Vegetable Gardening in Broadmoor Soils

Our goal is to maximize your chances of success right from the start, and not to pick nits about this-or-that organic or specialty gardening.   We remove as many gardening variables as possible so the chance of failure drops to near zero.  Our altitude, soil, cool summers are not often covered in general gardening texts, so here are some tips that worked for us over many years. 






In most locations, Broadmoor soils are very poor, have a high clay content and useless for home gardening without major improvements. Just adding bags of “clay busters” or mixing in a few bags of compost may take many years and deliver poor results. Keep in mind that roots of vegetables extend 2-3 feet below the surface and just adding a few inches of garden soil won’t accomplish much. For root crops – carrots, beets, potatoes,  – use containers or deep raised beds.   We are attempting horseradish in containers this year - typically you harvest them in-ground at about 1/2 of the root and let the rest of the root re-sprout. 

Note:   2017 was a very cool summer but we got 70% of our usual vegetable production anyway. 

The soil choices that worked for us are:

-  We go to the Pikes Peak Stables with a pickup truck in October and spread a load of horse manure 2-3” thick over the garden and work it in with a shovel. At least two years, better three. This adds a massive amount of biologic material that provides a high nitrogen/carbon base to the existing soil. Later than October the material won’t decompose by Spring, and you want the manure to fully decompose before planting. The manure at PPS is very high quality, very few weed seeds, and it is free. Line the bed of your pickup with plastic to make cleanup easy.  If you are composting, nothing better than to add local horse or cow manure to your compost pile. 

-  There is only one natural fertilizer that is good in the Spring - that would be chicken manure.   It has nitrogen available and doesn't need composting.    Home Depot carries bags and it is quite cheap. 
However- don't use it on potatoes because it causes a bacterial disease. 

 
-  Use containers, see that section below. 

-  Build a raised bed with a mix of compost, native soil and garden soil. We prefer containers but raised beds do bypass the poor native soil.

When your earth garden soil is light,  easy to spade, and full of earthworms, you have great soil that will need a minimum of compost and amendments for years of productive vegetable gardening. 

Broadmoor Altitude Gardening Basics:

Sunlight:   To grow a full variety of vegetables, you must have a minimum of 6 hours of direct sun from May 1 – October 1.  Less than that will require large amounts of water and fertilizer and won’t give you the quality, taste and production to make vegetable gardening worthwhile.   Some of us cut trees to get the sun we need.

Accelerate the growth cycle:   Even though organic purists shame us for this practice, we add a boost with a chemical fertilizer such as Miracle Grow in the early spring to get plant foliage to the flowering stage.
This is because our growing season is short and sometimes we get very cool summers, also hail, wind and no end of raccoons and what-not.  You can use any general purpose plant fertilizer.   

Fast-growing varieties for altitude:  See our list below.

Adequate watering:  Our highly-refined varieties of vegetables spend most their energy on production and are not focused on the survival or hardiness of the plant.   Keeping a moist mix of nutrients at the plant roots is essential.  Plants take up nutrients during the day and grow at night.  Letting the plant dry out during the daytime or get over-stressed by mid-day heat sets back the growing cycle by days if not weeks.

Timing:   Live plants go in the ground at Mother’s Day, for seeds see the individual packets.   They are generally accurate for our climate.  Although this year, 2017, summer seems to have started in February. 

Compost:        We have a “short” cycle compost pile of one year for kitchen trimmings and a two-year pile for leaves and garden trimmings.   Don’t make the mistake of working leaves and yard cuttings directly into the garden; they will not decompose fast enough in our winters and leave your spring planting with carbon/nitrogen ratio that is far too high to grow vegetables.   Wood chips take three years in ideal conditions to convert to useful nitrogen.    We never use colored wood chips anywhere - the chemicals used for coloring end up in the soil.  There are books on composting, check the library.

We screen our compost with this frame, includes a 1/2" wire mesh stapled to the frame.   10 earthworms per shovelful shows you are a world-class composter.   We don't add any compost starter or earthworms, keep it moist and the earthworms will come up through the ground. 

One benefit of mixing your own compost into garden soil is that there is  a lot of earthworm food in your mix, so you are creating an earthworm heaven in the garden, great for improving the soil.  Don't add dog feces to any compost, it carries troublesome diseases that may problemize your vegetables, and anyway it contains way too much nitrogen and will slow down the conversion process.   We never did get the "breakdown temperature" in our compost pile, as recommended in many books.  But it works fine anyway.  

Fertilizer:    Using our “accelerated” system (below),  mixing in compost as available, repeating the horse manure every 4-5 years in the Fall is more than we need.  

PH of soil or container mix  Unless you are growing some "tundra tulips"  found  above 25,000' on Mt. Everest, you can forget about soil ph.   PH'ers are usually trying to improve our really poor local soil with various chemical additives, and bring a pile of clay back from the dead.   Fix the soil as described and only in rare cases do you have to do a soil test and make corrections.    If you do a soil test, there are many online, the Texas folks and University of Colorado labs are good.   We use soil tests to improve grass-growing (the lawn kind) where we have to treat large areas.  Good labs will not only give you the soil test results, but also a 3-year regimen of exactly what to spread and how often.   For about $25.   Follow the directions carefully and mail in the sample. 

Temperatures:   Most vegetables need a soil temperature of 65 degrees or better overnight, tomatoes especially.    Of course lettuce and spinach and some others can be planted May 1 or earlier.   Sometimes we get three planting of lettuce a season but it is too hot for a second planting of spinach in mid-summer.  Carrots can get 4 plantings,  March 1, March 30, September 15, August 15.  

Pest Control:  If the plants are healthy, they are rarely attacked by pests, fungus or mold.  Time and money spent growing strong plants is far less time and money spent fighting disease and pests.  

Deer Fencing:    We added to our existing fence.   Deer love vegetables.  

Indoor Seed Starting:   We do not get enough winter sun to start seedlings without indoor grow lights.  There are specialty texts about this method so check those out.

Plant Size:   If you plant at or near May 15th and you are using this accelerated system, and/or great soil,  you can purchase the small and medium size plants from local vendors.   We experimented for years and found smaller plants in good growing conditions rapidly catch up to larger plants with good sun and plenty of water.   We don't buy plants with fruit already forming because the stress of transplanting will cause that growth to stop, or the early fruit to fail.   
Greenhouses & Cold Frames:    We don't use one, but probably should.    Current City codes allow 120 square feet of greenhouse without a permit, 10' x 12' roughly.   The problem is hail, every 3-4 years we get hit.   Plastic will have to be replaced after a good-sized hail.   Glass is out of the question.   You can get a two-month jump on vegetables in the greenhouse, then move them to the garden.  In mid-summer, greenhouses must be open to avoid overheating.  

Container Gardening:   

We use both earth gardens and containers, and get great production out of both.     Containers have the following advantages:

• They can be placed at waist height, so a lot less bending over to plant and harvest
• Being off the ground, they have less exposures to pests
• They can be placed in a yard location for maximum sun
• Containers use about ¼ of the water of an earth garden
• They can be painted black and get faster production from overnight heat storage
• They are cheap:  about $1 each at Habitat for Humanity
• Soil and containers can be used indefinitely 

Best Practices with Containers:

Other than lack of sufficient sun, most container projects fail because they lack sufficient nutrients and water to grow quickly to flowering stage, and because the container gets too hot in the mid-day sun, killing the biologics that enrich the soil to grow healthy vegetables.

Our typical tomato container

Use 12” container or deeper.  Practically any will do.  We get them from Habitat for Humanity for $1 each.   Drill multiple holes for adequate drainage – soil should be moist but not wet.   Layer of rock or gravel in the bottom to prevent mold.

There is a "container and raised bed mix" you can buy now, but check the label for peat or wood chips, supposedly that mix holds water better but we haven't been using it long enough to compare it with our own mix below. 

We found Container Mix (Home Depot and others) to be too dense for good water drainage.   Add about 30% coarse Vermiculite to Container Mix and we use about 10% sand.   Perlite doesn't store water so don't use that.   Coarse Vermiculite can be purchased from Rick's Nursery - 4 cu. ft. bags or online. 

Vegetables: Use garden  soil mixed with ¼ sand and ¼ native soil

Root crops use ½ sand, ½ garden soil 

It is the nutrients flowing through the container soil that provide 90% of the growth function, and not the soil itself.   With typical "garden soil" you are never really sure what you are getting. 

We don't like peat moss, wood chips or anything besides garden soil for growth medium because the resulting carbon/nitrogen ratio is too high.  The microbes in the soil are converting all that stuff to nitrogen instead of the providing excess nitrogen to feed the plants.  

Watering:

We use an automatic watering system to water and feed a commercial fertilizer and supplements to our vegetable containers.  It is an add-on to our lawn watering and uses the same timer, in our case, 12 stations.    One for our containers, one for our earth garden, and one for our fruit trees.  Hand watering will cost about two weeks of growth unless done perfectly, neighbors will forget to water while you are on vacation. 

Container Watering cycle:  Keep in mind that plants grow at night, and the soil at night should be as warm as possible.   Therefore, we water containers at 5AM, 11AM and 2PM for two minutes each cycle.    This puts water and nutrients at the roots at exactly the right time, then lets the container soil warm before evening.    We continue to water in the rainy season because containers collect very little rainwater.

Earth Garden Watering:  Water at 4:30AM, once, for 15-20 minutes.   During the really hot part of the summer, you may want to water again in the afternoon if you see signs of wilting.   Your earth garden will grow really well when we get a lot of natural rainfall, as the chlorine in our water isn't all that great for garden biologics.    A warning about rain barrels:  If you have a roof with treated material – shingles, asphalt – don’t use that water to water vegetables because the runoff contains, or may contain, chemicals from the roof treatment.

Note about tomatoes, peppers:  Over time, tomato enemies such as fungus and bacteria will hide in the container soil and infect the next year’s crops.    Every second year, we flush our tomato containers with a solution of one quart plain old store-bought hydrogen peroxide with a gallon of water for each large container.    If you are not using our flow-through nutrient system, replace the biologics after the flush.

Strawberries -  We found that container strawberries have to be put in the garage over winter because they won't survive in the containers, although the do survive in the ground. We also move container roses into the garage, it is not heated but the roses do OK.   We use a hand truck with a couple of bungee cords to move the containers around. 


Pollination:  To eliminate one more variable, we use a rechargeable electric toothbrush like this one to pollinate the flowers of our tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and other flowering vegetables.   Just a two-second buzz on each bloom does the trick.   We tried using sprays but found this method to be much better; you interact with your garden every day. 

Puppies and young dogs - 6 months to two years, will follow along behind you and dig up most of what you plant.    We got a cheap electric fence system from Home Depot that worked perfectly.   After about two years, dogs lose interest. 

Our automatic watering system: 

This is a 12 station timer that will water any circuit up to 4 times per day.    It also waters the lawn and fruit trees.    Once it is set, it may only need minor changes to the watering pattern in the hottest part of the summer and early Fall.    It may seem like a pain to set up, but it lasts for many years and saves a lot of time watering manually.    It has a remote control that lets you suspend watering or water manually from your kitchen.   Get your watering system in shape early because Home Depot runs out of the needed fittings in the first month of gardening/lawn improvement weather.   See ABC Plumbing as a good source: http://www.abcplumbing.com.


This timer activates valves which water our containers, earth garden and fruit trees. 

A fertilizer injector system  feeds a siphon in the water line for our containers and earth gardens.   A cup of Miracle Grow or equivalent in the 2-Gallon version, and about 1/2 cup in the 1-gallon version lasts a about a week.  The siphon comes with the tank and is easy to install.   We get ours from www.dripworks.com.  

If you want  special additives (granular form) for vegetables we put about 1/2 cup in an old sock, tie off the sock, place it in the tank, and let the additives slowly dissolve and automatically feed the plants.    One sockfull lasts the season.   We also add about a teaspoon of agricultural lime every other week to prevent end rot on the tomatoes.  

Just about any spray head will work with containers, we prefer the spray head in this configuration for our earth garden,  over the individual drippers, which we tend to trip over, and the soaker hoses.  We don't like the soaker hoses because the water isn't distributed evenly over a wide root system, and they vary widely in output from hose to hose.  Also they tend to deteriorate after a few years in the sun, you want to store them during the winter to reduce the UV damage. 

Put your wasp traps out early.. get the early arrivals before they establish nests.  Although we are having some doubts this year ('17) as the early arrivals are not getting into the traps.   Stock up on the attractant because Home Depot always runs out during the "high" wasp season.  We have had two record wasp years in a row (2015-2016).   Wasps are wintering under our flagstones on our walks!   Found two this spring so far.    Ouch!

Aphids -   We tried lady bugs at least 4 times over the years with no success, even wetting the leaves, putting them out at night, during a very strong aphid infestation.   We now use a light soaking spray of anti-aphid just after the blossom time and sometimes later if we see them again.   (See below, we no longer use sprays at all)  They hit roses, cherry trees, wild plums very hard.   Our local wild plums get hit with with a black blight, use an anti-fungal at the onset.   

For Aphids in fruit trees - plums, cherries, the tree is sick.   Carefully reveal the root flare out to 3 - 4' from the base of the tree and use the Dirt Doctor's sick tree treatment, see www.dirtdoctor.com.  

Late getting started with bulbs?    Forget to plant in the fall?   We use this trick to start bulbs in January/February in a sunny window, and move them into the garden in April/May.

Best Tomatoes for High Altitude:

This article from Mother Earth News is a great guide.  We like the idea that growing smaller tomatoes works best, as the large varieties take longer to get to maturity. 

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/growing-tomatoes/best-tomatoes-zmaz10fmzraw  (paste link into browser)

Be careful using Epsom Salt for tomatoes, the additives are sulfur and magnesium - critical for good tomatoes but you can overdo it.  Any specific tomato supplement will include these items. 

Fruit Trees: 

Almost all fruit trees come from the nursery buried too deep in the container.   Most of us, trying to be safe, bury trees too deep in the ground.   The root flare must be exposed for tree health.  We made this mistake and have to expose the root flare every year.  If you have sick trees, this is the remedy to try first.  See the Dirt Doctor narrative on the site below.  

Using leaves and yard trimmings over-winter for mulch 

We try to use leaves over winter on our raspberries and other places on our earth garden.  Over winter, the earthworms will come up and eat the leaves from underneath, a huge benefit to increasing the viability of the soil.   The downside is that a big wind will blow them around and we end up raking 2-3 times extra.   But it really is a big benefit, try to keep the leaves wet and heavy. 

2016 Results:  

First potatoes  July 15

First cucumbers July 24 – Last October 5^th

First Tomato   July 26

First Freeze – October 5^th 2016 – 31 degrees

More:    For an excellent gardening/tree site, see:  https://www.dirtdoctor.com.   He has a radio show on AM 1040 Sunday Mornings at 7AM if you have call-in questions.  

 We also recommend "Gardening When It Counts"  by Steve Solomon, it is an excellent guide to prepare soil for gardens and describes the interactions of carbon and nitrogen for plant life.  Also published by Mother Earth. 

Compost Sources: 

Sandra on the NextDoor site has some to pick up.  Just drop by. The address is 701 Cresta. Just go down the dirt drive and the compost is right inside the gate at the end. No need to come to the house. 

A good commercial source is Rocky Top Resources, 1755 E. Las Vegas. 579-9103. They have a variety of soil additives of excellent quality in various mixes.info@rockytopresources.com. They can probably email you a rate sheet. A one-ton pickup holds 1 1/2 cu. yard exactly. Use a plastic sheet on the pickup bed to make cleanup easy. They can deliver but it is an extra cost.  

Home Depot has compost and garden soil in bags.  We are looking for garden soil or top soil without any wood fragments, see above.  We really don't trust the stuff we get in bags, but we use it anyway to supplement our own composting.   

Copyright 2017 Michael S. Lowery