Veggie gardening, Front Range style

We did very little vegetable gardening at our Chicago house. In our last couple of years there, we put in a small raised bed and successfully grew radishes, cucumbers, and lettuce, but then I got busy with other stuff and left the garden to go feral. (You're welcome, bunnies!)

Growing food has always been a desire of ours, and now we finally have the space to do it right. TMCH and I plotted (ha!) our ideas independently, and are gradually phasing them in. He put in a raised bed on one of the burn scars south of the house, for direct outdoor planting. Instead of planting in rows, he's following the principles of Square-Foot Gardening. The bed is surrounded with logs (of course) and filled with bagged garden soil. Long-term, we'll think about getting several yards of soil delivered, but Year 1 is for low-cost experimentation!

So far, TMCH has planted spinach, onions, carrots, and lettuce. Despite the often sub-freezing overnight weather and a very amusing 21-inch snowfall on May 11, his little seedlings are popping up and looking good!

Meantime, I decided to try starting seeds indoors for the first time. I invested in a cheap shoplight with daylight spectrum bulbs, a couple of plastic humidity trays, and some seed-starting mix. I also "liberated" some large aluminum baking sheet-type-things from a "Surplus" pile in the hallway at work. They make lovely sturdy drip trays. I set up in the laundry room with the light on a timer, and planted all sorts of stuff.

The tomatoes, cauliflower, and broccoli I recently transplanted into larger containers with soil and compost. I planned to do the same with the peppers, but time and weather have really not been conducive lately. When transplanting, I learned that one plant per cell really is ideal. If you have multiple seedlings in one cell, getting their roots disentangled is tough, and pinching off all but one seems so heartless! I water as needed with a weak solution of fish emulsion. It seems to do a great job but holy cow does it smell bad. On the plus side, the dogs love me!

Yesterday afternoon I started the "hardening off" process. Hardening off, it turns out, means "take your plants outside, totally forget about them, leave them out overnight, then shrug and say 'They didn't die so I guess they're done hardening off.'" I'm not sure this was the lesson I was supposed to learn, but whatever works, right?

Next weekend, I plan to get all these juniors into containers. I will probably keep them all inside the yard to protect them from the deer. The rabbits, however, are another story...

Cleaning up the aspen grove

Our aspen grove lies between the meadow and the ravine south of the house. The larger trees are about 30 feet tall, and there are dozens of saplings. The High Park Fire burned through much of the grove in June, killing smaller trees and damaging or killing many of the large ones. Since the grove is so visible from the house, and it is our preferred source of firewood (aspen is less resinous than pine), we're diligently trying to clear out the dead trees this fall. For a small grove, it is turning out to be a daunting task, and it sets an ominous tone for the acres of burned pines awaiting our attention.

This was the aspen grove just after the fire, on June 29.

It was easy to see at that time what burned and what did not.

On September 11, we started clearing dead trees. This was taken from the deck just before we started.

Yesterday, this was the grove:
It's impossible to see a difference but trust me, there are far fewer trees now! Even with dozens of dead trees cleared out, there are a LOT of saplings and many larger trees still alive. Once we're done for the season, I will take a picture from the deck for a better comparison.

Some larger trees lost their lower limbs while the tops remain intact.

As I lopped off small dead trees (1 to 1 1/2 inches) in order to increase sunlight to the forest floor, I observed new growth at the base of nearly every tree. Aspens have thin bark, useless against fire, but their underground stems survive and even seem to be stimulated by the heat.

Here is a section that we haven't cleared yet; most or all of these trees are dead:

while this adjacent section didn't burn at all.

There are two piles of logs waiting to be bucked (=sectioned into fireplace-sized pieces).

TMCH built this nifty foldable bucking stand and is sectioning logs as fast as he can. I then put them in the trailer and drive them up to the woodpile. Like all of our neighbors, we are going to have more wood than we will ever be able to use!

Aspens in autumn

We have our very own aspen grove. It was hit hard during the fire and we've been clearing dead trees out seemingly non-stop, but plenty still stand. In late September/early October, they look pretty amazing.

Fog

Hey, where did our canyon go?

It drizzled all evening and night and most of the day. The fog advanced and retreated but never left, and the next ridge remained invisible all day. Luckily I had nowhere to go, but TMCH had to find his way down the road after fire department training.

We figured out how to work the propane stove today. After years of having a forced-air furnace, learning to heat a house using wood and propane is quite an adjustment! The stove turns out to be pretty straightforward once you figure out how to light the pilot. It's lovely and toasty to stand in front of. We'll see how charming it is during the dead of winter.