The shovels featured in the work, Palas por Pistolas by Pedro Reyes of Mexico City, were used to plant trees on the grounds of one Denver elementary school during The Nature of Things art exhibit in July. The 20 shovels lying in a row on the floor meant there were 20 fewer weapons on the streets of one city in Mexico.

July was a busy month around here, but John and I managed to block out an entire day to take in several Biennial of the Americas events during the month-long celebration in downtown Denver. We’re so glad we did.

The Nature of Things was the title of the contemporary art exhibit at the reopened and partially-renovated McNichols Building. The exhibit featured artists from North, South and Central America who expressed themes of innovation, sustainability, community and the arts through their work. Many dealt with issues of social change.

If you’ll be traveling to New Mexico in early August, you may want to plan a stop in Taos for the Los Jardineros Garden Club’s annual garden and home tour.

I got a nice note from Jeannie Admire of the Los Jardineros Garden Club in Taos inviting WesternGardeners.com readers to join the group for its annual garden and home tour. This sounds like a terrific event for any gardener headed to New Mexico August 7.

The tour includes four private homes with fabulous southwestern gardens. According to the garden club’s website, the tour includes:

A custom built, free form adobe that sits on two landscaped acres featuring a meditation garden.

A contemporary adobe filled with one-of-a-kind furnishings surrounded by architectural outdoor entertaining spaces opening onto natural pinon and sage.

A family home in Ranchitos with water features and an abundant vegetable and flower gardens.

A rambling rancho in Las Colonias surrounded by an orchard and specimen gardens filled with roses, succulents and edibles.

Bill McDorman, president of Seeds Trust, is dedicated to helping gardeners preserve heirloom varieties for future generations. Bill will present his “Going to Seed” presentation in Pueblo, Colo., on August 5. (Image and information courtesy of Seeds Trust.)

Legendary seedsman Bill McDorman, president of Seeds Trust, will bring his Going to Seed Summer Revival Tour to Pueblo on Thursday, August 5th.

The program, co-sponsored by Pueblo County and CSU Extension, helps promote the role of gardeners in saving heirloom seeds.

Bill’s presentation is one part exposé on the need to address diversity, regional adaptability and food security by saving seeds, and one part seed saving techniques.

In the late 1980s, Bill was so concerned about the globalization of the seed market and the proliferation of hybrid American seeds, he traveled behind the Iron Curtain searching for open-pollinated, cold-tolerant varieties.

While in Russia, Bill was given seeds to many heirloom treasures from gardeners who did so under severe penalty if caught.

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.

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.

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.

WesternGardeners.com welcomes our newest advertiser: Flxx Rainwater Harvesting Systems and Equipment located in Boulder. Flxx serves rural Colorado, and nearby states, providing complete rainwater harvesting solutions from design to installation.  (Photos  provided by Flxx Rainwater.)

Colorado’s water laws have never allowed for the collection and storage of rainwater until last July.

Now, some rural Coloradans are allowed to lawfully capture and store rainwater on their property.

Legislative changes created the opportunity for rural residents to capture and use rainwater that flows off their rooftops.

However, residents who get their water from a municipality or water district are still prohibited from collecting rainwater in Colorado.

Harvesting rainwater is a sustainable option to letting rain simply slip away. Green-minded Coloradans can now catch it, store it and use it.

Catch It

This week’s Gardens Around the Globe feature is set close to home in the gardens of the SEEDS program in Durham, North Carolina. This urban farming leadership development program helps teenagers make healthy food choices, practice organic gardening and learn a variety of business practices.

SEEDS stands for “South Eastern Efforts Developing Sustainable Spaces” and is one of three community gardens in the U.S. honored with a 2010 Nature Hills Nursery Green America Award for making a difference in the Durham community. SEEDS was selected for the First Place Award out of more than 200 applications submitted by community groups, nonprofit organizations and gardening programs across the country. SEEDS will receive $1500 in plants to use in the gardens.

I had the chance to visit SEEDS last September and was able to see groups of teens getting hands-on experience gardening, growing food and learning to respect the land and each other. SEEDS mission is to “help individuals, neighborhoods and communities grow together through gardening, gathering and education.”

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.