Green Thumbs: Gardening in Northern Utah

I’ve never grown Dahlias before, but last spring I decided it was something we were going to do this year.  I love the online catalog at Dahlia Barn.  You can search by size, color, or height, and the site has directions and information to make planting and caring for dahlia’s a piece of cake.

Catching my eye this morning:

Autumn Harvest Collection

Cut Flower Collection

For Dinner Plate Size, I’m loving these

Baarn Beauty

Vera Seyfang

Envy

I also liked this info I found on planting dahlias.

Christmas is hours behind us, and do you know what that means?  Garden planning begins in earnest!  Yeah!!

I have some favorite seed catalogs, and in searching for more catalogs that are different, I found this link from Mother Earth gardens, that details 22 different seed catalogs; some look pretty interesting, others not so much.

My favorite gardening catalogs have been Burpee, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and High Country Gardens.  It’s going to be fun to order some of the ones off the Mother Earth list and see if they can help me round out a Top 5.

This poor, neglected blog.  It mimics our poor, neglected garden.  This was a slow gardening year.  We had such a long winter – we had good snow in late May.  The baby was born in mid-May, and we were still planting in August.  Not good!  We brought most of our tomatoes into the house to ripen in the basement.  50 pounds of green tomatoes.  Every single tomato turned red, but unfortunately, since they were in the basement, we missed some here and there.  About 25% were tossed because we got to them too late.

It’s only mid-December and I’m already out of good salsa.  We are going to add several garden boxes in the spring (each 4X8 feet) and I’m determined to have one heck of a salsa garden out there.  We didn’t get pumpkins growing this year, either.

As soon as January greets us, I’m going to start planning the garden in earnest.  We are absolutely doing a grow light this spring – building it ourselves to be cost effective.  I have not had one tomato plant make it from seed, and I am DETERMINED this year to make it happen!

**I don’t know why the formatting for pictures is all messed up.  Sorry about that.  I’ve tried to fix it 3 or 4 times and I’m done messing.

At the Salt Lake Farmers Market in mid-June, we found 2 kids selling a 6 pack of tomato starts for $1 or $2.  Each hole had a different heirloom start.  We had 1 or 2 that got killed by the awful tomato worm, but I am eagerly awaiting the first tomatoes from the rest.  One of the plants, I think Valencia, has enormous leaves like I’ve never seen on a tomato plant.  What we started out with  (these are random pictures from the web, not our actual harves):

Brandywine Tomato:

Valencia Tomato: there are green, orange and red varities, and I don’t know which we have

Japanese Black Trifle:

Black Prince:

Green Zebra:

We also planted the basic tomatoes: grapes, Super Sweet 100s, Early Girls, and a Roma.

We picked up our landscape design plan today.  We just love it.  It’s a bummer to look at the gorgeous pictures and realize that we won’t have the same look for 3-7 years, until the yard matures.  But look what we have to look forward to!  I will never want to leave our yard.  It is going to take a lot of time and hard work – we’re going to do as much of it ourselves as we possibly can, but wow, it’s going to be SO worth it.  You can click on each picture for a bigger shot.  On the new page, there will be notes to explain more about each photo.

Future Front Yard

Future Back Yard

We are getting serious about our yard.  A few weeks ago, we hired a landscape designer to help us out.  It’s a bit pricey, so I had kept putting Nathan off – this was something he really wanted to do . About a year ago, I agreed to have a design drawn up for the front yard.  About a month ago, I agreed that we needed to do the entire property.  Ha – makes my house sound like a compound when I call it a “property”.  Anyway, we’re pretty excited to see what our guy, Casey, comes up with.  He is from The Garden Lodge, our favorite garden center in Utah.  It’s newer, in Riverton, and really fancy.  It’s huge.  The center has lots of furnishings for all kinds of outdoor living, and it’s a cross between Pottery Barn and “new” flea-market finds.  They have landscaped demonstration gardens, a cafe, lots of books, the landscape design center, and of course all the plants outside. 

Casey came to the house to interview us about what we wanted.  We have been thinking about what we’d really like since we moved in.  We gave him some things that we absolutely wanted, but gave him some freedom, too.  He took a ton of measurements and pictures.  We filled out a long survey, and gave him picture examples we liked as well as extra notes we had written to make sure he understood the feeling and mood we want in our yard.  I think he was at our house for over 2 hours.

About 2 months after we moved into our house, we hired a crappy landscaper to do our backyard.  The crappy landcaper poured a large concrete patio, pads on each side of the house, a sidewalk connecting the patio with the side of the house, and finished off with concrete stairs.  It’s just about the worst workmanship I have ever seen.  Less than two years later, the concrete is a disaster and needs to be totally removed and replaced.  Unfortunately, that’s a pricey job, and the first thing that will have to be done.  We’re worried that if we wait until spring to remove the concrete, we might have issues with water flooding the basement.  It’s a bummer that the first big improvement is that one, but we’re excited to see what Casey’s ideas are for the patio, and what we can get done before winter.

This is a tomato horn worm.  And it’s killing our tomato plants.  I hate them.  They’re a couple inches long and get really fat when they eat my beautiful heirloom plants.

…to the Utah gardening season.  When we were in San Diego 2 weeks ago, we drove by some gardens that already had knee-high corn.  We’ll be lucky to be able to plant ours by June 1 this year.

We went to IFA last night to buy some 4 packs and came home with chard, romaine, broccoli and cauliflower.  Couldn’t find any spinach, and we eat a lot of that.  I realize I should have set up the green house and planted my seeds a few weeks ago.  Then I started thinking about possibly hooking up a fan and heater in the green house at night until we get a bit warmer here.  We have the “pop up” green house, which only gives us a 5-10 degree difference from the outside.  We are still dipping into the 20s, so 5 degrees isn’t going to be enough to really help the late spring plants.  Jacob was crushed I wouldn’t let him bring home a tomato plant, but even with the wall-o-waters we used last year, I’m not sure the poor thing would survive in the snow.

http://loveapplefarm.typepad.com/growbetterveggies/instructions-on-how-to-gr.html

Wow.  Just…WOW.  I’ve never gone to that much work.  Ever.  I thought, for about 2 minutes, about planting a control plant and doing a test plant exactly following her directions to see what differences there would be.  I’m not sure I’m in for that much this summer, but maybe next year.

I’ve been told that I could plant my peas this weekend.  I’m trying to decide if I should, or if I should wait until we get back from San Diego at the end of March.  I really want to do it this weekend, but the weather might stop me tomorrow.  It will likely either rain or snow, which would get in the way of my working the dirt and adding our compost.  So.  Two more weeks to wait.  You might say that I’m impatient.  And you’d be right.