High-Altitude Gardening in the Rocky Mountains

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Land that tilts like a roller coaster, a growing season of indeterminate length that may well include frost or snow, the absence of suitable directions on seed packets. FOTOLIA/SQUIRLGIRL

Land that tilts like a roller coaster, a growing season of indeterminate length that may well include frost or snow, the absence of suitable directions on seed packets . . . those are some of the challenges that confront you when you plant a garden at an altitude of 8,000 or 9,000 feet. Even the back issues of that reliable old friend Organic Gardening seem to forsake you up where the air is thin and often chilly, and the prospects for high-altitude gardening success at first seem slim.

Still, if your green thumb really itches, bumper crops of splendid turnips, potatoes, cabbages, onions, garlic, and herbs can be yours without any real difficulty as high up as the timberline if you know how to grow them. And when you succeed, you get superb food along with the satisfaction of mastering the fine-tuning of one of the world's more exotic natural environments.

High-Altitude Gardening in the Rocky Mountains

I live in a small cabin on a mining claim in a national forest in Colorado, high on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. And I find that my greatest pleasure in living here is learning the glories and subtleties of nature . . . and the ways of plants. I am surrounded by a wildness still intact enough to be an overwhelming force in my life, a wildness that makes me, as a gardener, want to learn what vegetables grow here best and most naturally, with the least amount of care and manipulation of the environment. The following approach to gardening has brought me a wealth of food and has helped me preserve the wildness a little longer. And it may tell other high-country gardeners how to do the same.

First, if you garden in that fascinating zone between 3,000 feet above sea level and the Alpine tundra where even trees don't grow, you must realize that the sunshine, moisture, temperatures, and soils all vary greatly over relatively small areas and short periods of time. This is because the land rises and dips steeply except for broad, high meadows that taper off into narrow gulches choked with willow and alder. Thus, every slope and its plants has its own relationship to the sun. Slopes facing north receive the least sunlight, and are cool and refreshing in late summer, when land tilted south is parched and dry. And slopes facing east get the morning sun, while those directed west are warmed even more by late afternoon rays.