These ripe sungold tomatoes signal the summer harvest is about to begin.

This year’s growing season is taking a lot longer than most–just ask the Hatch chile farmers in New Mexico or the peach producers on the Western Slope. Many crops are delayed because of the cool spring weather that seemed to last forever.

I experimented with planting two tomato plants in early April, thinking the wall of waters would protect them. I was dreaming of taking my first bite of home-grown tomato in June.

Ha!

Those poor plants had to suffer through freezing weather, several snowstorms, driving rain and then suddenly hot weather. The tomatoes on those plants are just now starting to ripen.

I planted 14 different tomato varieties, but some of the tomato plants have yet to set fruit. That means I won’t be growing any 2 pound Giant Belgiums like I did last season.

In May, I started my Great Potato Gardening Experiment when I planted a plastic trash bag and my compost bin full of seed potatoes.

“I sure hope there are some potatoes growing in there,” I thought to myself as I took some pictures of my backyard potato garden.

It’s the first time I’ve tried to grow spuds–and depending on the outcome–it may be my last.

Right after planting at the end of May, the potatoes started to send up green leafy shoots.

When the shoots were about 7 inches tall, I added more of my soil mixture, part mushroom compost and part potting soil, to the bag and the composter, leaving a few inches of the plant showing.

I’ve tried to keep the potatoes well-watered, but not too wet. After they’d grown another 7 inches, I added another layer of soil mix.

I’m hoping tubers are forming at this very minute.

There are about 250 species of butterflies in Colorado, but I see more Two-Tailed Swallowtails than any other kind.

As part of National Pollinator Week, I’d like to take time today to salute butterflies.

This has been a good year for spotting butterflies in my yard, especially the beautiful Two-Tailed Swallowtails.

The ones that I’ve seen sailing through my backyard are particularly fond of landing on the roses and gathering pollen as they carefully tiptoe around each flower on their long, thin legs.

I’m not sure most people realize that butterflies aren’t only lovely to watch as they glide through the air, but they’re pollinators, too. They’re an important part of the ecosystem and when we don’t see many in the landscape it’s a signal that something may be wrong in the environment.

To make your yard more attractive to butterflies, create a landscape with food plants for both caterpillars and adult butterflies. Provide shelter from wind, like trees, shrubs and ornamental grasses and even fences.

Cottage gardens are filled with old-fashioned favorite flowers, like shrub roses, hollyhocks, lilies and honeysuckle, with garden structures for them to climb on.

For nearly as long as cottage gardens have been growing, artists from Claude Monet to Thomas Kincade have tried to capture the beauty of these charming landscapes.

Their paintings depict rambling gardens framed by vine-covered wooden arbors and overflowing with roses, colorful perennials and flowering shrubs. A cobblestone path typically winds its way through the garden to the door of a thatched cottage.

Gardens like these are more than just another pretty place. In England during the Victorian era, cottage dwellers planted simple gardens that were as beautiful as they were functional. These tightly-packed gardens were planted out of the need to grow food and herbal remedies on small plots of land. They included vegetables, herbs, hardy flowers, fruit trees and small shrubs.

Today’s edition of Workshop Wednesday will appeal to those who like small-scale gardening.  Alpine plants, succulents and other low-growing plants grow well in trough planters. Here’s how to plant a hypertufa container garden.

I’ve always enjoyed planting container rock gardens, so I was delighted to find a table of hypertufa trough planters at the recent Denver master gardeners’ plant sale.

I’ve loved the look of hypertufa planters ever since my in-laws made a batch years ago, but I haven’t worked up the gumption to tackle the process to make my own.

Hypertufa planters look like they’re made of stone or rock, but they’re a light-weight container made from cement mixed with other materials like vermiculite, perlite, peat moss and sand.

If you’d like to make your own hypertufa trough planter, there are good tips included in a recent Denver Post article on using alpine plants to create container rock gardens or miniature xeriscapes.

One of the toughest roses I’ve found that does consistently well in my Zone 5 backyard has turned into something we affectionately call The Rose Monster.

Something most people don’t know about me is that I grew up with a mom who had too many things going on inside the house to be worried about the landscape outside the house.

She didn’t plant flowers. We didn’t have a vegetable garden. There were no colorful containers overflowing with petunias. As long as the lawn got watered and mowed on a fairly regular basis, she was happy with her gardening efforts.

So it’s no surprise I was captivated by the one flowering plant in our yard—a beautiful climbing red rose. Every year that rose grew on its own. It wasn’t lovingly pruned and it certainly wasn’t babied with any special soils or rose fertilizers. It wasn’t protected from freezing temperatures with thick layers of mulch and there was no winter watering.

This edition of Workshop Wednesday is How to Plant a Strawberry Pot in 3 easy steps.

Harvesting fruit from trees along the Front Range is hit or miss. We’re often hit with a late spring freeze that guarantees we’ll miss our fresh peaches, apricots and other stone fruits.

But life isn’t just a bowl of cherries, it’s also filled with ripe red strawberries.

I think being able to go berry picking in your own backyard is one of life’s simple pleasures.

I’ve had a large container of strawberries in a corner of my patio for several years that have yielded several nice strawberry crops. Even though the strawberries were doing just fine, I wanted the container for another kind of planting.

I decided to experiment with transplanting the strawberries into a strawberry pot and thought I’d get it done before the plants grew too tall. But an exceptionally cool and wet spring prevented me from getting the transplanting done until some of the plants had already started to flower.

Today’s Workshop Wednesday is for gardeners who want to make the switch from liquid  synthetic chemical fertilizers to nature’s best all-natural soil conditioner.

If my early-season planting experiment is a success, I’ll owe it all to Authentic Haven Brand manure tea.

I planted two tomatoes, a ‘Roma’ and an ‘Early Girl’ on April 4, watered them in with manure tea and placed Wall of Water plant protectors around them. They survived several spring snowstorms, freezing overnight temperatures, severe wind gusts and a sudden 90-degree day.

Last week I finally removed the plastic protectors, staked them and gave them both another manure tea party. They look extremely healthy and, if the weather cooperates, I hope the ‘Early Girl’ will live up to her name.

I thought I’d use today’s Workshop Wednesday post as a “How To” for using manure tea in the garden. I’ve written about Authentic Haven Brand premium soil conditioners before and I’m proud to have this product as an advertiser on my site.

I dream of a dish of home-grown, home-made mashed potatoes and took the first steps toward making that dream come true on Sunday when I began the Great Potato Experiment in my garden.

I’ve read all about growing potatoes, I’ve interviewed farmers about growing potatoes and I’ve written their tips for growing potatoes, but this is my first attempt at growing my own.

Because potatoes are supposed to be one of the easiest root crops to grow, I decided to plant a few varieties in my garden this season.

There’s not much room in the vegetable bed for a big crop, so I used some of the planting alternatives I’ve heard about from others: growing potatoes in a trash bag and growing them in a compost bin.

I thought I could improve my chances for success if I ordered Colorado Certified seed potatoes and placed my order with the Potato Garden for 1 pound of organic Caribe and 1 pound of Adora potatoes.

As part of the May WordCount Blogathon, today’s special event is a blog post swap with another Blogathon Blogger. I’ve swapped blogging duties with Nancy Mann Jackson, a freelance writer who gardens with her husband and two young sons in Alabama.

Nancy blogs about gardening, harvesting, cooking and preserving with kids in tow at GrowingFoodandKids.com. You can find more of Nancy’s writing on her website at NancyJackson.com or connect with her on Twitter @nmjackson. (Blog post and photo by Nancy Mann Jackson)

Oh, Okra!

Growing okra is a lot like having babies; there is some discomfort, even pain, involved. But the end result is worth it all.