Do you want to learn how to grow food in the mountains? Come see for yourself and spend the day in the beautiful Wet Mountains touring Penn and Cord Parmenter’s High Altitude Gardens and Greenhouses. The gardens feature Food, Herbs and Flowers, grown in a multitude of ways. Early plantings in the open and under cover will be under way as well as early perennial food.
We will discuss shade growing veggies, fruit, composting, soil building, season extenders and more.
Penn’s Forest Garden is in the trees on a decomposed granite mountain and has a collection of over 45 raised beds – built with dry-stack rock or wood. Cord’s Bio-Intensive Garden is in the open and down the mountain in the rich bottomland soil, featuring 20 bio-intensive beds, a fleet of covers and a few well-placed hail guards.
This walking, talking, educational tour includes demonstrations, examples and two totally sustainable passive solar greenhouses.
The setting is gorgeous, bring your camera, a sack lunch, water, the usual stuff…
Come prepared for 8,000 ft. in the spring.
See you on the mountain!
$25 member, $30 non-member
Participants my carpool from the Denver area and meet at the Botanic Gardens at 8 am at the Visitors Center or you may meet at the site at 12 pm for the tour.
Tour Location:
12746 CR 255
Westcliffe, Co 81252
North of Westcliffe
South Central Colorado
Wet Mountains
8,140 ft. elevation
Are you dreaming of spring? Can’t wait to get your tools out and begin another year and another quest to conquer the ever elusive green thumb? Join us at Denver Botanic Gardens for a full day event that is packed with answers to all those looming and mysterious gardening questions. Get started on the right foot this year with all of our best beginner’s classes that are carefully designed to equip you with all the tools you’ll need to master that garden once and for all!
Classes include:
Starting Your Garden from Seed
This beginner’s class will take you step by step through the process of starting seeds, raising them to sturdy plants and transplanting them to guarantee the greatest success for you and your garden. We will identify the easiest seeds to start and have a hands-on “how to” lab. You’ll be sent home with a tray of seeds ready for you to care for and all the tips you need to grow them into healthful vegetables, herbs or flowers.
Instructor: Patti O’Neal
Patti O’Neal has been an instructor at Denver Botanic Gardens for nine years, specializing in kitchen gardens, seed starting, preparing the beds, intensive growing, pests and diseases and extending the seasons to a successful harvest. She is a horticulturist in the CSU Extension office in Jefferson County.
Soils and Composting 101
Learn how to build and maintain an effective compost system for your backyard and why it is important that you have one. In this class, we will explore the importance of forming a healthy ecosystem at your home, starting with nurturing a healthy soil. An understanding of your soil’s physical properties including texture, structure, and pore space will go a long way towards managing your soil to grow healthy plants. Soil pH, soil tests, drainage, and soil amendments will be discussed.
Instructor: Carl Wilson
Carl Wilson has over 30 years experience in teaching gardening and growing plants in three states and overseas. He recently retired from Colorado State University Extension as the long-time horticulturist in Denver. Carl has taught a variety of topics to hundreds of Colorado Master Gardeners and green industry professionals over the decades. Among his favorite subjects are soils and vegetables, topics he now speaks about throughout Colorado. Check his Front Range Food Gardener blog for current information.
Gorgeous and Easy Container Gardens
Learn how to design, plant and maintain container gardens for patios, balconies and decks. We’ll cover flower, herb and vegetable container gardens and give tips on watering, fertilizing and the best choices for soil and containers. Discover the beauty and ease of planting your own portable garden. Handouts included.
Instructor: Susan Evans
Susan has been studying and working with plants since the early 1980’s. She managed garden centers and greenhouses in Denver before starting her own organic landscaping business, Flowerscapes, which she owned and operated for twelve years. She has worked as a master gardener and volunteer naturalist for Jefferson County, Colorado. She has a certificate in Advanced Clinical Herbalism from the Rocky Mountain Center for Botanical Studies in Boulder with over 1,800 hours of clinical study and experience in the uses of medicinal plants. After attaining her certification in Clinical Herbalism in 1997, she founded Chrysalis Herbs. Since that time she has devoted herself to sharing her love and knowledge of herbs and gardening, helping people to reconnect with the beauty and healing aspects of the natural world.
Beginning Vegetable Gardening
If you have never planted edible plants or had little success at growing your own vegetables, Betty will take you through the ABCs from planning, soil preparation, plant choices, watering, fertilizing and harvesting your first vegetable garden. Betty will include the most popular vegetables to grow- including lettuce, spinach, peas, tomatoes, peppers, green beans and more. You'll take home a comprehensive planting guide that will help you through the entire growing season, as well as garden seeds to start planting in early spring.
Instructor: Betty Cahill
Betty has been gardening in the Denver area since 1988. She grew up in Billings, MT and learned about vegetable gardening from an early age from her mother and aunts. She's been teaching gardening classes at Denver Botanic Gardens and around the Denver area since 2000. She's a member of the Denver Rose Society, The Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Herb Society and the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society. Betty is a certified Colorado Master Gardener in Boulder County.
Annuals and Perennials for Color in the Garden
Whether you're a first time gardener or a world class gardener new to Colorado, this class takes the mystery out of growing flowers in our high and dry climate. Topics covered include deciding where the garden goes, finding your style, building a bed to suit the flowers you want to grow, and putting it all together to create the effect you're after. You'll discover that no matter how difficult your site might be, there are flowers up to the challenge.
Instructor: Marcia Tatroe
Author of Perennials for Dummies, Marcia Tatroe writes the monthly "Mountain Garden Checklist" for Sunset Magazine, a weekly gardening column in The Denver Post, and is a frequent contributor to Colorado Gardener. She lectures throughout the West focusing on garden design, perennials, xeriscape, and incorporating native plants into gardens and landscapes. In her most recent book, Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West, she advocates using drought-tolerant and native plants and indigenous materials to create a gardening aesthetic unique to this region.
These classes combined usually cost more then $200 but with our daylong New Gardener Boot Camp, you can learn all of this information for only $60 (member price; $80 non-members), lunch included. Register early as space is limited and prices will go up starting in February.
Mycology is the study of fungi, which are known more commonly as mushrooms. Mycology herbaria are both centers of active scientific research and the storehouses of dried fungal specimens. The lovely mushrooms that suddenly appear in your yard or that you stumble over in the forest are more than just dinner ingredients. Mushrooms are the reproductive structures of the fungal organism that break down the log at your feet or the thatch in your lawn.
Mushrooms can be carefully and properly collected for deposit as herbarium specimens. These specimens are the lasting and irreplaceable historical records of where and when fungal species occurred, and they are essential for mycological research.
In this class, you will learn each step in the process of collecting mushrooms for scientific study. The lessons will range from ethics to permissions to making beautiful and scientifically valuable specimens.
$26 member, $31 non-member.
Instructors: Michelle DePrenger-Levin, Dr. Jennifer Neale
Image: Courtesy of Eurapart (Flickr)
Are you an avid plant enthusiast? Do you love to hike in Colorado and find beautiful plants? Would you like to learn how to bring indoors a little of what you love?
Join our class on herbarium collections where you will learn: How they are made, the ethics of when and where to collect plants, when permissions are necessary, and how to create beautiful and scientifically valuable specimens. You can enjoy the beauty of our flora year-round!
We will also teach you about our own Kathryn Kalmbach Herbarium which has both value as a storehouse of pressed and dried plant specimens and is important the Gardens’ scientific research. Every year, new plant specimens are added to the collection. These specimens are the lasting and irreplaceable historical records of where and when plants occurred and essential for botanical research.
$26 member, $31 non-member.
Instructors: Michelle DePrenger-Levin, Dr. Jennifer Neale
Image: Courtesy of Jodiepedia (Flickr)