Green Thumbs: gardening in northern utah

Starts

atsf121 — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 04:53:40 +0000

Last month a number of garden catalogs showed up and it was fun to scheme, dream, and plan what vegetables to grow in our garden, or flowers and bushes to add to our yard. It’s hard to have such cold winters and not be able to do much outside. Growing up in Northern California, you could have a winter garden as long as you didn’t mind a little bit of mud. So I decided I wanted to get some seeds started, and after consulting with Julie on what we should try this time around, I started some seeds for cold weather vegetables. While those are growing this month I’m going to work on a little garden box cover to try and keep them going outside in March. After a week, we have a bunch of starts and everything should sprout by the end of the week. I’m hoping this will work out as I’m already chomping at the bit to work in the yard again.

For our “winter/early spring” garden I planted broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, lettuce, and peas. Hopefully they will all transplant well next month. The only thing that Julie wants which I don’t have seeds for yet is chard. The boys have had a blast the past few days checking out the new starts and looking to see what’s come up since the day before. Spring can’t come soon enough, especially since it’s 9° outside tonight.

Front Yard overhaul

atsf121 — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 05:14:55 +0000

So the summer of 2010 was spent redoing the front yard. A couple of years ago we paid a landscape designer to come up with a plan for our front and backyard. We’ve altered things a bit but it was a huge help and so worth the money. When we first moved here we would see plants in various magazines like Sunset and then go to one of the local nursery’s only to be told “that doesn’t grow here”. So the landscape designer took our various ideas and goals (lots of color, xeriscape, not a lot of grass in the front).

Starting in May we had a neighbor remove all of the grass but left to two Aspen trees. The boys (Jacob-6 and Joshua-4) enjoyed watching the big equipment dig up the front yard. Then another neighbor built a new brick patio and a pathway from the front walk to the sidewalk because that’s a more natural way to come up to the house from the street. The patio will let us sit and watch the kids play in the front since the porch is set back and you can’t see around the corner of the garage. The finished walkway and patio look great and should be very fun next year. I decided to wait until next year to use the left over pavers to build a pathway to the south gate that leads to the backyard. There is a little pocket of yard along the side of the house that will have to wait until spring 2011 to be finished.

After our neighbor was finished then it was my turn. I had to dig new sprinkler lines for the new, smaller front lawn and for the drip irrigation system for the planting beds. There were huge piles of left over dirt that I had to dig through and then level once the sprinkler lines were done. That took longer than it should have as I got bronchitis and that slowed me down quite a bit. After the sprinklers were in my dad and a couple of neighbors came over and helped me level the dirt and make things look more like a normal yard.

Before all of the dirt was leveled I bought the plants to go along the front of the house in the beds along the garage and the front porch. I even got the drip irrigation lines setup for these sections so they could be watered all summer and I could try out the different pieces. That helped motivate me to get the rest of the yard finished, even if it felt like it was taking forever.

At the end of July we had 4 large boxes of buffalo grass plugs show up from High Country Gardens. Julie and I spent 2 days planting plugs, even Ainsley (2) helped out. The grass had started to fill in before the weather turned cold and the grass went dormant, so it will take a while to grow in but this grass won’t require as much water and won’t need mowing as often. After the grass was in my brother-in-law came over to help me use a concrete saw I rented to cut back some of the concrete used to lock in the curves on the front path. I wanted more room for the flower beds we added (another plan alteration) along each side. There still a couple of inches right along the brick that I can’t plant in, but I get to use most of the 2′ space now.

After taking a little bit of time off from working on the front yard I finally got around to planting. We placed a huge order with High Country Gardens for most of the plants to finish the front yard. For some of the larger bushes that I wanted to fill in faster, I went to Olsons Garden Shoppe in Lehi. I waited a little too long to order everything so it was a mad rush in October to plant everything when it arrived. I didn’t get the drip irrigation done, but since it was almost time to winterize the sprinkler system it didn’t matter. Because we had altered the plan a bit, I had to run to a couple of other nurseries to find some extra plants to fill in the gaps since I only ordered or bought what was shown in the original plan. I planted pansies in the flower beds along the path, behind the patio in front of the fire bushes, and a little spot in front of the clematis. I added one more alteration to the plan that Julie requested, two 4′ radius planting circles on each side of the driveway by the sidewalk. I filled these with various bulbs, so between the bulbs and the pansies we should have a colorful spring. By the beginning of November all of the plants were in and it was time to call it a year.

In 2011, I need to finish the path around the side of the house with the thyme between the bricks, the other plants on the side of the house, the rest (a lot) of the drip irrigation lines, and cover everything with mulch to keep down the weeds. Hopefully it won’t take me the full summer to get that finished and that it looks something like the landscaper imagined!

Dahlias

Julie P — Sat, 29 May 2010 14:24:53 +0000

I’ve always loved dahlias and never planted them. For some dumb reason, I’m nervous; maybe because I really want them to turn out! I’m hoping it’s a lot easier to be successful than I’m thinking it is.

We bought two bags from Lowes. The landscape dinnerplate mix

and a bag of hamari gold, also in dinnerplate size

I posted awhile back on the Dahlia Barn. They have great directions for success. I also found this link this morning.

New Year, New Garden!

Julie P — Sat, 29 May 2010 13:53:47 +0000

This year we didn’t do seedlings indoors. We didn’t even get in our winter garden in March. Here it is May 29th and I will only go out to buy our compost today! We took a family vacation to San Francisco from May 14-23, and it’s a good thing we did. If we stayed home, I would’ve gotten my garden in, and then when it snowed on May 24th, I would have lost a good part of it.

Here in Utah, we are usually safe planting our gardens after Mothers Day, but if we want to be really safe, we wait until Memorial Day. Two things: Mothers Day was early this year, May 9. That would have been a really early garden. Also, this is our 4th spring in Utah, and the first where planting a garden in the window between Mothers Day and Memorial Day could have backfired. I guess it happens every 5 years or so? This year was the year.

Our winter was pretty lame and dry, but spring has made up for it. It has been horribly cold and very wet. When summer shows up it’s going to feel like moving from February to July without a spring at all.

We had planned to build at least three new 8′ x 4′ boxes this spring, and it didn’t happen. We’re also totally relandscaping our front yard right now, and we really need to get that done pronto, which means the new boxes won’t happen this year. I’m thinking about build them out late this summer so they’re ready to fill early next year.

squash bugs and other pests

Julie P — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:24:42 +0000

We have squash bugs. I didn’t even know there were squash bugs until yesterday, and I hate them. A bunch of my squash plants are having the same problem – the leaves are yellowing and dying, there’s some black spots on the undersides of the leaves, and often, the flowers will die and fall off before the vegetable starts growing:

Somtimes we’ll get a squash that never gets big, and starts rotting on the vine:

I have a good handful of healthy looking squash that have not grown any bigger than a fat pinky finger in 2 weeks:

and I’m exasperated.

We. Love. Squash.

And this year we’ll be lucky to get 3, I’m thinking.

My friend told me about a product I can buy to dust on the leaves of the young plants. Next year. These are goners.

My other pests:

Grasshoppers.

they are big, they are small, and they are GIANT. They are well fed on my garden, sadly, and most of my plants are riddled with holes. The news reported recently that while the state is having the grasshopper problem everywhere, my town is the worst.

At this point, I’m going to be lucky to get anything!

We’ve already harvested 1 zucchini, a handful of smallish tomatoes, a few beets and a couple carrots.

tomato blight

Julie P — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:52:04 +0000

I noticed this afternoon that a lot of my tomato plants have black spots on the leaves. After looking at the possible causes, I’m pretty sure it’s blight. Usually late season blight sets in when the weather is too cool and wet. Unfortunately we’ve had an extremely wet, cool June. And that’s not good for my poor tomatoes. I’ll take off the affected leaves tomorrow, and it’s going to be ugly out there. I’m glad we found it before we leave for 2 weeks (vacations come at the wrong time for gardeners!), but still, what a pain.

Sunflower House

Julie P — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:22:33 +0000

I really want to do this next year!

Directions and Info

Garden Inoculent

Julie P — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:24:59 +0000

The beans I planted about 4 weeks ago have failed miserably. Out of two full packs of beans, I have maybe 10 sprouts, and some of those have been eaten by bugs and snails. I was telling my neighbor how frustrated I was, especially because beans, in my mind, are like zucchini – they just grow, no matter what. She told me about garden inoculent:

It’s supposed to give bean and pea seeds a boost, especially when they’re planted in dirt that hasn’t had vegetables grown in it before. I soaked the new package of bean seeds overnight, and am about to dust them in this powder and plant them outside. Then we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed that this round goes better than the last.

Snails

Julie P — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:10:26 +0000

We are having big time snail problems. It has not been like this our other 2 years gardening in Utah, and it’s bad. I’m wondering if every snail in northern Utah decided to come to our yard. In under one week, they have killed several plants and working on several others. Almost everything has at least a bite out of it. We used snail killer along the outside of the boxes earlier this week, but two mornings since, I have found a group of snails inside the boxes. My dad sent me two links about killing and managing snails.

from Weekend Gardener.com

from UC Davis

I think I want to go price copper at Lowe’s today, but since we have 4 boxes that are each 32 sq ft, it might get pricey. The articles describe several traps, and ways to try to get them out of the garden, but since we have so many, and the bait isn’t even working, I might be desperate enough to shell out the money for copper.

garden box 4

Julie P — Sun, 24 May 2009 01:48:39 +0000

We planted one of our 16X2 foot beds today.

what’s in the bed

1 – Supersweet 100
2 – Slicing Cuke
3 – Beefmaster Tomato
4 – Straightneck Squash
5 – Golden Boy tomato
6 – Grape tomato
7 – Ace 55VF Tomato
8 – Juilet Tomato
9 – Cilantro
10 – Zucchini
A – Purple Beans (Sequoia?)
B – Golden Wax Beans
C – Bush Garden Gold Mine Beans
D – Detroit Dark Red Beet
E – Red Cloud Beet