Growing Food in Colorado, part I

So you think you want to try growing your own food? It’s a great idea! . . . But have you umm . . . really thought. . . this thru?

Recently I reviewed yet another book about gardening. This one with lots of great gardening tips, dirt, compost, etc. I even came away with a few great tips to try myself. But my overall reaction to the book was one of general disappointment.

When it comes to gardening books, I am finding myself increasingly bothered by one thing: how in books mostly written by gardeners on the lush green east coast, yet even also in books by and targeting gardeners in the West. . . for those of us here in the more arid, high-altitude, and colder climes, the recommended gardening crops, along with their growing guidelines, spacing, season-extending tips, and so forth, are nearly always again, on how to grow pretty much all the usual suspects — tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, cucumbers, melons, peas, summer squashes, corn…

Goddess help me; this place is too dry. The growing season is too short. The nights are cold too soon. The weather sometimes too violent. The soil is pure rocky mountain clay. And sometimes, . . . the deer are really hungry.

When people tell me they want to grow a food garden, I often find they too have begun where I first started out– (my dead blueberry shrubs may be the tale of another post). Most of us usually start out by considering our usual diet, and then proceed to attempting to grow the conventional foods we’ve become accustomed to seeing on our plates (I grew up on the East coast where I ate nothing but blueberries for an entire month out of each year).

Now, I’m not saying you can’t!

I’m only saying growing non-native plants in Colorado climate is an whole another creature.

There are, really, two ways to go about growing a food producing garden in Colorado. One is to invest in adaptations (season extenders, extreme weather protection, etc) to grow the conventional food crops. The other is to forgo the adaptations and choosing to grow nonconventional but native or climate-compatible food crops, which will likely mean… some kind of changes to your diet.

And this actually, is yet another thing to factor in because otherwise you are still going to the supermarket for your usual customary fare. Kinda defeats the purpose, right?

So, these are your first two considerations when you first decide to grow your own food: What kind of gardening do you want to do, and how open-minded are you going to be about eating what you grow?

If you’re choosing the latter in these here regions, you’re in luck — you’ve found me and my list of food I’ve had success growing in Colorado.