Perennial Favorites

Every year we set aside a day for our customers to come and plant a pot or basket here at the nursery. You bring the container, buy the plants you want to use, and we provide our good nursery potting soil and our organic fertilizer for free.  This year it’s Saturday, May 19, from 1-3 p.m. We’re semi-famous for our hanging basket combinations, and we’re happy to share our planting techniques with you. It isn’t hard to create a beautiful pot to sit on your patio, or a lovely basket to hang on your deck. I enjoy doing baskets with a theme: a hummingbird basket, a shade lovers basket, the hottest-spot pot, baskets that are all blue, bright red, or shades of peach and apricot–pick your favorite color, we can help! One container per person, please.

Why do I love Supertunias? You don’t have to deadhead them for them to continue blooming and flourishing all summer. One supertunia can fill a 12″ basket with ease! We have all sorts of cool colors, including the new purples above, and a great pink one called Vista Bubblegum.  Last week, on a rush to town for groceries, I checked the box stores. They charge twice as much for supertunias as we do! Yes, theirs are in a little bigger pot, but the darned things grow so fast, ours will quickly catch up. And if you’re looking for more savings, you can still get six-packs of petunias from us at the shockingly low price of $2.95.

We’re not just about petunias, of course, we have other cool annuals like callibrachoas, diascia, nemesia, lobularia, portulaca (moss rose) and dianthus. Pansies, still lend their grace to our benches. Pansies will bloom all summer in Rye and points upward. Last year one of our employees planted pansies in a south-facing spot–not the best place for a pansy you might think, yet anytime the snow melted, the pansies bloomed for her, all winter long!

We’re ready for a great weekend, with drawings every day. Saturday we’re giving away an apple tree! Sign up this morning before noon for a chance to win it.  Sunday’s drawing is for a hardy shrub rose.  Planting in this damp and cool weather is perfect! It’s so much better for your  newly purchased plants than dry and windy.

If you can’t make it to the nursery, you can still call and get a gift certificate for Mother’s Day or graduation–you chose the amount. We take Mastercard and Visa, so buying a gift certificate over the phone is no problem. We can either hold it here for them, or mail it, whichever seems best to you.

We have lots of different kinds of catmints, and I like them all. The one in the picture is Nepeta mussinii, also known as Persian Catmint, taken last weekend. If a plant has Persian in its name, you can count on it being able to tolerate drought. Nepeta mussini can survive months of drought and still look good. It blooms early each year and every time you cut it back, it blooms again. Some people say it’s weedy; some people say it’s their favorite flower.  I’ve learned that those who love it garden in some of the most challenging micro-climates in Colorado, with poor soil, or little irrigation water, or high elevation, or all three! Those who hate it have rich soil, water a lot, and can grow plants that enjoy those conditions. If you need a tough plant, this one is for you.

We had such a great rain on Monday night and Tuesday day.  Navajos call it a female rain, a slow, gentle, soaking rain; not like the male thunderstorms that will occur later this summer–or possibly later this week! But even before that rain, in unwatered areas, our catmint flourished. Yes, it seeds around a bit, but I’m coming down on the side of “love it!”

One of my neighbors here in the Greenhorn Valley sent me this picture. Another successful gaura that survived the winter! You can see hers had a lot of rocks to gather heat through the winter. That’s a good plan for any questionably hardy plant.  Thanks, Maggie, for the picture!

P.S.  Hmm.  I thought I’d copied the picture from Maggie’s email so that it would appear right here, but a few friends have told me that that is not the case. A picture is only worth a thousand words if it is actually visible! So, until I can figure out what I did wrong, help me by calling on your imagination: take a long, slow deep breath and picture a close-up shot of a healthy, compact clump of basal leaves and the Siskiyou Pink tag stuck in the ground next to it. The leaves have that characteristic reddish tint to them. It’s surrounded by some apple-sized rocks.  Seeing this in your mind’s eye has made you feel relaxed and refreshed. Anytime you are feeling stressed you can call on this image of the stalwart gaura that survived the winter, ready to burst into bloom when the season allows.  Thanks, and I hope to figure out the picture thing soon.

We’re offering five different varieties of strawberries this year, by customer request, and I want to plant all of them! Three of them are new for us, two are old favorites.

Ft. Laramie is one of the most cold hardy strawberries and recommended for Colorado gardeners by CSU-extension. The berries have good flavor and produce a long time in early summer and again in late summer. Classed as an ever-bearer. Zone 3.

NEW! Allstar is a June-bearer. That means it only produces one crop a year, but it is a big crop! The berries are big, too, and really sweet. Excellent disease resistance. Hardy to Zone 4.

Tristar is a day-neutral strawberry. Day-neutral berries produce even in the longest days of summer, and, for those of you who have greenhouses, in the shortest days of winters, too. Tristar has good flavor, it’s one of my favorites. Zone 4.

NEW! Eversweet is a day-neutral variety bred for heat tolerance. It can produce berries even when the temperatures reach 100 F. ! If your garden is in one of the hotter regions of Colorado, this strawberry might be the one for you. Sweet berries, too–ever-sweet! Zone 5.

NEW! Eclair is a sweet, juicy berry, producing in mid-season. It is a June-bearer, but has an everbearer in its family tree, so it produces for a longer season than many. It tastes really sweet, with hints of citrus and raspberry. Its unique flavor has quickly made this one of the favorite berries for gourmet cooks and strawberry aficionados. Zone 5.

Are strawberries difficult to grow? They like a rich, organic soil, weekly irrigation, and they prefer a slightly acidic soil. Despite that, they grow well in my alkaline soil, with sporadic irrigation. I think they’re easier to grow at my elevation (6500′) than in lower, hotter gardens. If I gardened in Pueblo I’d be tempted to try them in an area that receives afternoon shade, I’d mulch the soil deeply to help it stay cooler and hold the moisture, and I’d definitely try Eversweet for its heat tolerance. If I gardened in Westcliffe, or Cuchara, I’d pick Ft. Laramie for my main berry and experiment with others to test their winter hardiness. All strawberries like a winter mulch to prevent them from heaving out of the ground. And for my deer-challenged gardening friends, be warned, deer will eat them-leaves, berries and all! That’s one reason I always grow some in baskets where I can move them out of harm’s way.

It was cold here last night, 19.9 F. according to my digital thermometer. That’s not really so cold for March 21, in Southern Colorado, but it is cold compared to our recent record highs, and cold for the poor fruit trees that started blooming in Pueblo and Canon City last week.  Will those peach trees still look as happy when the sun hits the blooms this morning?

It was cold, too, for the Gaura lindheimeri that I uncovered yesterday. Those of you who read this blog regularly will remember I did a test last summer, planting the species Gaura lindheimeri and the selection Gaura ‘Siskiyou Pink,’ to check for hardiness. Yesterday I pulled away the winter debris to see if there was any sign of life and yes! They were alive, both the species and Siskiyou Pink! It was so exciting to me. But then I wandered off, not protecting the crowns with the leaves and broken stems that had kept them safe all winter, and left them for the 19 degrees to test again.  I’ve noticed that I often lose plants this time of year, plants that are starting to break dormancy and then get hit with a blast of cold.

The title of this post might date me but Stephen Stills had something beyond free love to offer when he suggested that we quit pining after what we can’t have and enjoy what is here.  It’s been a long weird winter in Colorado–aren’t they all?–and I’m so ready for spring.  I checked a couple of blogs today, where spring comes a bit sooner: one written by a gardener in Portland, Oregon; another by an Albuquerque landscape architect. I have friends in both of those regions and sometimes I’m tempted to move to one city or the other. They have longer growing seasons. They (both) can grow palms! And not just palms, all sorts of other plants, plants that bloom in November and December and January, when I’m looking at a snow-covered landscape and below zero temperatures.  I have to remember, though, that Southern Colorado also has its glorious weather days and would I really want to live where it rains for six months in winter, or where the dust storms signal spring? I can be content with our crazy weather and grow the plants that love to be here–as do I.

If you’d like to see those two inspiring blogs, here are the links:

Albuquerque  http://desertedge.blogspot.com/2012/03/ephedra.html

Portland   http://dangergarden.blogspot.com/2012/03/agaves-getting-protection-they-deserve.html