Fort Collins Nursery

As autumn draws in and nights get colder, you may find yourself with loads of green tomatoes left on the vine.

Rather than composting them or letting them go to waste, try this simple trick to ripen them and continue to enjoy homegrown tomatoes just a little longer:

Cut the vines and hang them, intact, in a dark room. Amazingly, most of those tomatoes will actually ripen. The ones that are most likely to ripen well in this environment are those that are a lighter more translucent green color, known as “mature green.”

Fruit that is a darker shade of green may not ripen as well and makes an excellent candidate for fried green tomatoes, green tomato chutney, green tomato pickles, or get creative and invent your own dish!

Have a great  gardening tip you want to share? Comment on this post and tell us, we may highlight your tip on our website, facebook, or in an upcoming newsletter!

Looking for some late-summer, early autumn perennial bloomers? Add a colorful chrysanthemum to your flower bed or fall container garden! In the autumn, Fort Collins Nursery offers hundreds of these prolific, hardy and beautifully bushy perennials.

Mums come in a wide variety of colors, from yellow, pink, magenta, red, lavender, and more. Blooms on mums typically last for weeks providing a late-summer boost when other flowers have given out. And did you know that mum’s flowers are edible?

Fort Collins Nursery also offers a great selection of colorful asters, also a hardy late-summer and autumn bloomer. Small, abundant, star-shaped flowers tower on 2-3 foot plants, providing a nice backdrop in perennial beds.

Both mums and asters appreciate full sun, and a good dose of compost when planted. They also prefer water at their base, not on the leaves, which encourages powdery mildew.

Before shooing away cobwebs, consider the benefits spiders provide for your garden. The majority of spiders found in Colorado are not poisonous and help control harmful insects, such as wasps, flies and mosquitoes.

One of Fort Collins Nursery’s resident spiders is the writing spider (or banded garden spider). These green and yellow striped spiders are known for the zig-zag pattern woven into their webs. Writing spiders are not poisonous or aggressive, and can eat insects twice their size!

You can encourage beneficial spiders by not spraying insecticides in your garden.

Be careful around wood piles to avoid contact with spiders that can bite. Although most spiders are harmless to humans, black widows and brown recluse are poisonous.

Spiders may be a little creepy, but help in a big way.

Harvest time will start slowing down, but the taste for fresh vegetables never really wanes. Extend your veggie harvest with cole crops.

Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi and kale do great with cooler weather conditions. Some will even withstand frost or snow with the right protections such as mulching, row covers or using cold frames.

Cole crops can be transplanted once daytime temperatures are in the 60°-70°F range. Fort Collins Nursery’s greenhouse offers cole crop plant starts in September. Shop early to make sure your plants have a head start!

It is also not too late to sow cool season crop seeds. When choosing a variety, check the “days to maturity” for a shorter (50 day or less) duration. This will ensure proper germination and strong plants facing cool night weather.

Spinach, lettuce, peas, radish and beet seeds can be sown and do best in lower temperatures. These will need protection from frost, such as seed guard and frost cloth (available at Fort Collins Nursery.)

With Colorado’s fickle climate, we could see sun and mild weather well into December, so take advantage of it to extend the growing season.

Nothing smells as inviting as fresh garlic sautéing in a pan. These tasty bulbs can be added to nearly any style of cuisine, or even roasted and eaten by themselves.

Fall is the time to plant garlic for next year’s harvest! This over-wintering bulb needs at least four to six weeks to establish itself. Plant garlic cloves about 12 inches apart in loose, amended soil with plenty of organic matter. Garlic will do best if planted when soil temperatures are 40°F, but before the ground freezes.

Each garlic clove will produce a bulb in the summer. After the leaves have turned brown, garlic is ready to be harvested. Harvest is easiest with a digging fork to loosen the soil without disturbing or damaging bulbs. Drying garlic, or curing, can help your harvest last for up to a year. The biggest and healthiest cloves can be replanted again in the fall.

Keep soil moist but not too wet, which will rot garlic bulbs. Make sure to keep the beds free of weeds, which competes too much with the bulbs.

Fort Collins Nursery has garlic varieties arriving in September, but they don’t last long! Stop in and get planting!

Saving seeds can be an inexpensive way to continue the great harvest of a vegetable or flower garden. For hundreds of years, it was part of the task of growing food. Now, buying seed packets can be inexpensive and easy, with a wide variety available (especially in our Garden Shop!).

If you spread a handful of flower seeds last spring, chances are you are still enjoying the reseeded flowers this year. Clip and save seed pods to broadcast next spring, or just let the flowers go wild; that’s what they do naturally!

Seeds from peas, beans, tomatoes, peppers, squashes and herbs are easy to save. After harvesting ripe, but not rotted fruits, remove as much pulp as possible. Beans and peas should be left on the plant until the pods are dry, and squashes should be left until the first frost, than harvested.

Spread seeds on a paper towel and air dry. You can try to speed up drying in the oven or a dehydrator, but temperatures over 100° F will damage the seed. Never use a microwave.

Store seeds in a cool, dry place away from hungry critters. Only seal seeds in a container when they are completely dry, since any moisture can lead to mold.

Use seeds the following season, since seeds will lose their viability after the first year.

If the vegetable seed you used was a hybrid, which is genetically modified, chances are seeds from these will not be true to its parent. This is often the case with saving seeds from store-bought vegetables. The best results are also from self-pollinated plants, listed here.

With a wonderful bounty of fresh produce, sometimes the garden overflows. Many home gardeners consider preserving the fruits of their labor to enjoy throughout the years to come. Preserving your own food can also be a big cost savings.

Freezing is one of the easiest ways to preserve food, but canning, drying or creating a root cellar work for particular foods and aren’t as labor intensive as they sound.

Cucumbers, green beans, peppers, onions, cauliflower and even watermelon rinds can be pickled.

An easy pickling recipe from Mother Earth News requires no canning, just a few weeks in the refrigerator.

Tomatoes can be preserved as salsa, sauce or just diced. Using a boiling water bath, tomatoes and pickles can be preserved without a canning pressure cooker due to the acidity content.

Cherries, plums, rhubarb, plums, pears and apricots can be made into jams and jellies and canned. Fruits can be packed into jars raw or preheated and packed hot.

To can fruit without adding sugar or salt, check out the CSU Cooperative Extension’s article “Food Preservation Without Sugar or Salt.” 

Dried fruits, such as apples, cherries and grapes, last well into the winter, if you don’t eat them all before then! Use a drying tray or an oven. Keep dried foods for up to a year by using a vacuum sealer.

Freeze shredded Zucchini for later use. Pumpkin can be steamed, pureed, and frozen. Try freezing pre-measured amounts for easy defrost. Turn a bumper basil crop into pesto, frozen into cubes, which is also easy to defrost for a quick dinner. Remember to label each with the date.

Hard-sided squash, such as acorn, butternut and spaghetti, can last for months in cool, dry areas, no preparation needed!

The CSU Cooperative Extension Office offers classes on a variety of preservation methods.

Our Colorado environment is home to some amazing native shrubs. Not only are these shrubs disease resistant and perfect for our native soil, they attract birds, butterflies and provide year-round interest.

Try adding to your landscape a sumac, Apache plume, serviceberry, rabbitbrush, fernbush, mountain mahogany or buffaloberry.

These shrubs have some very unique features, such as the curly, furry fruit of the mountain mahogony, reddish-orange berries of the buffaloberry or the white clusters of flowers of the serviceberry. After proper placement and establishment, these shrubs require little care.

You won’t find these shrubs outside the southwest region. Adding them to your landscape helps keep the area diversified and encourages the local ecosystem. They can be blended seamlessly with non-native plants, depending on the shrubs water and sun needs.

Ask for a tree and shrub representative to help find these native shrubs to match your landscape needs. We also offer many native trees and perennials, come out and see!

Looking beautiful color all summer long? Try adding a shrub rose for summer color, even in a harsh location. Some of our most popular shrub roses to try include Morden Sunrise, Winnipeg Parks, Hope for Humanity, Sunrise Sunset or a Knockout.

Shrub roses do well in most parts of Colorado and are the hardiest of rose varieties. Choose a full-sun area with well-drained soil. Avoid areas with other shrubs to cut down on root competition.

Make sure to amend the soil when planting, digging a hole about twice the size of the container wide a deep.

Shrub roses also benefit from early spring pruning. Remove dead, diseased or winter-damaged canes, and open up areas for air circulation and shape. There is no need to cut back shrub roses to the ground like the hybrid roses. Past-bloom flowers develop into attractive rose hips, which add a dab of winter color and food for birds.

Ask a nursery tree and shrub representative for more tips, fertilizers and maintenance on shrub roses.

Even the hardiest of vegetables and flowers need protection from frost and freezing temperatures. In Northern Colorado, the average last frost date is May 15, and in Southern Wyoming it can be as late as the first or second week of June, so don’t let those 70 degree days fool you!

Most early spring bulbs resist the unpredictable weather, but the actual blooms are more likely to be damaged. The same goes for vegetables; early season crops may thrive in cooler conditions, but may be devastated by a hard cold snap.

There are many ways to prevent cold damage to your plants. We recommend using frost cloth, whether laid directly over plants or attached to a structure.

Using black plastic to cover soil in vegetable gardens will also warm the soil, prevent moisture loss and keep weeds at bay. You can do the same in landscape beds with a layer of mulch.

We also recommend Hot Kaps to cover tender (but hardened off) crops. Even an upside down nursery pot can cover plants overnight. Just remember to remove any covering during the day so sunlight can get in.

These frost protection items are all available in the garden shop at the nursery.