Cold Climate Gardening

The subtitle of Grow Organic: Over 250 Tips and Ideas for Growing Flowers, Veggies, Lawns and More by Doug Oster and Jessica Walliser reads “for first-timers and old-timers alike,” but I think it excels at helping veteran gardeners who have been using chemical fertilizers and pesticides to make the transition to an organic approach.

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An unidentified bee species visits a corn poppyPerhaps, like me, you’ve noticed there haven’t been as many bees flying around this year. If you’re the sort of person who gets nervous around bees, this might even seem like a good thing to you. But perhaps, like me, you notice your apple trees have scarcely any apples on them, and you know that the flowers weren’t damaged by a late frost. This is not a good thing. Multiplied by millions of fruit and almond trees in orchards all over the country, it becomes a very bad thing. They’re calling it Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

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Readers, I’d like your help in answering this email:

I live at 8800 ft. in the Rocky Mountains ( yes, we have had snow recently also) and want to garden. I did not get 1 tomato last summer because nights are cold.–although my flowers and herb pots did well. This year I have cut out 2 areas to do about a 300sqr.ft. garden.

Where can I get a comprehensive list of vegetables that thrive in the colder climate? At least then all I’d have to worry about is beating off the elk!

I certainly have not gardened at such a high altitude and I wonder if tomatoes and other hot weather crops are even possible at …

Popularity: 11% [?]

I’ve been reading the 1991 edition of Organic Gardening in Cold Climates by Sandra Perrin, which I checked out of the library. (Since there is now a 2002 edition, some of my comments might not be appropriate.) First off, it might better be called Organic Vegetable Gardening–there wasn’t much about flowers except how to use them as companion plantings or beneficial insect attractors. And even though I am not the vegetable gardener in my household, I found most of the information fairly basic. You could learn almost as much just by reading the …

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I weeded half the asparagus bed yesterday. It hadn’t been weeded at all this season because of my hospital stay and then Deirdre being born, and since it hadn’t been weeded it was never mulched. The asparagus seem to be doing okay despite the neglect, although some are leaning way over, which makes me think their roots weren’t buried deeply enough. I bought my plants from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, so you’d think they’d be hardy, but these first two years that they’ve been in the ground, the first sprouts have been knocked down by hard frost–maybe I should say a hard freeze. Of course, we have been having exceptionally cold frosts exceptionally late in the season. Almost all the …

Popularity: 6% [?]