Si Pak Tani

By Kurt M. Jones,  Chaffee County Extension Director I was at a conference recently and was visiting with some colleagues from across the Western United States.  The conversation came around to how baking, cooking and gardening all relate to one another.  It was an interesting analogy that I will attempt to recreate for you here. If you think about it for a while, you realize that for many of us, Baking is a prescriptive activity.  You find a recipe that you like, maybe tweak it for high altitude adjustment, but then you follow the directions and let the science of chemistry and physics turn into delectable treats.  Gardening has similar attributes.  You pick plants that will work in our growing environment, arrange them according to their irrigation needs (what we call “hydrozoning”), and provide plant care including proper irrigation, proper plant nutrition to minimize stress, and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) techniques when problems appear.  Ev...

By Sharon Faircloth, Master Gardener We’re in the throws of another record, dry, winter.  The dry wind that brings those unseasonably warm days in the winter, cause substantial damage.  The seed catalogs are coming in the mail so spring MUST be just around the corner.  Hopefully, we’ll get feet of that lovely moisture-laden snow in March and April to help mitigate the stress created from so little precipitation (without the damage that can come along with that wet heavy snow)! In the meantime, if you have no snow cover but do have water rights, consider watering trees, shrubs and susceptible plants.  Trees that are particularly susceptible are spruce, alders, mountain yews, maples, mountain ashes and conifers.  Watering can be done when temperatures can get to about 40 degrees by mid-day.  Ideally, you’d like to be able to get the water down about twelve inches and to give the enough time to soak in before temperatures drop.  Also, try to water to the ...

By Cherie Luke Sunflowers, an annual, are one of the easiest plants to grow. The botanical name for sunflowers is Helianthus, helios meaning sun and anthus meaning flower. They are part of the asteraceae family and are native to North America. They have a habit of turning their heads to face the sun, usually facing east when their flowers open. Although gardeners in general love to grow the tallest and biggest sunflowers, there are many varieties that are beautiful and fit nicely into almost any garden setting. Sunflowers can be grown in colors besides yellow and gold. You can find seeds at your local garden center in bronze, purple, orange, and red, and in varying heights. At one seed catalog I visited there were 42 sunflower choices. Farmers in the U.S. started growing sunflowers commercially after WWII because of their many uses. The commercial crop consists of two types of seeds; confection and oilseeds. The confection seeds are used in baked goods, trail mixes, granola, and cereal...