Si Pak Tani

Musk thistle Consider the warm dry winter that’s just ended and how with a bit of Spring moisture, weeds will soon make their annual appearance in your garden and surrounding landscape.   Whether you’re a local veteran of yearly weed battles; a new resident from out-of-state or someone who’s just ‘moved up the hill’ from the more urban surroundings of the Metro area, facing weeds in the foothills can be daunting!     As if gardening at altitude isn’t challenging enough, the dandelions and diffuse grassy clumps of lower elevations are for the rookies.   You’ve just entered the big leagues of weed wrangling!   Consequently, this is a good time to dust off your garden tools and read up while we highlight steps on wrangling popular local offenders.   Let’s review the basics from weed identification to eradication and control.    Additionally, as foothills residents, we shouldn’t forget that there are many state agencies that can help with the identification of the weed you’re looking at.

March and April are such variable months in the mountains.   March is usually one of our wettest months of the year, at least on the Front Range, with the highest average amount of snow. This March (at the time I’m writing this, anyway), has been much warmer and drier than usual. I’m seeing signs of spring that I don’t usually see until well into April, such as aspen catkins swelling, and wildflower seeds germinating.   I even had a crocus blooming at 8,700’ on March 20 -- the first day of spring!   Last year, I didn’t get my first crocus until April 10.   Some years (ones with an early spring and late Easter) even see Pasque flowers (the name refers to Easter) blooming at Easter up here, and we might see that this year.   My Pasque flower buds are already starting to swell. What causes such dramatic differences from year to year in plant growth? Plants rely on two main cues to come out of dormancy/germinate.   One is day length – plants in the Northern Hemisphere get the message that

About this time every year, I start hearing folks say that they already started seeds for their vegetable transplants. As if it is a competition, the dates seem to get earlier and earlier each year. While it is none of my business who starts their seeds when, I always take the opportunity to address my concerns of starting too early when I hear about these early start dates. While you may never truly be safe planting warm season vegetables in mountain communities, it is typically recommended that no warm season plants should go in the ground in my community before the first week of June. To find average frost dates for your area, check the dates here . Now of course, this completely depends on your gardening style, and the season extension tools you may utilize in your endeavor to be the only one in the county with tomatoes. Season extension aside, let’s look a little more closely into using transplants and some of the difficulties you face growing your own vegetable transplants are ho