A Season for Community Engagement

Posted by: Linda Langelo, CSU Extension, Golden Plains Area

A new season begins after this growing season is complete.  For the holiday festivities our Julesburg Garden Club joins in with the local chamber to utilize our newly-empty planters which once held beautiful petunias and other annuals.  This year we are working with the themes of A Toyland Christmas and Old Fashioned Christmas.    

The Julesburg Garden Club asks businesses to adopt-a-planter during the growing season by watering, fertilizing and weeding annuals.  During the holiday festivities, the club decided to engage the businesses and invite them to compete and decorate a tree in the themes of A Toyland and Old Fashion Christmas.  In addition, the club reached out to the schools to engage students as judges for the competition. 

The art class at the high school will be one set of judges.  The 5^th and 6^th graders will be another set of judges.  The students will follow a rubric.  A rubric used in education is set-up to demonstrate to the student what is expected of them.  There are definite criteria to judge such as composition, balance and creativity.  This both engages them and is a fun educational project. 

Members of the Julesburg Garden Club created sample trees to begin the competition.  The picture below shows the basic tools that we used to build the trees out of chicken wire.  The containers are cement and have a depth of 18 inches and about 18 inches wide for planting.  The materials we used were mostly recycled with the exception of the ribbon. We used tools such as wire cutters and a hammer (not in the picture) to achieve the results we wanted.  The recycled materials were chicken wire, wire hangers, a sturdy pipe for staking and smaller stakes cut from the wire hangers.  

To make your own chicken-wire holiday tree, use materials you already have around the house!

We formed the chicken wire into a cone shape and reinforced with the wire hangers.

Form your chicken wire into the shape of a tree.

 Then we created lots and lots of bows…………….to get to our final result below:

One can never have too many bows.

We tied the bows on the frame and then created a piece of chicken wire with thin strips of ribbon for the tree to have a base.  We staked the base in the container with smaller pieces of wire hanger and drove a pipe as stake in the center of the frame to secure the tree deeper in the soil.  So far the trees have sustained 25.5 and 32.5 miles per hour winds and counting. 

The final product--a fun and festive "tree" that can sustain pedestrian traffic and wind!

Battling Jacques the Rabbit

Posted by: Mary Small and Curtis Utley, CSU/Jefferson County Extension



Rabbit clipped peppers

One of the sure signs that life has returned to our demonstration and research garden here on the Jefferson County fairgrounds is that the resident cottontail rabbit, Jacques, has been busy.

He’s found a good life here with refuge underneath a couple of large shrubs abutting our building and plenty of gourmet food to eat once it gets planted by his humans. No more of that yucky grass and those weird-tasting perennials from the High and Dry garden.  It’s time for the tender lettuce, spinach and other yummy greens.

We thought we foiled Jacques last year by placing the greens in a 3 foot high raised bed, rather than the in-ground bed where they were the previous year.  Voila-it worked! (Against Jack, anyway, not against pests of the human and insect varieties.)

This year Jacques has been getting even by clipping off many residents of our just-planted pepper research bed (at a nice 45 degree angle, as they so artistically do!)  And to add insult to injury, he’s just clipping some of them off and dropping the tops nearby as if to taunt us.  He’s not eating everything, just getting his revenge.



Rabbit proof fence
Two foot wide one-inch poultry netting
stapled to two foot survey stakes



It’s a bit hard to get a harvest and compare performance of pepper varieties when some of them are damaged right at the beginning of their garden life. Thanks a lot, buddy!

So, what to do?  Two foot tall stakes were hammered into each corner of the bed and along the sides. Next, two foot wide chicken wire was tightly wrapped around the stakes. As you see in the photos the fencing is tight to the ground and encloses the perimeter. We hope it will be tough for Jacques to dig under so he will give up and find something else to do.

The fence will make taking data later in the summer a bit more challenging, but at least we should have something to measure!  We’ll see just how clever this guy is as the season progresses and what he decides to do in the meantime.