Congratulations to Carrie Fritz of New Prague, Minn., for taking the top prize in the 3rd Annual Weird Veggie and Funny Fruit contest sponsored by WesternGardeners.com. Her Love Apple is actually three tomatoes that grew into the shape of one perfect heart. “Love Apples” (La Pomme D’Amour) is an old French term for tomatoes.

Our contest judge, Geri Koncilija, chose Carrie’s entry saying, “I really grew to love this guy.”

There’s also a lot to love about the background of Carrie’s vegetable garden.  Last year her fiance was deployed overseas so they couldn’t plant a garden, but this year they were able to plant one together.  Carrie wrote, “Our garden started out of love and has blossomed.” She also mentioned that a September wedding is in the works.

Second place goes to Amy Lambert, also from Minnesota, for her Tomato Grinch. Amy’s tomato caused Geri to break into the signature song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas: “You’re a rotter, Mr. Tomato Grinch, you’re full of dreadful spots. You have no place in a garden, you’re scaring all the crops.”

My mid-summer garden is filled with heirloom fruits and vegetables including some adorable round baby squash, long purple eggplant, tomatillos, 7 different kinds of sweet and hot peppers, cucumbers, herbs, and 11 varieties of tomatoes. Not shown are the trombetta squash that are just now starting to take off.

Everybunny ready for the Denver County Fair?

The first-ever Denver County Fair is just a few weeks away! The fun begins on July 28 and ends July 31 at the National Western Complex.

If you’ve wanted to win a blue ribbon for your gardening efforts, the fair is your chance to show what you grow.

WesternGardeners.com is sponsoring the In-Season Vegetables competition and I hope you’ll join in. The competitions are open to any Colorado gardener. The competition entry deadline is going to be extended past July 18. Walk-in entries will also be considered. Check the Denver County Fair website for details.

Check your garden for the biggest and the best veggies in these categories:

• Root veggies (like potatoes, carrots, kohlrabi)
• Leaf vegetables (like lettuce, broccoli, cabbage)
• Vine vegetables (like cukes, zukes, squash)
• Peppers of all kinds
• Garlic

Saturday was a cold day for one of the Plant a Row for the Hungry kickoff events, but that didn’t dampen gardening spirits. Volunteers, Elizabeth Staton and Cynthia Pasquale, kept busy by handing out free garden starter kits to more than 100 gardeners.

The kits included free vegetable and herb seeds from Colorado seed companies BBB Seed, Botanical Interests, and Lake Valley Seed. Gardeners promised to plant the seeds and donate extra produce to any of the Food Bank of the Rockies donation sites or food service agencies in their neighborhood.

More images from the day are posted on our Plant a Row Colorado Facebook page.

I want to send a special “Thank You!” to all the Plant a Row for the Hungry volunteers in the Denver Metro area who helped at the kickoff events on Saturday. That includes dedicated volunteers who helped hand out the free garden starter kits and gardeners who volunteered to help plant extra produce in their gardens.

I’m especially grateful to the CSU-Denver Master Gardeners and the Front Range Organic Gardeners who let us join in their plant sales so we could reach as many gardeners as possible. Several hundred people will be planting produce to help feed hungry families by donating fresh vegetables to food banks, church pantries, and soup kitchens.

More images from the day are posted to our Plant a Row Colorado Facebook page.

It’s Official. Spring has Sprung.

Even though the weather is still iffy, gardeners are ready to start the 2011 gardening season.

It’s been a long, cold winter and just about every gardener I know is itching to get outside.

There’s plenty to do, too.

There’s also plenty of time.

While it’s too early for many warm-season gardening tasks, like planting tomatoes and peppers or sowing cucumber seeds, there still are many lawn and garden tasks…

Here are 9 to try:

1. Plant cool-season veggies: broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, onions, lettuce, peas, radish, spinach, and other greens.
2. Prune shrubs to remove dead branches and crossing branches.
3. Sow tomato and pepper seeds, if you haven’t already.
4. Place catalog orders for specialty perennials.
5. Pull back mulch wherever green shoots have started sprouting.
6. Sketch out vegetable garden bed plan.
7. Cut back ornamental grasses.
8. Apply pre-emergent herbicides to prevent grassy and broadleaf lawn weeds.

Every gardening season brings ideas for growing experiments in the vegetable garden.

I know for some people, gardening is a serious endeavor–and I used to feel that way, too.

But now I look at my garden as one big experiment in what I can get away with in sowing and growing.

In past seasons I’ve grown round baby carrots in a large patio container, planted Italian heirloom squash on a rose arbor, and raised a crop of potatoes in a trash bag.

But not all my experiments have been successful.

Some especially notable failures include trying to get a head start on spring by transplanting tomatoes into the garden in March and planting peppers long before the weather warmed.

This year I plan to expand my culinary crop and stretch my skills with some new-to-me vegetables and herbs I’ll plant from seed, like tomatillos and cumin.

While planning your vegetable garden this year, consider using vertical spaces.

Growing up is a great way to get more out of gardening in a small garden space. These vines of the ‘Trombetta di Albenga’ climbing summer squash grew on an arbor in my backyard last summer and produced beautiful light-green fruit.

If I would have planted the seeds in my vegetable bed, there wouldn’t have been room for anything else.

The plants produced long vines with beautiful large, ivy-shaped leaves. Even if these plants didn’t grow delicious fruit, the vines are spectacular.

Trombetta is an Italian heirloom summer squash that resembles its cousins in name only. Long, light-green fruit grow into curvy squash with a distinct trumpet shape. The seedless fruit has a mild, almost nut-like flavor that’s sure to win over those who say they don’t like squash.

The fruit is best when it’s harvested at about 12-16 inches long, but I let one grow to almost 3 feet and it was still tender and tasty.

It’s a new year, but time’s already slipping away. Only 66 more days until Spring.

Spring may not be within reach just yet, but you couldn’t tell that by the way my heart leaps every time I open a new seed catalog.

It’s easy for me to lose track of time while slowly turning the pages of each new book as soon as it reaches my desk.

So many new seeds; sow little time.

Even though I order a lot of seed from catalogs, I recently learned the majority of gardeners don’t buy through paper catalogs. Most prefer to buy seed packets for gardening at their local garden center or retail shop.

I was especially surprised to hear this during a conversation I had with Renee Shepherd of Renee’s Seeds.

I had emailed her to ask for a photo of the company’s 2011 seed catalog to update a catalog review I wrote for VegetableGardener.com last year.

The end of the year–and the decade–is a good time to look back at some of the changes I’ve seen in the world of gardening.



The exceptionally dry summer of 2000 caused me to change the way I thought about my suburban landscape.

Using only a spade and an old wheelbarrow, I dug up most of the front lawn and replaced the bluegrass with drought-tolerant flowers and shrubs.

Now I’m seeing more yards with less lawn and more homeowners interested in planting xeriscapes and learning about sustainable landscaping practices.

Here are a few other positive gardening and landscaping trends I’ve noticed over the last 10 years:

1. More people are thinking about how their individual lawn and garden choices impact the environment.

2. Nurseries and garden centers are carrying more environmentally-friendly lawn and garden products.

3. There are more xeric and native plants to choose from.

4. The eat-local movement took hold and more vegetable gardens are being planted.