Why buy bags of compost to help your gardening efforts when you can turn ordinary kitchen and yard waste into black gold?

I had the chance to talk with Chris McLaughlin for an article on compost tea I wrote for The Denver Post earlier this season.

Something Chris said during the interview stuck with me and I think about it every time I step into the garden:

“Compost is at the very heart of organic gardening. It’s literally the heartbeat.”

Taking kitchen and garden waste, watching it decompose and then returning it to the earth is a powerful gardening concept.

Compost is the answer to most gardening questions because it can be used to loosen clay soil or to add water-holding ability to sandy soil. Compost boosts soil fertility because it brings in the microorganisms that support all forms of plant and animal life, Chris said.

Vegetable gardeners in the Rocky Mountain states will find gardening can be a little easier and a lot more enjoyable with a new book from Cool Springs Press.

If you garden anywhere in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah or Wyoming, you have to get your hands on a copy of Guide to Rocky Mountain Vegetable Growing by Robert Gough & Cheryl Moore-Gough.

But that’s only if you want to have a successful vegetable garden this season.

My brand-new review copy of the book is already marked up, dog-eared and broken in.

Whether you’re an experienced vegetable gardener or you’re just getting ready to take your first tentative steps toward the garden bed, the Goughs have some advice for you. They wrote this book because it’s the resource they wanted to have when they first started gardening in such a challenging region.

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.

You had to “tweet to meet” for Wednesday evening’s tweet up at Rose Cottage in Raleigh, N.C.

After a long day of travel to the annual Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh, it was a welcome change of pace to stroll through Raleigh’s historic district to Rose Cottage.

On the way to the GWA twibe tweet up, I passed the state capitol and a historic marker proclaiming that Andrew Johnson, U.S. President from 1865-69, was born in a kitchen only a mile from where I stood.

Rose Cottage is the home owned by Jim and Sharon Bright who opened their garden for the GWA twibe’s tweet up. The event was organized by Helen Yoest (@HelenYoest) and Elizabeth Licata (@GWI).

Proven Winners sponsored the get together and it was an enjoyable way to meet face-to-face with more than 40 personalities I knew only by their twitter tags.

Crops with tasty roots, shoots, and leaves are nature’s way of making sure we get plenty of fresh vegetables even when the weather turns cold.



If you’ve never grown a fall garden, now’s the time to start. Besides the joy of bypassing expensive veggies in the produce aisle, many cool-season vegetables are also good for your health.

Vegetables belonging to the cabbage family, like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi and flowering kale, have cancer-fighting phytonutrients.

Other delicious cold-weather vegetable friends include beets, onions, carrots, peas, chard, endive, lettuce, collards, mustards, turnips, radishes, spinach, and even Chinese cabbage. Look for cultivars that are known to be cold-hardy and fast-maturing. Garden centers often carry transplants of fall crops that are most suitable for their specific area.

An added benefit of planting for cold weather is that the frosty temperatures actually bring out the flavor and sweetness of some vegetables, like parsnips and kale.

If you planted garlic in the fall, it should be ready to harvest right now. The mature scapes on hardneck varieties signal the bulbs are ready in my garden.

I haven’t had the best luck growing garlic in my garden, even though most gardeners says there’s nothing to it; just plant it and it will grow.

But that technique didn’t work for me and I was always disappointed with the size of my garlic bulbs at harvest time.

So last fall I decided I’d put some real effort into it to see if I could improve my yield. I researched websites and then attended the Garlic Festival at Tagawa Garden Center to learn every possible best practice for growing garlic. Then I went to work in my garden.

Because soil is the most important part of growing good-sized bulbs, I really worked at improving drainage and fertility. I added compost and top-dressed with fertilizer when I planted.

The best use for coffee grounds is as an addition to the compost pile.

The “Grounds for your Garden” program started by Starbucks in 1999 is a terrific example of win-win-win-win in business.

By giving away tons of used coffee grounds, the company has been able to recycle a product it would normally throw away, frugal gardeners get a free soil amendment, compost piles get a good source of nitrogen and birds, bees, butterflies and other insects are the ultimate beneficiaries.

Used coffee grounds are a good soil amendment but, contrary to popular belief grounds don’t make a good fertilizer when used alone. The best use of used coffee grounds is to add them to the compost bin as another source of “green.”

The researchers at the Oregon State University Extension Service say when coffee grounds are used as a soil amendment “keep them damp and add some nitrogen fertilizer when you do this.” Apparently the grounds feed microbes in the soil, which depletes nitrogen and needs to be replaced.

Leah Ingram is a lifestyle expert and seasoned spokesperson who appears frequently in the media to discuss shopping, gift buying, eco-friendly topics and frugal living.

I recently posted about our ability to become accidental pumpkin gardeners at our old house. In response to that post “Jen on the Edge” made a comment about lasagna gardening. Of course, my mind went immediately to that gooey Italian dish. But this isn’t what Jen meant.

“Instead of digging a garden, you build one by layer leaves, grass clippings, compost, dirt, etc. on top of layers of newspaper or cardboard. If you do it now, you’ll have a great garden and amazing dirt next spring,” Jen wrote.

If you like container gardening, you’ll appreciate Better Than Rocks.

If you’re still using rocks in the bottom of your containers to aid drainage, there’s a new product that can make your gardening life a bit easier. Better Than Rocks is…well, you know.

This product is made of 100% recycled plastic and comes in squares that can be cut to any size for use in planters of every shape and size, including window boxes.

It was easy for me to layer the mesh-like product in the bottom of the planter and then fill the container with potting soil before planting.

The pots were so much lighter to move around the patio and I used less potting soil.

So far, I’ve found the product does help prevent soil from draining away during watering. I also like the idea the plastic can be reused for several seasons.

Better Than Rocks is located in Hudson, Wisconsin. You can read more at www.betterthanrocks.com.

I think these irises are as beautiful as any orchid.

Irises have been part of the landscape for so long it’s easy to take them for granted. Cultivated for hundreds of years, and a staple of grandma’s garden, the bearded iris is the perennial that keeps on giving.

These easy-to-grow plants are colorful, drought-friendly additions to any landscape. The plant’s upright leaves add vertical interest throughout the season and the flowers come in a dazzling array of colors, color combinations, shapes, sizes and bloom times. They also multiply each year.

Irises also serve many purposes in the landscape. Tall irises are traditionally planted along fences or in corners as specimen plants. But mixing heights and bloom times can add color to the garden throughout spring.

Irises can also fill in areas where it’s difficult to put other plants, like the edge of a sidewalk or along the driveway because they can take the heat.