As we began to plan our garden, the first thing we needed to do was to decide where to put it. Conventional thought suggests that gardens should be placed with full southern exposure. We also thought that in our cooler climate the southern exposure would be especially important. Our first inclination, therefore, was to put the garden right in front of the house, at the south side where the greenhouse is currently located. Had we put the garden in that spot, water would have been readily available from the house, but we would have had to do a lot of terracing. It would have been a lot of work. We thought about other spots in flatter areas, still not far from the house and south of the trees.

Then, after observing what the summer conditions had been like our first two summers here, and reading about some of the challenges faced by other Colorado Rocky Mountain gardeners, we decided to look for a better spot.

We began to observe that on most of the slopes around here, the south facing side is often quite barren of trees and vegetation, while the northern facing slopes are lush and green. See the photo at the top of the page. Those bare, green slopes have full southern exposure, but on the northern sides they are lush and green. Shouldn’t we pay attention to that? What we hadn’t been thinking about was that the sun is so intense at high elevation, it bakes the plants and dries them out.