What  gardening lessons do you take away from the 2009 season? Share your experience here for a chance to win a CobraHead Weeder and Cultivator.

Fall has definitely fallen around here and I’d like to recapture some of those nice, warm feelings from summer.

Want to play along? You could win a CobraHead Weeder and Cultivator–my new favorite gardening tool.

Thinking back to this year’s gardening season I recall it certainly had its ups and downs.

Some gardens took too long to come up and others were beaten down by hail.

Despite these challenges, I’m sure every gardener learned something from his or her 2009 gardening experience.

What gardening lesson did you learn this year?

Think about your 2009 garden…

• Did you try a new plant that performed well?
• Find a new planting or maintenance method that saved time or effort?
• Did you beat Mother Nature at her own game?

Despite their scary image, bats are an important part of our ecosystem. Here are more bat facts from an article I wrote for the Denver Post in August 2005. ( Bat photo credit: iStock)

The Congress Avenue Bridge bats may be a top tourist attraction in Austin, Texas, where visitors watch the bats stream out from under the bridge for their nightly insect hunt, but Colorado is home to its own bat colony, too.

The Orient Mine, located in Saguache County, is the summer residence of a large colony of Mexican free-tailed bats, according to Rick Adams, professor of biology at the University of Northern Colorado and founder and president of the Colorado Bat Society.

“What’s unique about this bat colony is that it’s almost all male. It’s a huge bachelor roost,” Adams said. Estimates range from 150,000 to 250,000 bats.

Each summer, hikers navigate the trail to watch the out flight. The Orient Land Trust, a nonprofit preservation organization, protects the area.

Bats are unfairly characterized as one of Halloween’s scary icons, but the truth is they’re as cute as any puppy and a boon to gardeners. Learn more bat facts in this article I wrote for the Denver Post in August 2005. (Brown Bat photo credit: iStock)

When Merlin Tuttle was growing up in Tennessee he made a remarkable discovery. The gray bats that resided in a cave near his home were migratory, which contradicted everything he had read about the bats.

“I got my parents to take me to the Smithsonian, where I politely informed leading authorities that I had found gray bats that seemed to migrate,” he recalled.

“They were impressed with my observations, gave me several thousand bat bands and suggested I band them to see where they were going.”

Tuttle banded over 40,000 bats and traced their migratory movements from northern Florida to northeastern Tennessee and from northern Alabama to Missouri. He used the migration data to write his doctoral thesis.

The recipe for Stuffed Pumpkin appears in The Vegetarian Epicure cookbook, but my adapted version requires fewer ingredients and skips several steps.

There’s a lot to like about serving a stuffed pumpkin for dinner. Not only is it a simple vegetarian entree, but it’s fun to prepare and there’s no messy casserole dish to wash at the end of the meal.

It also smells heavenly while baking up into something beautifully delicious.

I discovered this recipe in an ancient copy of The Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas and prepared it for a Halloween open house several years ago.

The pumpkin came out of the oven piping hot and I used it as an edible centerpiece for the buffet table.

Not exactly a Martha Stewart moment, but pretty darn close for me.

When I prepared the recipe for the party, I used all of the right ingredients in their precise amounts and followed all of the steps–and there were plenty of them.

Spiders are an important part of our ecosystem, but some people find it difficult to get past their creepy appearance to fully appreciate them.

Colorado is home to hundreds of species of spiders, but only one is considered potentially dangerous—the western widow spider (Latrodectus hesperus).

In spite of this, many have a fear of spiders that ranges from the “eeek” factor to petrifying arachnophobia. This aversion may come from spiders’ daunting looks, stories about their poisonous bites, or images lingering from movies about eight-legged radioactive monsters.

Despite their reputation as loathsome creatures, spiders are one of the landscape’s best friends. We might be up to our knees in pests if it weren’t for our eight-legged helpers.

Gardeners can encourage spiders to live in their yards by planting a layered landscape that offers many different attachment points for webs, adding mulch for hiding places and by refraining from indiscriminate use of toxic chemical pesticides with integrated pest management methods.

Research shows that cruciferous vegetables, like Brussels sprouts, contain certain chemicals which are thought to prevent estrogen-related cancers.

Seeing the tall stalks of Brussels sprouts at the farmers’ market last weekend, reminded me this veggie was once considered a banned substance at our dinner table.

I’d given up serving them until I started roasting the sprouts in a hot oven with a little olive oil, fresh garlic and oregano. Roasting brings out a nutty flavor that is a perfect complement to other fall foods and their crisp texture is a pleasant surprise.

Cruciferous vegetables–like Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage–are members of the mustard family (Cruciferae or Brassicaceae) and they get their name from their cross-shaped flower petals.

Your mom was right when she told you to eat your Brussels sprouts. These cool-season vegetables are garden-variety superheroes when it comes to fiber and vitamin C.

Brussels sprouts grow on tall, thick stalks and when they’re ready to harvest they resemble small trees loaded with miniature cabbages.

It was a subfreezing Saturday morning at the Cherry Creek Farmers Market in Denver, but this stalk of Brussels sprouts gave Adrienne Hott something to smile about.

Last Saturday I had the chance for a one-on-one Tweet up with Jean Ann VanKrevelen, Portland food writer, director of social media for Cool Springs Press and co-author of the forthcoming book, “Grocery Gardening: Planting, Preparing and Preserving Fresh Food.”

Jean Ann (@JeanAnnVK) was in Denver for a family event and looked for fellow garden writers on Twitter, where she found me @WesternGardener.

We met at the Cherry Creek Farmers Market, despite the subfreezing temps that made for frozen fingers and wilted lettuce.

Jean Ann brought along her niece, Adrienne Hott and Adrienne’s husband Chris, who were visiting from Phoenix. They were exceptionally good sports humoring Jean Ann and me as we admired the glorious fall vegetables including perfect pumpkins and colorful winter squash.

Chesnok Red is a purple stripe, hardneck garlic, perfect for planting now and harvesting next year.

If you’re looking for a simple way to get a head start on next year’s gardening, plant garlic. Planting now means you’ll be rewarded next summer when your own garden-fresh garlic is ready to harvest.

If you’ve followed my garlic-growing trials, you know that I took it as a personal gardening challenge to find ways to improve my garlic yield. I didn’t want to just grow more garlic, I wanted to grow bigger heads of garlic, too.

When I dug my garlic in late July, I was happy with the results and now I think I’ve cracked the code to growing great garlic.

First, start with good quality seed garlic. Tagawa Gardens in Aurora, Colo., had so many different varieties, I spent nearly 15 minutes reading the descriptions and making my choices. I bought Inchelium Red, Music, Chesnok Red and Romanian Red. I guess I like red garlic!

Fall fell with a “thud” this weekend after two nights of subfreezing temperatures.

The green ash tree in my front yard went from fully leafed to fully bare branches seemingly overnight due to two days of unseasonably cold temperatures.

On Friday morning, after the first night of subfreezing temperatures, I went outside and leaves were falling like rain from many of the uppermost branches and the lawn was covered with a thick layer of green leaves.

On Saturday morning, after the second night of subfreezing temps, the tree had but a few leaves on its lower branches. All of the other leaves had landed beneath the tree in a perfect circle just outside the outer edge of its canopy.

Of course I was immediately concerned with the health of this 25-year-old tree, especially after reading recent reports of a looming ash tree crisis.

Clearing out all vegetable garden debris is the first step toward next summer’s healthy plants.

You think I’d be glad to pull up the dead summer squash foliage after the ups and downs of growing it this year.

Early on I complained about the fruit not setting and having to pollinate the squash by hand.

Then I complained because I had so much yellow squash I had to find new ways to use it in the kitchen.

Now that it’s all gone, I’m a little wistful.

I loved looking out my office window and seeing a green and growing garden, that was alive with butterflies, bees and birds. Around here the time to enjoy it is so short compared to the amount of time the garden is empty of plants and pollinators.

But there’s still plenty to do in the garden now and it starts with raking up every bit of garden debris to put the vegetable garden to bed.