If you’re in the Denver area on Sunday, please join Plant a Row for the Hungry at a special Plant Market at Saint John’s Cathedral.

The Market will offer a beautiful variety of colorful annual bedding plants, fragrant herbs, strawberries, and three kinds of tomatoes grown by City Floral. Donations will benefit the Nursery Play Garden at Saint John’s.

Be sure to add a handmade Mother’s Day corsage (or two) to your selection!

The outdoor Market is open from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at 1350 Washington Street, Denver, 80203.

With every $20 donation, gardeners will receive a limited edition Mother’s Day canvas tote featuring the Plant a Row for the Hungry logo.

In addition to all the bloomin’ flowers, flowering baskets, and pots of basil, lavender, parsley, and rosemary, Plant a Row volunteers will be handing out free garden starter kits filled with seed packets and other gardening goodies.

It’s time to take the safe lawns pledge.

That lush green lawn that looks so natural is kept that way unnaturally because of a diet of synthetic chemical fertilizers and toxic herbicides.

This year, instead of taking care of the lawn in the conventional way, gardeners should challenge themselves to use fewer chemicals in their landscapes and take an organic approach to lawn care. Instead of feeding the grass, ask “What can I do to feed the soil?”

Building healthy soil is the goal of an organic lawn. Synthetic chemical fertilizers may make the lawn look green and healthy, but chemicals don’t help the soil or feed the beneficial organisms that live there.

Here are six ways to get started on an organic lawn care program:

1. Loosen the soil. Core aerate your lawn at least once a year. Aeration is the mechanical process of pulling small cores of soil out of the ground. Opening up the soil surface allows water and important nutrients to move into the root zone. Core aerate with equipment that pulls plugs three or four inches deep on four-inch centers.

Let’s celebrate Cinco de Mayo with the lively taste of tomatillo!

While planting tomatoes this season, be sure to add a couple of tomatillo plants to your gardening efforts.

Classic Mexican dishes need the lively taste of tomatillo to roast, grill or simmer into a chile verde sauce or use raw in salsa, guacamole or gazpacho.

Tomatilllo (toh-mah-TEE-yoh) may look a little like its distant cousin the tomato, but they’re miles apart in taste.

The fruits are eaten green, while still firm and have a sweet, but lively lemon-apple-herb taste that’s essential to Mexican and Southwestern cooking.

I grew several tomatillo ‘Toma Verde’ plants last summer and enjoyed the entire process. These plants produce small-size fruit, but there are other varieties that grow bigger or those that ripen to a deep purple.

I started the seeds along with the tomato seeds in spring and transplanted two little plants to my container garden once the weather warmed. But I’ve also seen tomatillo plants on the vegetable tables at local garden centers.

A big thank you to the Laramie County Master Gardeners in Cheyenne, Wyo., for the fabulous Western hospitality they showed us during our recent trip there. John and I had a wonderful time getting to know our new friends to the north–just 90 minutes from Denver.

The group invited me to visit on April 21 and present my “Gardening on the Cheap” program at the beautiful new public library. I enjoyed getting the chance to share my 10 tips for being a cheerful cheapskate in the garden. The other frugal gardeners in the audience shared their tips and asked some really great questions, too.

We were impressed by all the nice folks we met in Cheyenne, but I can’t thank Roberta Bolton enough for making all the arrangements for our visit. Even though we could’ve driven home that evening, she helped turn a one-day trip into a two-day stay…

Thanks to five different seed companies, the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden starter kits are full of potential.

The Plant a Row volunteers are getting ready for the campaign’s kickoff events in May. Thanks to our generous sponsors, the free garden starter kits will be full of gardening goodies this year.

We hope volunteer gardeners will use their garden kits to grow extra vegetables and herbs in their gardens to donate to a neighborhood food bank, soup kitchen or church pantry to help feed hungry families.

Thousands of seed packets were donated for the local growing-and-giving effort by the following companies:

• BBB Seed
• Botanical Interests
• Ferry-Morse
• Lake Valley Seed Company
• Renee’s Garden

Whole Foods donated reusable cloth bags to contain everything, a big plus this year for holding more seeds and holding up in case of inclement weather.

The kits also include:

• Samples of Happy Frog organic fertilizer from Fox Farm

Celebrate Earth Day 2012 by entering to win Jane Shellenberger’s new book, Organic Gardener’s Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West.

If you grow a vegetable garden in the West, you need this book! It’s a complete guide to growing an organic garden in the Rocky Mountain West.

Jane is the publisher and editor of Colorado Gardener, a regional gardening magazine that just celebrated its 15th anniversary. As a long-time organic gardener, she shares her gardening experience in this beautiful new book (Fulcrum Publishing, $24.95).

This hands-on resource is sure to help you grow a successful organic vegetable garden.

To win a copy of Organic Gardener’s Companion, just post the top reason you need this book by Friday, April 20 at 5:00 p.m. Mountain time. One name will be selected at random from all comments.

There was such a good response to my post about how to grow round baby carrots, I thought I’d share another garden baby for small-space gardening.

‘Garden Babies’ butterhead lettuce is a cool-season leafy green that’s easy to grow in a container. I admit I fell for this variety from Renee’s Garden Seeds simply because of its name.

I couldn’t resist the idea of growing “Garden Babies” on the patio.

Garden Babies are a fairly new butterhead lettuce first developed for a sophisticated luxury market for flavor and quality, according to the seed packet information.

After growing one container of them, I have to agree. These babies are fun to grow–and to eat. The leaves are smooth with a nice, buttery texture. I used them in salads and slipped them into sandwiches. I also ate a few right out of the container.

If you’d like to grow these miniature butterheads, follow these steps:

Now’s the time to plant cool-season vegetables and round baby carrots are a top crop.

I’d never been interested in growing carrots before, until I planted round ‘Romeo’ carrot seeds from Renee’s Garden a few seasons ago.

All I did was sprinkled the seeds on top of the soil of a large container, covered them with a thin layer of soil and kept a close eye on soil moisture until they sprouted. Then over the next several weeks, I thinned the seedlings conscientiously so they’d have plenty of room to grow.

My heart soared every time I pulled a round Romeo carrot from the soil. Each one of those baby carrots was so small, so round and so full of flavor that I couldn’t believe I grew them in a patio container.

I was so happy with those sweet results, I also sowed a late-season crop and enjoyed those little round carrots into the fall.

The beautifully-designed Bodega Birdhouses are featured in the Spring 2012 issue of Leaf Magazine. The magazine says these birdhouses are part of a collection of “contemporary, environmentally responsible affordable items with high style” offered by online retailer aHa! Modern Living.

The birdhouses come in three styles, including Bungalow (shown here), Tower and Chalet. Each stoneware birdhouse is carefully constructed, using recycled materials for the teak roofs.

I’m delighted to offer these birdhouses as an aHa! affiliate.

Leaf Magazine is the new online free garden and design magazine that features gorgeous images and interesting design ideas for every kind of garden and landscape. Gardeners (and garden designers) can sign up to get every new issue of the magazine delivered to their email inbox.

If you’d like to add some high style to your gardening efforts, click on the Bodega Birdhouse images to the right for more information about these adorable birdie abodes.

Friday’s Grow gardening section in the Denver Post featured an article I wrote about eight great new plants for 2012. Speaking of new plants…here’s part 2 of New Plants for Gardening, an article I wrote for The Post in 2006. Please see the blog post from March 30 for Part 1.

Every year Welby Gardens holds annual trials for a variety of seed and plant companies. All-America Selections, the oldest international testing organization in North America, uses the trial process to name winners among new seed varieties.

During a field trial, plants are evaluated based on qualities like growing habit, time of bloom, disease resistance, and whether the color stays vibrant or fades in the intense Colorado sun.

“If it’s a variegated color, all of the flowers have to have the same white edge and have the same size of edge,” explains Debi Borden-Miller, Welby’s marketing coordinator. “The plant has to be consistent in size, especially if it’s a plant we’ll sell to landscapers.”