If you’re looking for a way to attract more bees to your garden, plant a patch of Lemon Queen sunflowers and join The Great Sunflower Project.

In May I planted a packet of Lemon Queen sunflower seeds so I could be one of the citizen scientists counting bees for the The Great Sunflower Project. The project is the brainchild of Grechen LeBuhn, a professor in the Department of Biology at San Francisco State University.

The project encourages gardeners to plant sunflowers and collect data that will help gauge the health of urban bee populations.

I’m one of about 50,000 gardeners who have signed up to plant and count. So far I’ve submitted the results of three observations.

I don’t know how many bees gardeners are counting in other areas, but I have to say, the bees are loving my Lemon Queens.

During each of my observations honeybees have landed on these sunflowers at nearly one landing per minute during each 15-minute observation.

Thanks to the Better Denver Bond Campaign–and Denver voters–the new Denver Botanic Gardens Greenhouse Complex is almost ready for its debut. This morning, the Gardens hosted members of the media to a sneak peek of the shiny new facility.

The Denver Botanic Gardens Greenhouse Complex opens to visitors on September 4, but if you’re a Denver County resident, you might want to wait until September 6 when you can get in for free. Marketing and PR director Robin Doerr told me the free day is DBG’s way of saying thank you to the community for approving funding for the project.

“We’re humbled in a time of difficult economic conditions to be able to do this,” she said.

More than $15 million was allocated for the major construction project that includes 50,000 square-feet of greenhouses, labs, offices, classrooms and other amenities. The exterior shows creative blending of existing structures–the Tropical Conservatory on the right–with the new Marnie’s Pavilion (left).

Do you have a floriferous container you’re especially proud of this year? If so, you may want to enter the Zone 4 Magazine container contest. But hurry…the deadline for entries is September 1.

In June I posted a blog called Plant a Hypertufa for Small-Scale Gardening and I showed how to create a container rock garden. In just a few short months, the ice plant and mock strawberry in my hypertufa have filled in and spilled over the edge, just like I hoped they would.

I’m thinking of entering a picture of it in the Zone 4 Magazine container contest.

To enter just send a digital photo, with a description of the container and its contents, to the nice folks at Zone 4 Magazine.  Be sure to include your name, mailing address, email address and telephone number.

Zone 4 is a quarterly magazine based in Bozeman, Montana, and it’s one of my favorites. Every issue is filled with helpful information for gardeners trying to grow in difficult climates–like ours–and Idaho, Utah and Wyoming.

Have an interest in Colorado’s native plants like this Pasque flower? Then the Colorado Native Plant Society annual meeting is an educational event you’re sure to enjoy. (Photo and information provided by Autumn Hummel, CNPS)

The Colorado Native Plant Society’s (CNPS) annual meeting is taking place September 10-12 on the Auraria Campus in Denver and all plant enthusiasts are invited to attend.

“Colorado Collage: Inspecting and Protecting our Special Places” is the theme for this year’s meeting.

Events begins on Friday night with a Rare Plants Symposium and opportunity to meet CNPS members and guest speakers.

Saturday features an impressive line-up of speakers including a keynote presentation by Steve O’Kane called “Boot Laces and Uncommon Places.” Dr. O’Kane is a biologist at the University of Northern Iowa.

Presentations will cover native plants and plant communities across the state, from the north to the southeast; from Gateway Palisade State Natural Area to The Great Sand Dunes National Park.

Good things do come in small packages, especially when talking about miniature tomatoes. These gems may be small in size, but they’re big on flavor.

When I planted my crop of mini tomatoes in May, I was looking forward to harvesting a big batch of small fruits in a variety of colors, shapes and sizes.

Now I’m enjoying the fruits of my spring-time efforts.

Every year I plant a number of small tomatoes in containers on my patio, mostly as insurance against elements that seem to conspire against abundant tomato gardening and harvests in my climate. Many summers it’s either too cool or too hot. There may be too little precipitation or there’s too much hail.

Planting a nice selection of tomatoes helps ensure I’ll have some kind of crop by the end of the season. While the rest of my heirloom and other larger tomatoes are still growing, I’m enjoying the superior flavor of these littler ones.

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.

The Fourth of July is just around the corner and the celebration calls for some good old fashioned craft-making fun.

I had such a great time making a Fourth of July wreath for my front door, I thought you might like to try making one, too.

Most of the materials were found in my own backyard, but I took a few shortcuts with craft-store goods. I’ve never been able to make as nice a bow as I can buy for 99 cents.

If you have vines growing in your yard, like the trumpet vine growing in mine, you should have plenty of material to craft your own twisted vine wreath and I’ve included some tips on how to make one.

If you take a stroll through your garden, I’m sure you’ll find some flower heads you can use to decorate the wreath, like yarrow and baby’s breath.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

Materials

It’s time to celebrate National Pollinator Week, June 21-27, with a WesternGardeners.com salute to pollinators. Today we proudly salute bees!

Thanks to the efforts of the Pollinator Partnership, pollinators are being celebrated across the country this week. As part of its mission, the Pollinator Partnership works to protect pollinators–like bees, birds, butterflies, bats and beetles–through conservation, education and research.

Today we salute the little workhorses of the garden, bees. Gardeners already know that to have a beautiful, productive garden, bees have to like to hang out in it. Especially honey bees.

Honey bees are the best of the insect pollinators and hundreds of fruits and vegetables would disappear if we lost all of our honey bees. But, as many of you already know, our bee populations are in serious trouble. Loss of habitat and use of pesticides are two key reasons why bees are being threatened. Honey bees are also suffering from a mysterious disease called Colony Collapse Disorder. Just this week, researchers identified imported, disease-carrying honeybees as a possible cause of colony collapse.

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.