Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

• Local farm loses the battle against local government

  Thursday, May 17th, 2012

  by Hadley Vandiver After years of fighting Boulder County land use codes and regulations, Zia Parker is selling her farm and moving with her husband to Ecuador in hopes that running a permaculture farm will encounter fewer obstacles in the South American country. Parker’s farm, Willow Way, is a permaculture herb farm and herbal CSA [...]

• Recipes on the range

  Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

  Local farmers share favorite dishes by Clay Fong As spring arrives, most foodies’ thoughts turn to the local produce making its way to area farmers’ markets. To help usher in the fresh produce season, Boulderganic asked three county farms to share a favorite recipe that makes the most of their bounty. Ollin Farms Nestled between [...]

• Urban herbs

  Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

  Starting small with an herb garden by Amanda Moutinho If a full-fledged garden sounds like too much work, consider scaling back and springing for an herb garden. Find a sunny windowsill, or plant them alongside a bigger plant and enjoy fresh herbs instead of store-bought ones. The list of herbs to grow includes basil, thyme, [...]

• No lawn? No problem

  Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

  How to start your own apartment garden by Amanda Moutinho Locally grown food just got closer. If you crave the flavor of home-grown carrots or cucumbers, the taste can be yours, even if you don’t have a backyard. You can grow a garden just as delicious (if not as plentiful), with no more space than [...]

• Digging in to organic gardening

  Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

  Ask four experts about how to make a garden grow, and you’ll get four different pieces of advice. What the experts have to say about cultivating healthy soil and when and where to water varies, but then, so do backyards. Familiarize yourself first with the term “microclimate.” Your backyard has one, and the amount of shade it gets, the soil in it and the nearest water sources will all play into what you can grow and how to successfully grow it. But for a novice gardener, a few tips from the pros can be helpful just getting off the ground — or rather, getting your seeds to come up through it.
  Here, a few local gardening experts share their knowledge on everything from soil to sun, watering to pests, and what plants a first-time gardener can have most success with.

• Hail pulling a Houdini

  Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

  Small, summertime hail storms in the Colorado Front Range could disappear by 2070, according to a recently published study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• Drifting toward answers on lost crops

  Thursday, December 8th, 2011

  If you shop with any regularity at the Abbondanza stall at the farmers’ market, you might have noticed some gaps in their inventory this fall. Dried beans and winter squash are mostly what Shanan Olson, co-owner, says people have commented on missing. They ask why, and she’s not sure how to reply. Pesticide drift on their organic-certified farm in 2010 cost most of their fall harvest, a $250,000 loss. At least, that’s what they can piece together. What really happened to their crop has been a complicated puzzle to solve.

• Peeking in on priceless plants

  Friday, November 4th, 2011

  The doors to a prized collection of plants are opening to Boulder — for just a few people and only briefly. On Nov. 8, the CU greenhouse on 30th Street will allow a few people in to tour the greenhouse and develop a better understanding of the work that happens at the greenhouse and the work plants do in our daily lives.

• Cultivating farmers on small farms

  Thursday, July 28th, 2011

  Rows of squash, beans, corn, broccoli, lettuce, potatoes and tomatoes are tended by apprentice farmers, coming out even on the recent blazing hot afternoons to plant seeds, pull weeds and cover potato plants in hay and dirt on a small farm off the Diagonal Highway near Niwot. The one-acre Everybody Eats! farm is planted on 3.5 acres of land leased from the Shepherd Valley Waldorf School. The farm was founded by Dave Georgis, who started the seeds now planted in neat, student-friendly rows in his basement earlier this spring.

  Everybody Eats! is one of several farms and school partnerships in the Boulder area.

• First tomato of the season

  Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

  Whether it’s genetics or zeitgeist, I felt compelled last year to start a vegetable garden. My younger son, now grown, helped me plant a test garden of sorts, haphazardly sowing veggies amid our flowers and opening up one vegetable bed, in which we planted green beans, broccoli, peppers, cucumbers and squash. It was an exciting time, as we both crept out to the garden each morning to see what had sprouted. Though we didn’t plant that much, we got so much food out of that last-minute agricultural experiment that we decided it was time to become full-blown urban farmers.