When you work full time, finding time to garden can be a challenge. All those magazines showing pictures of smiling gardeners with not a hair out of place (or a smudge on their face), surrounded by perfectly behaved plants makes you look at your yard and think “I’m such a slacker.”
Ignore them. We garden in the real world – the one that takes place after five. This is full-contact landscaping, and we need support or therapy to make it work. Here, you’ll find a bit of both.
Carol O’Meara is an entomologist and gardening enthusiast in Boulder county, Colorado, where she works as an agent for Colorado State University Extension.
Gardening after five 
I thinkI’m falling in love …with more tomato growing and eating!
Carol – kudos for keeping us up to date in the real gardening world. I love your articles and miss working with you as an MG. Gotta go buy those seed potatoes this weekend. I nursed a bed of long over-aged Ogallala strawberries for the last few years, but it has just been too hot for them. I transplanted some of their offspring in the shade of a crabapple and will plant potatoes in their bed. I grew red bliss in AZ and couldn’t wait to pick some baby ones to microwave and devour with butter and salt and pepper. Yum!
Hi Lisa, great to hear from you! I hope your strawberries are happier in their new location. On the potato front, I’m going with German Butterball and Yukon Gold, but now others want to swap a few types and I suspect I’ll be adding other kinds. Although not Purple Viking – they grew well last year but the flavor just wasn’t there for us. How about a culinary exchange at the end of the season? I’ll trade a few of my spuds for a couple of yours – just for a chance to taste ’em.
Carol,
Thanks for doing this blog! It’s a great resource and an enjoyable read…
I have some questions — I’m brand new to Colorado and via our Denver City Park rental house, inherited a 6″ raised-bed 8’x11′ garden in full sun that was completely covered in weeds. I’ve now spent two Saturdays hand-pulling as many weeds as possible and leveling things off. I’m sure there’s a ton of weed seeds still in the beds, and the ground stays relatively moist (even without all the recent rain), as the plot is on the very downhill end of the property. Long-term, I’m hoping to do some relatively chemical-free vegetable and herb gardening, but I’m also brand new to gardening.
So my questions:
1. To really kill off the weeds, will soil solarization do the job? I’m just learning about it. Sounds like this is the right time of year to do it, if I’m going to. If soil solarization won’t do the job, can you recommend a weed killer?
2. If I do solarize and lose 4-6 more weeks of growing season, is there anything I can plant in mid August that will give me some kind of sense of accomplishment for my two Saturdays of hard work? 😉
3. Can you recommend any beginning gardening books that apply to growing in this region?
Thanks for the great work y’all are doing at CSU!
Thanks,
~Zack
Hi Zack,
Welcome to Colorado! Your beds sound like two approaches would work: juducious herbicide and a bit of mulch. If you want crops this year we sow for fall in mid-July, so I suggest that you mulch the beds with two sheets of newspaper (not glossy pages) laid flat on the soil and covered with three inches of an organic mulch (grass clippings, straw, etc).
Most weed seeds need light to germinate, so you should have good control – pull any weeds that blow in and sprout.
If you want to solarize it DOES work, but you’ll need a full month of sunlight plus a UV resistant plastic. Look for plastic 6mm or thicker. But you’ll be mostly out of luck for fall planting, so go with the mulch.
Long term, try clove oil or horticulture grade vinegar herbicides to spritz on weeds to kill them.
Books by Rob Proctor, Barbara Hyde, Lauren Springer or John Cretti will serve you well – they are great gardeners and give good advice.
Thanks! I took a hard look at my overly-committed summer and decided I should focus on setting up for next year. So, I’ve got a soaker hose buried and my layer of plastic down, with a plan to get some garlic and such in the ground in the fall. 2010 should be the year for me!
Thanks for the advice….will have to do some reading on clove oil and vinegar…
~Zack
That is a beautiful watermeon photo.
I have need of a photo of a watermelon growing and attached to its vine for an educational video I am editing. Could I have permission to use your photo https://gardeningafterfive.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/dscn40682.jpg
We are using an illustration of a watermelon to help explain the the Hebrew word for Trust as a watermelon lies on the ground and trust the vine to feed it.
Trust
Hebrew – (bah-tach)
“lie flat on the ground”
Hi Rob – yes, you can use the photo, thanks for asking!
Dear Ms. O’Meara,
I’m not into gardening, but I enjoy your column in the Daily Camera anyway. It enlightens on much more than gardening.
Quite a while back, you wrote an article about turkey vultures. I wanted to reply to you about it, but the paper gave no contact information for you then. Now it publishes your blog’s URL, so I’m belatedly responding.
You cited the website of the Turkey Vulture Society, which stated that perching turkey vultures often assume a pose with outstretched wings. They called this position the “horaltic” pose.
That seemed fishy to me, so I tried to find that word in several dictionaries. No luck. I am sure that “horaltic” was the way somebody heard the word “heraldic.” In heraldry, birds of prey are usually depicted with spread wings, as on the U.S. quarter, for example. But other poses are also used in heraldry, so the proper term in heraldry for the pose in question is “displayed.”
I agree with you that turkey vultures are cool, whether displayed or not, and I appreciated your article. Keep up the informative and entertaining work!
Sincerely,
Wilhelm
Hi Wilhelm, thanks for your comment on the use of the word ‘Horaltic’ in my Boulder Camera column last year. I’d seen it used both by the Turkey Vulture Society and in a couple of .edu sites, so I went on-line to look into definitions of it.
What I discovered is that this word has really got the feathers flying over whether it is a mishear of the word Heraldic, as you suggest, if it can be attributed to the Egyptian god Horus, or if it’s a birder’s term. Since I’m an Entomologist and not an Etymologist, I will leave that argument up to the experts.
But it was pretty neat to dive back into the world of vultures for a bit.
Carol,
Just discovered your “Gardening After Five” website and blog … WOW all sorts of information for those of us who ENJOY gardening! I need to check out your recommendations for tomato varieties … the time for sowing seeds for transplants is fast approaching. I sowed the pepper seeds in early February … they take much longer to germinate compared to tomato seeds. Looks like Tony and I may have some pepper plants to share later this Spring … especially some varieties of the hot peppers.
Thanks, Ronda! I have no idea where you start enough plants for your 16 raised beds, but if you have a few leftovers I’d love to swap with you.
Carol, The weeds have started to poke up already….asking your take on weed control in the grass yard and in beds.
I’d like to nip early so want a pre-emergent now, could incl light % of fertilizer but as it is I mow every 5 days.
Have used both Scotts-type weed/feed products and corn gluten. Seems they all instruct to use when temp is consistantly over 60, but that is way too late for a pre-emergent.
Your suggestions?
Hi, Carol. I just stumbled across your blog and I am glad I did. I think I am going to learn a lot from this site! We just purchased our first home and the yard leaves a bit to be desired. Apparently the previous owners really let things go and now there isn’t much grass left. Do you have recommendations on where we could get some info about rejuvenating our yard, what seed to buy, etc? Thanks for your help!
Crystal
Hi Crystal. Anytime you start planning to put in a new lawn, the experts will ask you certain questions to give them an idea of how you plan to use it. For example, if you have active children and dogs, they type of grass you should choose needs to be tough enough to take the traffic; if you live with limited water and won’t be walking on it much, a different type of turf would be better. My suggestion is that you contact your county Extension office to speak to their Master Gardeners. They’ll help you decide what grass suits your needs.
Hi Mary Ann. If you’re starting to notice weeds in your lawn, it could be that they are those that germinated last fall and are ready to grow in early spring. These aren’t the types targeted by pre-emergents. The one pre-emergents act on are the summer annuals which germinate as we get warmer. Depending on where you live, the window for using a pre-emergent might be now or already past, so I suggest asking your local county Extension office when the timing is right. Here along the Front Range, we encourage people to use pre-emergents now through very early April, but the southern part of the Front Range should have already applied it.
In general, the best defense against weeds is to grow a thick lawn; it will outcompete the weeds (excpt along the edges where it meets pavement. That’s always going to be a challenge). If you can adopt a consistent schedule of fertilizer, have your irrigation system checked and operating correctly for spring, and spot treat the weeds that pop up, you should get a lawn healthy enough to crowd out weeds. For more information on weed control, check out the Broadleaf Weed Control fact sheet from Colorado State University.
I need a vine that will grow up a wire support and help lower heat gain on a west facing mobile home wall. In Sacramento I used cat claw vine for this. Would cat claw vine work in Fort Collins – or would another choice be better? Thanks
Thank you for your kind inquiry, Joanne, but at this time I’m not set up to accept ads on my blog.
I live in Boulder County (Louisville) and am interested in creating a short grass/ midgrass prairie meadow in my backyard. I have John Greenlee’s book the American Meadow Garden and want to create something appropriate to my location that would eventually require less maintenance and water and still be healthy. I am not expecting this grass will be green all year, but expect it will go dormant just like a real prairie. I was thinking of Blue Grama and/or possibly Buffalo grass as the foundation, but have heard that they both can have huge issues with weeds taking over. I would also like to combine it with other prairie grasses such as Indian Rice grass, Side Oats Grama and Galetta Grass. I would also like to add prairie flowers to make this attractive and attract some butterflies and bees (either initially or eventually). Assuming I start with an area where I have effectively killed the existing weeds, to start with, is any of this reasonable? Do you have any suggestions on grass types? Would you have any suggestions on who I could talk to who has already done something similar? Or where I could learn more about this? I am not expecting this would be maintenance free but want to make sure that I am not creating a nightmare either. Thanks for your help!
Hi Anne, you pose a challenging question, one where I get to admit I don’t know the answer. I have buffalo grass in the backyard and it took years for me to get a good patch without a lot of weeds. Blue Gramma is also a great grass once it gets going, but in the early stages it can get a lot of competition from weeds coming in. I suggest that you check with Beauty Beyond Belief in Fort Collins or Applewood Seed Company in Arvada, both of whom specialize in native seed mixes. Don’t be put off by the wholesale nature of Applewood – they sell in smaller bulk, too, to local retailers and I’ve always found the staff there and at Beauty Beyond Belief to be excellent help. In the meantime, I’ll forward your question to our state turf specialist, who cut his teeth caring for prairiegrass in the mid-West.
Hello
Can we use an image from your website for a not for profit magazine we publish called Sustain?
http://sustain.org.au
It’s an image of buds on a small tree branch (one year old).
Thanks in anticipation.
Geoffrey Grigg