or the irrigation water is salty–comparatively speaking.

Knowing a soil’s pH will help you understand how easily some nutrients can be taken up by plants. It will also tell you what plants may not grow well.

The Cheyenne area typically has alkaline soil. That is why soil amendment advice for the acidic soils of the eastern U.S., such as adding lime or wood ash, can be counterproductive here. Acid-loving plants, such as blueberries and rhododendron, will not grow here unless you plant them in a container in which you can acidify the soil.

The percentage of organic matter in your soil should match your garden plans. It is possible to add too much compost or manure for the plants you want to grow.

Get a soil-testing kit

Home testing kits sold in stores are not usually designed for our alkaline soils and also, the information will not be precise enough.

Colorado State University’s Soil, Water and Plant Testing Laboratory in Fort Collins is one of the few remaining labs of this kind at land grant universities. Being in our neighborhood, the folks at the CSU lab will understand our soils better than those farther away.

The standard test costs $31. See the accompanying information on how to get a sampling bottle, directions and submission form.

Follow the directions

Whatever lab you use, follow their directions.

CSU’s indicated that to get a balanced sample, I needed to collect the same amount of soil at each level—I needed to dig a perfect cylinder 6 inches deep. And dig one of these perfect cylinders 5 to 15 times in random places in my garden or lawn.

How do you get a cylinder of soil? The right tool for the job is a soil probe.

I went out to the Laramie County Conservation District office and asked Jim Cochran, district manager, if he had one I could borrow. He did. And you can borrow one, too.

A soil probe is a nifty little tool, a stainless steel pipe about an inch in diameter and three or four feet long, with a crossbar handle. You punch it into the ground 6 inches and pull out your sample, which you then dump out the side vent.

Well, almost. In my vegetable garden I had trouble keeping the soil in the tube until I was ready to dump it in my plastic dishpan. Maybe the soil needed to be just a little moister. I also tried twirling the probe to keep in the dirt.

Twirling didn’t get me more than an inch into one spot in my front lawn, even after making sure I was between blades of grass. I hit solid clay near the house—probably left by the builders 50 years ago. I had to get husband Mark to help. And then, I needed a sharp tool to dig the clay out of the probe.

I decided to sample both the vegetable garden and the front lawn areas. I took enough sub-samples of the lawn to make two cups’ worth and then mixed them together in a dishpan, doing the same in a separate dishpan for the vegetable garden sub-samples.

The directions said to break up clods and remove organic matter. I picked out as many roots as I could, and a few worms. I spread the dirt (excuse me, soil) out in the bottom of the pans and by the next day both samples were dry enough. Don’t use the oven—it will stink up the house and distort your nitrogen readings.

An important part of the testing is filling out the paperwork. The lab wants to know what’s been growing in the tested area, what fertilizers have been used and how much it is irrigated, so they can understand any anomalies they find. They also want to know what you plan to grow so they can make recommendations.

There is no good or bad soil. It just depends on what you want to grow and whether your soil currently is capable.

In a way, my perennial flower bed performs its own suitability exam. I plant a new type of perennial and if it doesn’t thrive–which could be due to incompatible amounts of light and water as well as incompatible soil–I know I should remember that experience and try something else the next year.

But now that I’m growing vegetables, which can deplete the soil, and we have a lawn that isn’t quite thick enough to shade out the dandelions, I’m curious to see what a soil test can tell me.

In next month’s column we’ll look at the soil testing results and find out what they mean.

 Where to get a CSU soil sampling bottle, directions and submission form

**Laramie County Conservation District, 11221 U.S. Hwy 30 (nearly 10 miles east of downtown, west of I-80 Exit 370), 772-2600.

**Laramie County Cooperative Extension, 310 W. 19^th, 1^st Floor, 633-4383.

**www.soiltestinglab.colostate.edu (put soil sample in Zip-loc-type bag and print and fill out the submission form)

**Soil, Water and Plant Testing Laboratory, Ft. Collins, Colo., 970-491-5061.