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Blue Shed Urban Gardens Cultivating food, flowers and community using organic and sustainable practices.

With 7 home garden+two DUG Denver Urban Gardens donations we are sending 58 lbs of fresh produce, herbs and flowers to S...
10/07/2026

With 7 home garden+two DUG Denver Urban Gardens donations we are sending 58 lbs of fresh produce, herbs and flowers to Sun Valley Kitchen + Community Center for their food share this afternoon. This puts us over the 2000 lbs mark for the season (2,020 to be exact) and we appreciate Denver Food Rescue for picking up and delivering today🙏🏼❤️

The porch will be open for donations until we get a hard freeze. Please remember as you are taking down your gardens that we will take your green tomatoes.

Also please don’t let your herbs go to waste! They are a precious commodity at food pantries and kitchens (or you can hang and dry them and use them all winter☺️).

The mighty Toma Verde tomatillo, Aunt Molly’s ground cherries and Bloody Butcher corn were the winners in the South HS G...
10/04/2026

The mighty Toma Verde tomatillo, Aunt Molly’s ground cherries and Bloody Butcher corn were the winners in the South HS Garden this season. As I mentioned in the spring there were multiple issues to contend with but ultimately it was the lack of irrigation that prompted us to pull all the seedlings the first of June. That’s why most of the beds sat fallow this season.

However, once water was available again in mid-June, Barbara Masoner of Barbara Masoner and I decided to run one of the zones twice a week to preserve the raspberry patch. I stuck a handful of BB corn (original seeds from Homesteading in Denver, CO 🙏🏼) and we harvested 3 +1/2 cobs (out of a dozen ears🦝🐿️🦨) last month.

The raspberries survived and did bear some fruit but the healthiest and most prolific plants were the tomatillos and ground cherries-all reseeded plants from last year’s fallen fruit. This morning’s tomatillo harvest was 6 pounds👍🏻 and will probably total 25-30 lbs before the season’s over.

Both ground cherries-aka pineapple tomatillos-and regular tomatillos are low water plants, tough as nails and ridiculously prolific. The ground cherries grew underneath the tomatillos and drop off the plant once they ripen, making harvesting easy-peasy. And unlike their tart larger cousin they are delectably sweet right out of their ‘wrapper.’

Food pantries appreciate tomatillos and it’s lovely how they coincide with the pepper and tomato harvests for salsa and pico de gallo recipes💃🏻🌶️

How do YOU use tomatillos?

So wonderful to spend a morning with friend and fellow plant nerd Gerald Abner this week before he and his wife Belva he...
10/02/2026

So wonderful to spend a morning with friend and fellow plant nerd Gerald Abner this week before he and his wife Belva head back home to Kentucky. After spending an hour in friend, Joe Fleenor’s garden harvesting 40 lbs of beautiful produce (just look at those beautiful beets!), we headed to another friend’s home to harvest aloe (that’s 10 lbs I’m holding) and flowers. This, along with another 70 lbs of produce previously donated from BSUG gardeners, was delivered to Sun Valley Kitchen + Community Center on Wednesday. One donor, Jodi Holloway, has harvested and donated cucumbers, twice a week, the past 6 weeks. Yesterday she surpassed the 100 lb mark with 107 lbs in total🥳and I don’t think she’s done😂. The Amazon box you see in my trunk is full of those bad boys🥒🥒🥒🥒 (including some from Elizabeth Thomas and Urquart community garden as well).

We are at 1860 lbs of produce for the season, about half of where we’ve been at this time in years past, but very grateful for every ounce we HAVE been able to grow and share 🙏🏼

Thank you Barbara Masoner for offering up some of the 400 lbs of fruit you all gleaned last Sunday🍑🍎 (I got off easy by ...
09/17/2026

Thank you Barbara Masoner for offering up some of the 400 lbs of fruit you all gleaned last Sunday🍑🍎 (I got off easy by only attending the peach picking😉)

We have found a few communities north of the city that have fruit trees WITH fruit which has been very unusual this year. Thanking those two generous homeowners for sharing❤️🙏🏼

This carload was delivered to Andrea’s No-Cost Market to celebrate her last distribution of the season on Tuesday. And thanks to volunteer driver/neighbor Maureen Hanrahan Birdseed Collective received an additional truckload of fruit and veggies on Monday❤️

Last week pal and part-time Carbondale resident Kathy Whitaker and I attended our 3rd annual dinner at Rock Bottom Ranch...
09/15/2026

Last week pal and part-time Carbondale resident Kathy Whitaker and I attended our 3rd annual dinner at Rock Bottom Ranch ACES at Rock Bottom Ranch in Basalt, CO. RBR is a non-profit (under the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies) regenerative farm with an educational focus. They offer both more formal farm-to-table dinners in the summer and more casual ‘burlap’ dinners in late August/early September.

The evening began with an informative tour of their facilities led by two of their farmer apprentices. A beautiful, family-style dinner followed, highlighting the bounty of the season.

They also work with community partners like LIFT-UP and UpRoot Colorado to distribute their extra produce to folks who need it.

Challenges for them include bears, raccoons, birds (specifically magpies), and other hungry creatures and an incredibly short (3 month) growing season. A light frost had take out all their summer and winter squash the night before our dinner😕 (September 10th).

They also have a very high water table, so while most of the state is complaining about drought their fields can have standing pools of water, especially when they let water out of the Ruedi Reservoir to the Roaring Fork.

RBR is a pretty special place in the Roaring Fork Valley, and worth a visit if you find yourself in the area. The farm store sells their produce, eggs and meat from area ranchers and you can’t get much fresher than that!

Thanks ACES at Rock Bottom Ranch for hosting a wonderful evening-these events are a lot of work for y’all but they are appreciated❤️🍆🥔🥗🥕🥒🍅🥬🫜

09/12/2026

A Pepper Post!

From the Sweet Red Bell to the Long Thai Chilies, my pepper plot has won the best garden bed contest (out of my 10 beds) this year🥇Providing shade cloth, straw mulch and feeding every 10 days (alternating comfrey compost tea, Bloom and fish emulsion) seems to have made a difference. The plants are healthy and fruiting and putting in a few drought tolerant Burmese Okra have made a compatible ‘bed fellow.’. Thank you Laura Parker for these seeds, I love the long length of the fruit and the shorter height of the plant👍🏻

Pepper varieties include: Mosca, Long and Short Thai, Guajillo, Poblano, Hatch, Anaheim, Fish (winner of the beauty contest for its red fruit and variegated white and green leaves), Jalapeño, sweet red bell, Shish*to and Pepperoncini. Cha cha cha💃🏻

At the beginning of the season I had difficulty telling the Pepperoncini and Shish*to peppers apart (of course I had planted them right next to each other and their markers had disintegrated🤪). But here is what I learned: the shish*to peppers have a dimple at their tip while the pepperoncini boast a more blunt pointy end.

What pepper varieties have done well in your garden this year??

We’ve been harvesting Concord grapes from Wash Park neighbor, Lori’s arbor for the last 3 years. This morning Blue Shed ...
09/06/2026

We’ve been harvesting Concord grapes from Wash Park neighbor, Lori’s arbor for the last 3 years. This morning Blue Shed volunteers Orna, Elizabeth and Sarah joined me in gleaning 70 lbs of 4 different varieties of Concord grapes, leaving behind a few pounds for the raccoons 🦝!!

We’ll have plenty to share with our food distributions this week🍇🍇🍇

I love these partnerships with neighbors❤️and appreciated Lori’s Bernese, Doc Holiday’s, supervision today😊

08/26/2026

Thanks to Urquart and Steele, (both Denver Urban Gardens community gardens), Jill Fielder, Elizabeth Thomas, Doug Asper Doug Asper Elizabeth Thomas, Tricia Beavers and Jodi Holloway we are donating 97 lbs of fresh veggies, herbs and flowers to Sun Valley Kitchen + Community Center today. So far this season we have shared 873 lbs fresh produce with our community partners🙏🏼❤️

And a special shout-out to daughter Katie Grogan Katie Grogan for bringing back a box of organic Palisade peaches (after hosting her sister’s bachelorette weekend there) to donate. Thanks to her, and the good folks at The Stone Fruit Company 26 lbs of peaches are headed today for Clayton Early Learning center’s Teacher Health and Wellness Day🍑🍑

If you find yourself awash in zucchini or cucumbers please think about donating to your nearest food pantry, schedule a pick up FreshFoodConnect or drop in the cooler on our porch in Wash Park. Fresh produce is a terrible thing to waste.

Thank you for supporting our mission of growing and sharing food❤️

Thank you Linda Kiker Barbara Masoner for the veggies and gorgeous zinnias; Jodi Holloway for her cucumber haul🥒 and MAS...
08/22/2026

Thank you Linda Kiker Barbara Masoner for the veggies and gorgeous zinnias; Jodi Holloway for her cucumber haul🥒 and MASA Seed Foundation for giving us the opportunity to share 45 lbs of produce with the Friday University Church of Christ’s food pantry yesterday. Bill, one of the pantry coordinators said how much his community enjoys the special donations that make people smile, like flowers 🌼 🌻🌸🌺

If you have flowers to share no need to make a bouquet just put the single stems in a plastic jug, bucket or jar and we will get them delivered.

Oh, and another 47 lbs of produce was picked up by So All May Eat Denver from the leftover CSA boxes. We have currently collected 761 lbs so far this season, from 20 individuals and community gardens🙏🏼🥒🫑🌶️🍅🥕🥬🫜🍑

I’m not much of an ‘annual’ person anymore but I do like to try a new, interesting variety every year. This spring I fou...
08/19/2026

I’m not much of an ‘annual’ person anymore but I do like to try a new, interesting variety every year.

This spring I found this gem Harlequin's Gardens in North Boulder. Despite the heat (with so much hardscape I think the temp is consistently 5 degrees higher than anywhere else on my property🥵) this plant has proved to be VERY low maintenance. Originating from Mexico it has been hardy and happy in the heat but now that the nights are getting a bit cooler it’s really putting on a show❤️

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1700 E Louisiana Ave
Denver, CO
80210

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