Hi CD,

Welcome to Colorado! When are you planning to get here?

Below is a link to the CSU Colorado MG Home Page. Hopefully you can find what youre looking for there.

And, I donÂt have time to live link it, but if you need more info, hereÂs a link to the County Extension Offices. You could call the Jeffco one to find out more.
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/cedirectory/countylist.cfm
(If this doesnÂt link directly to the list of offices, just click on County Offices!)

For your soil, lots and lots and lots and lots of home grown compost (or other good quality organic matter)Âand it STILL wonÂt be black! But itÂll be "useable!" I grew up in Illinois, and no matter what you do to/with it, itÂs NEVER gonna look like good Midwest soil! But we all manage to make it work. Just takes some "readjusting!"

Gotta go, but, again, welcome,
Skybird

P.S. Arvada probably is z5, but weÂve been getting warmer out here in recent years, so many if not most z6 things will probably work for you too. We have so many micro climates in our yards out hereÂespecially because of our high-altitude sunÂthat you can find somewhere to grow, or at least try, almost anything!

Welcome.

There are Master Gardeners in JeffCo, I'll ask the GF for some contact info, give me a few days (she used to work for Denver Extension office).

Welcome also to Colo soil - alkaline, not black. We are semi-arid, and often have damaging, desiccating winds. We learn to love our clay soil's WHC here and amend just a little, and grow adapted xeric plants (wait 'til you get your water bill for August if you aren't careful). Your MG training will give you a leg up in adapting to the climate, and you'll need it; it will be difficult to bring much of what you are used to - no foxgloves and hostas for you! bearded iris maybe, Dutch iris better here.

We are zone 5, Arvada is Sunset Zone 2a-2b depending upon the year. This year, 2b. I was outside today in shorts and a T-shirt, placing rocks on our soil mounds. Some daffies and crocus are up. I fully expect snow to return again this winter.

Your growing season should be roughly 135 days on average, some years more, but regardless the season is easily extended to 155-160 with little effort save for ensuring row covers aren't shredded by wind. We are having lettuce and mustard out of the unheated cold frame tonight (constant sun allows this).

Again, give me a few days and I'll have your extension contact and who to talk to about MG opportunities. You will love, love, love the Denver Botanical Garden's opportunities for volunteering - Panayoti is phenomenal. And the GF is the head of the big tree planting initiative here and there are always opportunities there for volunteer hours.

Dan

Welcome to RMG from another midwest transplant (Illinois). We don't get nearly as cold in the winter as De Moines does, but we'll get frosts much later in the spring and earlier in the fall. Summers can get fairly hot, but there's very little humidity, so it's easier to deal with. On the down side, you can't just plant things and let them grow because there's not nearly enough rain.

As Skybird said, add lots of organic matter as often as possible and your soil will continue to improve. I've been adding compost to the garden every year and also piling leaves and coffee grounds from Starbucks on in the fall. I wouldn't say the soil is black (at least not Iowa or Illinois black) but it's getting to be sort of a darker brown (instead of the yellow I started with).

Welcome. North East Colorado used to be zone 4, now it is listed as zone 5. Guess we warmed up. Problem is, especially with tomatoes, is we can get one last frost in May and that sure shortens the season.
Kenny

Carpe:

your JeffCo contact for MGs is

Cheryl Mulhauser, cmulhaus@jeffco.us 303-271-6620. I did one of their plant ID outings last year and it was well run and the gentleman who led the walk was very knowledgeable.

Dan

carpediem,

I second that the spring frosts are killers. Last year we got 3 inches of snow on May 1st, so don't just assume the frost is past when the weather warms up. I keep my tomatoes and peppers in pots so I can move them under cover or bring them in for a time. This is also nice when we get that dreaded summer hail storm that destroys everything in seconds. If I happen to be home when it starts then I can save most of my plants.

Water, water, water! You are leaving fertile plains and moving to the arid prairies! Nothing grows without you actually watering it here. Nothing, nothing, nothing! My grandmother lived all her life in Shelby, Iowa. She had the most delectable, productive garden in the smallest little space I have ever seen. I don't think she even owned a garden hose.

The only advantage Colorado has over Iowa is that we seem to have fewer bugs. We do have problems with cut-worms and aphids, but not too much else, at least for gardens. We do have Codling Moths that destroy the apples.

Living next to the Rockies our weather is terribly erratic. "If you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes!"

Also, your skin will dry out. (And if I'm not too gross, your nose as well!) Keep a humidifier going all winter, or have one installed on your furnace. (I know you can't possibly imagine this, but yes, you will need a humidifier!)

Welcome to the land of the beautiful sunset!!! I miss them so much when I visit my relatives in Iowa. I'm ever so glad to get back to the way Colorado says good-bye to the day, every day, in such a dramatic way!

Thanks so much for your information. I will be Arvada next week for a week so may take a shovel and look at the soil. It sounds like I'll need to do lots of amending.

carpediem, you may as well consider Colorado a different planet. I am from Illinois, where I thought I was fairly knowledgeable, but I was humbled by Colorado. They have plants here that I've never even heard of and I've had to relearn quite a bit. I know you have specific plants that you want to continue to grow, but the best advice I can give is for you to adapt to Colorado rather than try to adapt the climate and soil to you. Colorado can be difficult and harsh, but there is so much that does do well here that you won't feel slighted by giving up some of your mid-western favorites.

Wow, I didnt realize there were so many Illinois/Midwest transplants out here! Any of you planning to ever move back to the High Humidity Zone? I cant even imagine!

Sowe know that you can successfully transplant "things" from the Midwest to the high, dry Rockies! Im going to agree with Buckley that youre going to find a whole new world of perennials that you probably never even heard of out herebut Im also going to recommend that you do go ahead and bring your favorites along to give them a try out here! Some will probably need very highly amended soil, and most will need a lot more water than the xeric stuff youll easily find out here, but most will probably do ok for you if youre careful about the soil, water, and light conditions"our" sun is a LOT hotter than the "Midwest" sun! ;-)

And you can definitely grow Hosta out here! (Try it, Dan, youll like it! Unless you go completely xeric, of course!) Some varieties will definitely do better than others, and you WONT find them spreading all over the placelike they would in Iowa or Illinoisbut youll also probably find that you have less trouble with slugs when you grow them out here. Francee is an easy to grow one, which, as near as I can tell, will grow almost anywhere. I had it at my last (rental) house where I did virtually nothing to the soil, and it didnt to too badly. When I moved here (now own) I brought divisions of 70 plants with me, including the Francee. Because of circumstances at the time, I did virtually nothing to the soil when I transplanted the hosta, and its still doing pretty well. I'm sure if I dug it up and added lots of organic matter, it would do even better, but I have too many other things to do, so poor Francee is stuck in clayfor now at least! Heres a pic!

And heres a couple of the other hostas I have. Its Serendipity on the left and an unknown marginata on the right. Hosta will definitely do better out here if they're in almost complete shade and in an amended, highly organic soil. I keep mine WET in summer AND winter!

And that IS a foxglove between the hostas and the fern.

They werent "lush" but they did bloom, and it looks like most of them are going to make it over wintereven the D. purpurea Foxy, which is a biennialbut unless something very strange happens in the next couple months, it will be back, and hopefully bigger and better than last year. I started a whole bunch of foxglove from seed in 07, some biennial and some perennial, and it looks like almost all of them are going to make it over winter. Digitalis thapsi Spanish Peaks is a Plant Select selection from 99 and is a true perennial, and Digitalis obscura, willow leaf or rusty foxglove is a Plant Select selection from 04 and is actually xeric. My Spanish Peaks (thank you whoever brought it to the swap!) didnt bloom yet this year, but Im expecting flowers in 09, and I dont have D. obscura yet, but Ive seen the flowers, and its kinda interesting, so some day Ill have one. I think its rustier looking than in the Plant Select picture. (I just discovered you still can't link directly to a picture on the Plant Select site, so go to the Plant/Photo Search link and type Digitalis in the search box to get there!)

Ill try almost anything one timeand if its something I REALLY want, Ill try it two or three times before I give uptrying it in different places with different conditions. So I say go for it and bring along whatever you dont want to lose. They may not all make it, but most of them probably will, and as some of them slowly "leave you," youll have time to start checking out our "local selection" to find things to replace them with. I guarantee youll find lots of fun things out here that would be very unhappy in the Midwestme includedbut, actually, I was sorta thinking of PLANTS!

When you get out here next week, I think youre gonna like our weather! Check it out!

Good luck with your move, and were glad you found us here at RMG,
Skybird

What buckley said.

Skybird, nicely done in your yard BTW.

I have a t-shirt that has a wood nymph wrapped around a tree on front and text on back that reads "why stop at hugging?" so that's where I start from ;o) . Except for trees and garden vegetables, I plant zero plants that aren't adapted (unfortunately, however, I can't convince the rest of the family to rip out the Kentucky bluegrass). My landscape design business in Sacramento was all xeric, and I took no clients that wanted an English garden-high water landscape.

So, (putting on my urban planner-green infrastrucure-policy guy hat) all I'll say is that very soon likely everyone on the Front Range will have water charges that will be much more expensive than now, and the "landscaping" tier for water charges [middle tier in 3-tier system] will be steeply increased unless we all vote to limit human population growth. New home tap fees will likely be low-mid $5 figures (more if we do oil shale on western slope to the fullest). Plants like hosta, digitalis, and all that other stuff I miss east of 100º will be luxuries.

Not that I'm saying people shouldn't be able to have them, just that they will be paying steep charges to bring a piece of back east with them. Our garden has something in bloom from early Apr to mid-end Oct, and textural interest all year. Nice landscaping is easily done with xerics.

[/soapbox]

Dan

Hey, Dan! Im all for hugging! Trees included! ;-)

KBG has been slowly disappearing in my backyard ever since I moved in here! Ive probably reached about the minimum amount now, but that kinda depends on just how crazy I get for more space to plant perennials! And I kind of dream about taking out a bunch of it in my front yard and putting in a BIG, freeform perennial bed out there, but so far I sorta have a problem with doing that! I dress like a bag ladyat bestwhen Im gardening, and most of the time I wear a pair of shorts and a blouse that are so threadbare Id be arrested if I wore them out into the front yard where people could see me! So that beds out for nowbut, again, desperation for space can do strange things!

[My Soapbox!] But if only people would learn to water it properly, I dont find KBG to be that much of a problem. Mine only gets deeply watered about every two weeks (or less depending on my schedule), and while it doesnt always look as great as some of the neighbors, it has deep roots and will keep going and going if we ever get really severe watering restrictions. Way back in the 70's, when Denver had their very first watering restrictions, I lived up in an old neighborhood in Park Hill, and a lot of the older neighbors watered their grass every day. It was a real pretty green! When the restrictions went into effect and they could only water every third or fourth day, their pretty green turned an nice even shade of brownand their grass was dead! They had been growing the stuff more like an air plant and there were a lot of distraught people around! I dont think Ill ever get to a NO KBG yard. I like to have a place to go "sit on the grass" on a nice evening, and if I ever have the swap here again, there wouldnt be anywhere to "go" if I took it all out! But I have a (too) small residential lot, so theres not all that much KBG, and Im oldeand set in my ways!!! I do think that perennial bed in the front yard is probably gonna happen in the next couple yearsas soon as my current gardening clothes fall all the way apart and need to be replaced with something more politically correct! And that bed will be on the south side in FULL sun, and WILL be xeric! This year Im taking out the Russian Sage and some of the other xeric things in my backyard that arent getting enough sun because of the neighbors overhanging cottonwoods! And the things Im taking out are all things I WANT, but dont have the right place to put them right now!

Since youre into xeric, if you decide to come to one (or both) of the swaps, and if youd be interested in some ground cover sedums and sempervivums, let me know. I go a little bit crazy with the Hen & Chicks, and I have 16 different varieties by now. I dont know the variety names of most of them, but most of them are really coolespecially with their winter colors. And I have 8 or 9 different sedums. With a small yard Im obviously not using them to "cover ground," but I enjoy having all the different ones, so keep them constrained to "accent plant" sizemeaning I always have plenty to give away. And I have Delosperma nubigenum, yellow iceplant, Delosperma basuticum White Nugget, and Panayotis Delosperma Kelaidis Mesa Verde. I think theyre all cool, and I offer starts of most of these every time we have a swap. CD, youre included in this offer if youd like some starts for your new dry-land gardensand consider coming to the swaps where you can pick up some free plants to help get you going even if youre not into succulents!

Oh! And the two Plant Select foxgloves I was talking about above are BOTH apparently considered to be xeric! I didnt know the Spanish Peaks was xeric, but I just happened to notice it with the info on the Plant Select site. And I can testify that the D. obscura is xeric because there was one in one of Paulinos display gardens, and it rarely got watered at all, and NEVER got watered well! So EVEN YOU can have foxglove if you want to, Dan!

OH! And, since youre into xeric, do you know about Kelly Grummons site where he sells LOTS of hardy cacti and some really cool Agaves and other things? Kelly is part owner of Timberline, and he has some really spectacular cactus display gardens over there. Many of them bloom around June, and its well worth driving over there just to see them!
Cold Hardy Cactus from the American West and Beyond!

CD, not intending to hijack your thread here, but I hope youll find some useful info here too. Heres a link to the Timberline Gardens site, where Kelly has, easily, the biggest selection of perennials in the Denver Metro area.

Skybird