Garden On, Vashon

Bush 'Siletz' tomatoes in Sept 2009, caged, tented, plasti-mulch on ground

Four flying hours after a stampede of buyers swarmed the tomato tables of the Vashon Garden Club plant sale, I looked up, saw it was 12:30, and we’d moved over 400 tomato plants into eager gardeners’ hands. Hoop-la! What a blast THAT was! 

We fielded a lot of questions about how to raise these plants. So garden readers, here’s a quick run-down of how to grow tomato plants here.

HARDEN OFF FIRST: Translated, get your greenhouse-grown babies acclimated to the outdoors, by leaving them outdoors for two hours today, and two additional hours each day for a week. Water daily.

 PLANT WHERE THEY’LL GET 6+ HOURS OF SUNBEAMS DAILY. And more sun is better if you have it. If your best sun is on a deck, get a BIG 20″ pot or half-barrel and fill with premium potting soil.

FEED: Toms are heavy eaters, so plant in rich soil with fertilizer added.

PLANT DEEP: Tomatoes are planted deep: more roots will grow from the stems to help with water uptake later. Dig a sloping, rectangular hole—think “stairs to the subway” shape—and put the rootball in the bottom, the top cluster of leaves just emerging into the light. Firm soil around rootball and stem, leaving the top leaves above the earth. (And for those of you who bought a plant with flowers on it, I know you’ll hate to do this, but clip that yellow cluster off. Those first fruits aren’t much good anyway, and you want the plant to concentrate on leaves and roots this month, not fruit.)

SUPPORT NOW: Now, avoiding where the rootball and stem are buried, jam a tomato-cage around that topknot of leaves. (That’s for a bush tomato: for a vining indeterminate that wants to grow tall, give a 5-6′ stake.)

SWADDLE FOR AWHILE: Nights are still cool, and tomatoes will stop growing when night temps are below 50°. Still, we gotta get growing, so to keep these babies warmer, surround the tomato cage with an enclosure of clear plastic, reemay cloth, or Walls o’Water. I use dry cleaner bags slipped down around the cage, with a big hole in center-top so rain can get to the plant (protects against Bambi, too). You can also tent over your whole bed with a hoophouse of reemay or clear plastic: just leave some windows for bumblebees to get in and excess heat to get out.

WHEN NIGHTS REACH 50° AND MORE YELLOW FLOWERS COME— At that point, remove the cover so that bumblebees can get at the flowers. Watch them sometime: they pollinate through “buzz pollination” by vibrating the flower so that it releases the pollen within. You can be the bee, too, by giving the flowers a little shake.

That’s it for now. You should start seeing fruit set in July and, if we have a good season, ripening beginning in late August. And since the weather folks have announced La Nina’s demise, we DO have a chance for a tomato year! Good growing!

Happy May Day! It’s been awhile since I posted some colorful eye-candy, so in this week leading up to the big Garden Club Sale on Saturday, I thought it would be a great time to preview what’s blooming in time for the sale.

From Kay White’s greenhouses comes dozens of blooming geraniums, fancy-leafed geraniums, tomato plants, and not quite 100 fuchsia baskets—even a few geranium baskets! Below are Geranium ‘Platinum’ with dark green leaves with a white edge and coral flower, next to geranium ‘Grossensorten” a clear pink over smoky blue-toned leaves with chocolate zoning. What drama!

If you’re mostly interested in big, colorful geranium blooms, you’ll appreciate the choices Kay’s staff will offer—especially you quilters who will laugh at the carnival colors of “Mrs. Quilter.” If you prefer more intimate joys, such as fragrance or tactile softness, you might enjoy trying Fancy-Leaf Pelargoniums. If the geranium seems to have a tiny flower, pinch a leaf instead and see if you can tell what plant is “Prince Rupert’s Lemon” of “Attar of Roses” or ‘Nutmeg.”

They’ve also been growing tomato plants, extending the varieties you can choose from: more cherry tomatoes like ‘Tomatoberry’, ‘Sweetie’, or ‘Sweetheart’, a grape tomato. Cool-tolerant tomatoes include ‘Northern Delight’ and ‘Momataro’, a favorite of Monument Farm. There are two romas, including ‘Ranger’, and a gold tomato, ‘Gold Nugget.’

Here’s the view along Kay White’s driveway—

Highly Unusual Perennials from CJ Brinkley

I’ve been around the plant nursery a few times, but some of the perennials we’ve been growing in the high school greenhouse for CJ Brinkley, I’d never heard of. Today I sought out some photos and information about these plants, and boy, some of them sound PERFECT for our climate. CJ seeks out plants and seeds from near and sometimes VERY FAR, so these are choice plants you’re not likely to see.

This is a photo from “Annie’s Garden’ of Incarvillea arguta—a hardy gloxinia. This orchid-like flower blooms on a bushy plant up to 3′ high/wide in mid-summer. Looks beautiful, huh?

On the left, a Tracehlium Caeruleum “Blue ThroatWort.” This has dome-shaped flower heads several inches across that are crowded with tiny, tubular amethyst or white flowers resembling allium. Foliage is deep green brushed with plum highlights. Though a perennial, blue throatwort performs as an annual and blooms summer to fall. 3 feet tall and wide. Excellent cut flowers. Provide neutral to slightly acidic, well-drained soil in full sun with some shade in the heat of the day. (from www.finegardening.com/plantguide).
On the right, the amazing-looking Salvia Barreliera: gets 3-5′ tall spikes of these blue flowers.

Here are two rock garden plants: Phacelia Sericea and Caiophora coronata. Phacelia, or “PurpleFringe” looks rather like a small, smoky Blazing Star: it’s a clumped perennial 4-16″ tall, with foliage covered with silky hairs giving it a silvery color. This is a common mountain wildflower native to Colorado. Caiophora is from the Chilean mountains: it’s a low rock garden plant with a fringe of large, ice-white balloon flowers. Both plants will want dry conditions and full sun.

Dicliptera suberect “Hummingbird Plant” (not shown): Felty grey leaves adorn this 20″ tall x 3′ wide, heat- and drought-loving deciduous clump, topped from late spring until fall with terminal clusters of tubular orange flowers…a hummingbird’s dream come true…
Above: Ratibida “Mexican Hat” and a Red Geum.
As you can see, we’ll have some choice plants for your garden. Plus a boutique of garden items, sedum centerpieces, books, vegie starts, and for you early-birds, baked goods on sale to hold you until the doors open at 9am. It’s at the Old Napa store on the west side of downtown Vashon—follow the sandwich boards. And don’t get between me and my new Blue Throatwort!

The Competitive Spirit rises in me when I notice vegie starts from Langley Fine Gardens and Bel-Red Nursery show up at Thriftway. I too am growing vegie starts for sale on Saturday, May 5th at the Garden Club Sale at the Old Napa Store. And I want you to know that, in another ten days, you’ll have a whopping selection (literally hundreds) of EARLY TOMATOES, in gallons and in 4″ pots. If you want a decent chance of a ripe tomato this August, come shop our sale—here’s what we’ll have to offer:

EARLY TOMATOES, in order of ripening—

HEIRLOOM TOMATOES

You would think that most Islanders compost. Most of us have the need for a Personal Refuge Dump, the acreage to hide it in the wilderness, plus juicy compostables are easy to find. 

Yet when I polled my favorite captive audiences this winter, I was surprised how few—a little more than half—did compost piles. And one lady said “You should poll again, this time asking ‘If you don’t compost, do you use a worm bin? I do, and I love mine.”

So I asked. And was I surprised: about 20% of these already-gardening crowds had worm bins. The favorite alternatives to composting? feed scraps to chickens or worms.

Later, I did an informal questionnaire about composting and alternatives, and 15 readers responded. While 13 of these 15 readers do passive piles—ie cool composting—many said they no longer dump kitchen scraps into the compost because of raccoons, rats, or flies.

One respondent who had a stacking compost bin from King County said, “The coons learned to jump on the roof to collapse it, so I put wire around it and a temporary lid—it became quite the contraption. Then there was the time I tossed in kitchen scraps and a rat few into the air, did a U-turn and disappeared.” Now, she says, she just buries her food waste.

Whenever I brought up the subject of composting, I would hear about varmints. Many Islanders, it seems, have given up composting because of them.

WORM BINS

A worm bin, however, is like a safe for kitchen scraps. Make it big, make it heavy, and the critters can’t get in.

“Mine’s like a coffin—a 2′x 4′ box with hinged lid and a handle to lift the top,” said Deborah Teagardin about the system like that in the photo above. She ordered hers from the Worm Guy, Mark Yelkin, who used to make “Wiggle Worm Castings” for sale at True Value. “We went to a presentation and were very impressed with the system: he could make us a plywood worm bin, with delivery and worms, for around $100.”

“It’s very heavy, but it works so well that when we moved, we emptied it out and took the system with us. It keeps the raccoons and rats out. And it gets rid of our kitchen scraps for us.”

The chest is divided by a 1/4″ hardware cloth into two halves. About twice a year when one side’s become stuffed full kitchen scraps, she’ll pull out the old bedding full of worm castings “that’s been mellowing awhile” and use it as side-dressing around garden plants. “In the summertime the flies and pill-bugs get pretty bad, so I just ‘Open-Throw-Slam-Walk Away’ without looking.” 

Another friend, Vicki Clabaugh, made hers out of an old chest from Grannie’s Attic. She told me “I do not use much of the actual compost because it is full of seeds from tomatoes, cukes, melons, peppers, etc, and these seeds sprouted EVERYWHERE the first year I used the compost. Now I fill 3-6 pails halfway with compost and then top with water. Stir daily for a few days. Then I use this tea, after straining it through an old screen, to water pots and my raised bed, especially when planting seeds and starts. I dump the compost left in the bottom of the pails back into the worm bin.”

Yelkin said, “Worm tea is like ‘Red Bull’ for plants, it has so much microbial activity.”  He said a tomato with just a skinny taproot will sprout a lot of mini-roots off that taproot if fed worm casting tea. Another blogger at redwormcomposting.com said that he “fed a worm-tea based fertilizer to his tomatoes and they got husky and darker green fast.”

Getting a Bin—

As Worm Guy, Mark Yelkin used to manage several large composting bin arrays, offering a “2 buckets of scrap for 1 bucket of worm compost” to subscribers and local restaurants. But personal difficulties and “too much silverware and junk” in the buckets from certain restaurants, plus a closure of the Dirt Yard where he had been based, put an end to Worm Guy enterprises.

However, he’s back on the Island and eager for some odd jobs, so he told me he would be open to making more worm bins. Best way to contact him: 206.683.6575 or myelken@yahoo.com.

You can also make this worm bin yourself: this link will take you to the 4-page “How To” pdf, which includes a cutting and materials list. www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/static/pdf/WormBinPlans.pdf

Another good system often recommended is a big Rubbermaid tub-within-a-tub: you’ll find plans online.

Getting the Worms—

Worm bin wigglers are not your standard 6″ earthworms. They are Eisenia fetida, also known as Red Wigglers, and they are the worms found in compost piles and in manure piles. They are adapted to living in rich organic rotting material rather than earth and in dense populations in warmer temperatures.

You can collect them yourself if you have a compost pile or exposed dirt: just lay a big square of moist cardboard on top, wait a few days and you’ll find scores of red wigglers have gathered on the cardboard’s underside. 

You can also get worms from Mark, or from Ann who demonstrated on Worm Bins at Mariposa Garden’s Compost Fests in 2009 and 2010. She sells them for $15/lb; you can contact her at anneonvashon@comcast.net. Or you can get them from her favorite website on the subject, www.redwormcomposting.com.

Ann said you need about a pound of worms for every square foot of bin volume. They’ll eventually multiply into gazillions of worms, but they will not reproduce more than the space in your bin can handle. Be patient: worms don’t so much EAT your scraps as suck on the slurry generated by decomposition, so it’s a good idea to let moist bedding and scraps moulder for a week or two before introducing the first worms.

And they’ll be a lot quieter than chickens.

(this article was originally published, in a slightly more edited form, on March 21, 2012 in the Beachcomber’s “Home & Garden” special section. I’m placing it here because there’s no online link to the original article, and I think the information’s important. If you’re interested, on Tuesday the 24th of April, the Fruit Club is having a presentation on the subject:“Toward an Abundant Orchard: Pollination, Pollinators and other Beneficial Insects” at the Land Trust Building. Doors open at 6, meeting commences at 6:30.)

By Karen Dale

As the air warms to 50° and spring blooms, honeybees will pour from Island hives to feed—and in feeding, pollinate—our native plants and hobby fruits.

Or will they?

During these last too-cool years, the 30± beekeepers on the Island have lost hives. They blame damp hives, starvation, pesticides, diseases, mites. Or is it Colony Collapse Disorder, which has killed early half the commercial hives in the USA?

That useful insect

On a mild March day, I donned a bee-veil and joined Elizabeth Sullivan to inspect her hives. She popped a top, smoked the hive, and lifted a frame full of “My Italian bees,” she said—Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, that useful insect domesticated since ancient times. “I left them most of their honey last fall so they’d go into winter happy, healthy, and with enough food to last through spring.” 

A few bees head-butt my veil. I’m not worried: unlike wasps, honeybees sting only as a last resort. These bees get their bearings, then zip away toward pollen-rich catkins of hazel, maple, alder, flowers of red currant or Oregon grape. Once loaded up, they’ll bee-line back and dance out directions to the motherlode for other forager bees. 

One lands on my sleeve, her legs loaded with saddlebags of yellow pollen that will feed nurse bees, they in turn feeding the pupae and  queen. Other bees regurgitate nectar into cells where, under the fanning of hundreds of bee-wings, it reduces into honey. 

Elizabeth looks into a hive of Carniolans, a darker honeybee that originated in Slovenia. They only number several hundred, but by July, this hive will have over 60,000 bees and nearly 100 lbs of honey from over 25 million flower visits each day.  

Colony Collapse Disorder

“Without bees, we’d do without honey—and more importantly, without fruit set,” says Cheryl Grunbock, who has sold her honey at the farmers’ market. “All our hobby fruits—apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, apricots, and all the berries—have to be pollinated by bees.”

One out of every three bites of food we eat comes from food pollinated by insects. Most US commercial hives are trucked to Florida or California to work crops, but in October ‘06, they were returning sick, dead, or MIA. 

Overwork, travel, stress, pesticides, or “all of the above” are blamed. Several countries have banned systemic “neonicotinoid” pesticides once the chemicals were implicated in mass bee deaths. 

Beekeepers have noticed that pesticides fly off local store shelves. Spraying when it’s over 50° and flowers are blooming may be comfortable for humans, but death to bees. Grunbock says “Bees are the most susceptible: you’ll kill them before you hurt your target bugs.” 

But long-time beekeeper Steve Rubicz believes that “Though a lot of different things make up CCD, the initial hit to American bee keeping was the varroa mite. From 1990 to 2004, the US lost 25% of its commerical hives and all the feral populations to varroa.” 

He lost 24 hives to varroa in the early 90s, and believes that they, and not the problems associated with agri-biz, are key to the problems Island beekeepers have with their hives. Varroa destructor sucks like a vampire on bees and larvae, and hides next to baby bees in their cells. “Mites are in all the hives on the Island—they are a factor.” 

Elizabeth Vogt, who helped start the local bee-club, says nosema, a gut disease, also hits bees hard. “And our island bees take the biggest hit during the winter.”

A Northern Resistance

To combat all these problems, Island beekeepers are adopting strains of honeybees—Russians, Carnies, English Buckfast, Minnesota Hygienics—that have shown mite-resistant behaviors such as grooming or cell-purging. They fare better in cool climates, too. 

Elizabeth smokes the last hive and pries off a frame of “my Minnesota Hygienics. They search and destroy mites and mite-infested pupae.” She pulls from the hive a brown paper strip: “This is a natural miticide made from hops. Smells a little fermented, doesn’t it?”

The “liquid gold, bee-dancing, improved fruit set and keeping the world in food—all seem reasons enough to keep bees. Maybe they are, as Grunbock claims, “the most delightful, hardest-working, most useful pet that you can have.” 

(For more on local beekeeping and pesticides, see the previous two blog entries.)

In my interviews with Island beekeepers and their difficulty keeping honeybee colonies healthy, the Island’s use of garden chemicals came up often. “The Aisle of Death” was the much-repeated term for the shelves of stinky spray-cans and bags of pesticides, herbicides, bug dusts, and fertilizers.

Beekeeper Cheryl Grunbock told me that “bees are the most susceptible of insects: they’ll die way before you get rid of your target insects.” In picking up a can to kill those aphids, caterpillars, thrips, termites, or wasps in your fruit trees, roses, or around your foundation, you just might be killing the very insect that makes your fruit tree fruitful.

I looked at many of the garden products on our local shelves and found that many had the following chemicals that are highly toxic to honeybees. And there’s a market for them, as many people don’t want to take the time to diagnose, but just want a convenient Kill in a Can. So while there has been efforts to steer purchasers away from the most lethal, bee-killing, water polluting substances, you can’t really blame the local stores from carrying these products if Islanders are buying them.

It’s up to you the buyer to make a good decision. Toward that, I provide the following list of baddies, with a mnemonic device at the article’s bottom to help you remember them.

Carbaryl, malathion, neonicotinoids, and pyrethrins 

Carbaryl one of the USA’s most widely used pesticides used against insect pests. One of the most widely used is Sevin, which combines carbaryl and malathion to kill aphids, caterpillars, thrips, Japanese beetles, and other insects. The EPA has requested that the following be added to all Sevin packaging: “This product is highly toxic to bees exposed to direct treatment or residues on blooming crops or weeds. Do not apply this product or allow it to drift to blooming crops or weeds if bees are visiting the treatment area.” However, Bayer CropScience protests that it has a Sevin formulation, XLR Plus, that is a finer-grained dust not so likely by bees to be mistaken for pollen and brought back to the hive with killing effect, so it feels it can refuse the EPA’s request. 

This carbaryl-malathion combo is in a lot of the products I saw, such as Bonide Fruit Tree Spray that is already banned in California. Bonide puts out a lime-sulphur spray that’s less toxic, or you can use insecticide soaps or Bt as the green alternative.

Products with carbaryl or malathion on local shelves: Sevin, Bonide Fruit Tree Spray, Corry’s Slug-killer. Also beware it’s in Ortho Basic Solutions, Ortho Malathion Plus, and Orthos Mosquito-B-Gone Tree & Shrub spray. 

Systemic Neonicotinoids

These are systemic chemicals derived from nicotine that the plant takes up within. Bees get it when they (and other insects) suck on the water exuded by plants through their leaf edges (guttation), and the chemical can kill a bee within minutes. Such neonicotinoids as imidacloprid, clothianidin, or acetamiprid work on the nervous system, causing bees (and termites, the target bug for many products with this active agent) to get confused: they don’t collect pollen, and they lose their navigational powers and thus, their way back to the hive. 

Because these neonicotinoids are systemics, farmers have adopted them happily as an alternative to spraying. However, both through a dusty application process and through guttation, honeybees HAVE become exposed to these harmful chemicals.  After studies of colony collapse disorder found imidacloprid highly correlated to high levels of honeybee deaths, these chemicals have been banned in France and nearly so in Germany, and in the State of California their maker, Bayer CropScience, has quietly asked the state ag department to stop recommending its use to orchardists.

(After I posted this story, a friend sent me this link to an article about neonics and bees at Mother Jones: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/bayer-pesticide-bees-studies

Local products with neonicotinoids: Bayer Advanced Complete Insect Killer, Bayer Advanced 12 Month Tree & Shrub Protect & Feed, Ortho Tree & Shrub Insect Control. With Acetamiprid: Ortho Flower, Fruit & Vegetable Insect Killer and Ortho Rose & Flower Insect Killer.

Pyrethrin and her scary daughters

The first pyrethrins were developed in the 1800s and were once the most widely-used pesticides. They are the principal agents used against mosquitoes, especially in the malaria-prone countries, yet bugs are developing resistance and threatening our ability to ward off malaria. Pyrethrin works by paralyzing the nervous system: the insect’s nerves cannot relent firing signals, and so the insect becomes paralyzed and literally falls from the air. 

The original formulation of pyrethrin broke down by sunlight after onlly a couple days, so stronger, more toxic formulations have been developed that, while not toxic to humans, ARE to small bees. These 2nd-gen Pyrethrins are legion, but most end with “thrin”—deltamethrin, cypermethrin, permethrin, bifenthrin, and cyfluthrin.”

Products with pyrethins: Green Thumb products “Flying Insect Killer”, “Insect Control” and “Home Insect Killer. Lily Miller Multi-Purpose Insect Spray, some Safer products like “tomato & Vegetable Insect Killer and “Yard & Garden Insect Killer”, Bayer Advanced Lawn PowerForce Multi-Insect Killer, and Bonide Delta Eight Insect Control, plus many RAID products.

Here’s a mnemonic device to help you remember and spot the most toxic active agents in these garden products: “Neo burns carbs and gets thin at the Marathon.”  ”Neo” for neonicotinoids. “Burns” for “pyre” as in pyrethrins. “Carbs” as in carbaryl. “Gets thin” as in “thrin” as in those 2nd-gen pyrethrins. Marathon because it sounds a little like malathion.

Another helpful device may soon be showing up on garden product shelves. A local group is seeking to revive a 2006-07 program, Garden Green / Drink Clean that used hang-tags to educate buyers on the best-to-worst chemical products. Watch the Beachcomber in coming weeks for news of these useful and green program.

As I was researching the article on honeybees appearing in this week’s “Home & Garden” section of the Beachcomber, I had the privilege and fun of talking to a number of Island beekeepers. Though they meet informally throughout each spring to compare notes and experiences, you might never know they’re out there, keeping our Island’s wee goddesses of fruit pollination alive and buzzing. So let me introduce you to

A Few Beekeepers of Vashon

Steve Rubicz has been beekeeping the longest on Vashon. He started in 1971 in Anacortes, kept bees on Capitol Hill and Leschi neighborhoods in Seattle, and once here grew his colony to over 85 hives, most stationed near the hazelnut trees at Island Meadow during the early 1970s.

In the 1980s, he got involved with Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk’s study of pollution from ASARCO’s Tacoma copper smelter. By testing five honeybee colonies in an increasing north/south distance from south Vashon, including some of Steve’s hives, Dr. Bromenshenk was able to show a correlation between the northwestern drift of the smelter plume and the presence of its contaminants in Vashon honeybees. “That plume was over the southern end of Vashon for 100 years, and it definitely had a suppressing effect on honeybee populations. The plume went as far north as Wax Orchard; I had a friend who tried to keep bees there, and despite all those fruit trees, he never did very well with those hives.”

In the early 90s, “we had the experience of colony collapse here, thanks to the varroa mite. I had downsized from 85 to 24 hives, and one winter I lost them all. The bees had either disappeared or were just crawling aimlessly around. I looked at the dead ones under a magnifying glass, and I could see the mites on them.” He cited many of the diseases that ail honeybees today, including the tracheal mite, the varroa mite, and nosema disease associated with mites. 

In his search for better, mite-free bees, he eventually returned to a Texas apiary “that had Buckfast bees from England. The Weaver family from around Buckfast Abbey had been working with bees for the last 120 years, and when they started seeing all this colony collapse, they quit using pesticides and they started breeding bees that had survived mite infestations.” Steve sees steadily increasing survival, thanks to new breeding of bees and such techniques as “smaller honeycomb cells, bottom screens, spraying the bees with sugar-water so they stop and groom themselves.” 

Bob Dixon has been keeping bees on Vashon for the last 15 years. He got started in Tennessee while on assignment from Boeing (“I met a couple of old guys who were keeping bees, decided I could do this, too.”) At one time, he was trucking his 20 hives out to the Washington coast to pollinate a cranberry farm, but gave up “because it cost more than it was worth.” Today he has six hives of bees that are “a cross between Russian queens and feral honeybees.” He parks his hives around the Island, “places that will provide 4-5 months of bloom” like a good garden, blackberry stands, lavender fields, maple trees.” To a set of regular customers he sells his honey, getting about 50 lbs from each hive. Voice of Vashon shot a DVD of Bob extracting his honey: if interested, track down Dan Schuler.

Some of Elizabeth Sullivan's honeybees with honey-packed cells on the comb

Margot Boyer and Bob Powell of Center are relative newcomers to what for them has been a thrilling start at beekeeping. They began beekeeping four years ago. “We built the hive from a kit purchased online. If you want to get bees through the mail, buy a ‘packet’ that’s 3 lbs of bees plus queen; if you want a bigger ‘Nuc’ (short for ‘nucleus hive’ with a queen, larvae, worker bees, and five frames of honeycomb), you have to go get it. We put that nuc frame in a ‘deep’ (the tall bottom box of a hive where the base colony lives) and didn’t know enough to top the first deep with a second deep for them to expand into. So six weeks later when the trees leafed out, those bees swarmed.” Margot provided that wonderful photo at top-left: that’s her husband Bob Powell holding the box underneath the swarm, with Margot on the other ladder with a pole-trimmer, trying to “cut off that branch so the whole mess will drop into the box.”

Her goal is to keep the bees into their second year. “Last year, I had 100% dead. When winter moisture condenses in the hive, if the hive is closed up too tight, the bees’ breathe condenses and drops on them. So we’ve been increasing circulation, installing a bottom screen, feeding the bees around now.” They have Russian bees. 

Gregory Martin—he of the hand under the swarm— “is a total newbie to beekeeping. We have a hybrid of Minnesota Hybrids with some European breed—basically tried to get the most mellow bees we could because they’re really for my 8-year-old child.” His didn’t survive well last winter: of his four hives, two collapsed last year due to the cold, extended spring. Consequently they didn’t take much honey from the hive, only about 3 quarts, to leave most for the bees’ overwintering needs. It didn’t last long. “My kids don’t want store-bought honey anymore, ours was that tasty.”

Cheryl Grunbock says “Bee-keeping is addictive: when I got my first two hives, I would sneak to my hive with a little chair and just sit there and watch, I wasn’t getting my chores done. They do their little dances right on their porch.”

Cheryl has wonderful proof of how much bees influence fruit set. “I moved into my house in 1999. in the first spring, I noticed there were some bees here serving the fruit trees. In the next year, only a few bees, not much fruit. Third year, not one bee and dismal fruit harvest. Wondering why the dismal harvest. I was guessing the lack of bees. So I got bees, and I started to note much better fruit production.”

    ”Then I got a property on Pinder Island in B.C. which had a blueberry field. The next door neighbor had an apple/pear orchard that was struggling; the sellers said they used to harvest a lot of apples from those trees, yet I saw not ONE apple, not one pear. All the other neighbors said, ‘we don’t have fruit either.’  So I brought honey-bees up there. That year—Voila—apples and the neighbors also had apples! They can thank me for that! Because it’s two examples rather than one, I don’t think I’m crazy.”   (I’ll bring Cheryl into my next blog that will focus on honeybees and local pesticide use.)

Elizabeth Vogt is an entomologist who used to do forensic dissections of honeybees for a living. Now a researcher at Pacific Medical Center, she only has time for four hives and the irregular meetings of the bee club she helped get going. She could easily ramble off a list of key pollen sources on the Island—”from now, from really from mid-April through mid-July, then it’s spotty. Let’s see: Oregon grape, cottonwoods, willows so far. Right now hazel, alder, red currant, Indian plum, and soon maples, bird cherry, all the berries, salal, dogwood. Yes, broom’s a big source, and so are the other weeds like blackberry, bindweed, fireweed, loosestrife. Any deciduous or fruit trees. And yes, madrone: there’s a guy who has his hives parked right in a madrone grove; he gets a nice light, clear honey.”

She suggested that if a person wanted to try beekeeping, to join a bee-club like the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association, read some books, get a mentor. “Everybody does okay the first year, it’s that second year that dumbfounds new beekeepers. What we really need are more mason bees: they’re so easy. They’re actually better than honeybees as fruit tree pollinators. They take a little maintenance, but far less than honeybees.”

Above collage: Boyer & Powell reaching for their swarm; some of Elizabeth Sullivan’s honeybees; Sullivan inspecting her hives; Gregory Martin’s hand under a swarm, photo by his wife. Below: me in the bee-veil I sewed up from food-grade cheesecloth given to me by the Tofu Factory (anybody in the market for a bee veil?)

That's me, in my homemade bee veil among Elizabeth Sullivan's beehives.

Sylvia Matlock of DIG—she of the recent “10 Indispensable Plants of the PNW”  just challenged me to say what my 10 Indispensables are. So here are my personal, for my own garden indispensables.

Roses: I’m a Portland girl, forever dragging friends and family up to the Portland Rose Garden to smell the roses. One of my life’s best days–and a rainy one at that–was spent in the Rosarie of Bagatelle Gardens in Paris. Imagine not just bush and shrub roses, but roses dripping from pergolas, twisting around pillars, draped from post to rose-covered post in swags of rose, blush-pink, and ivory. Ah, heaven! I grow ‘Felicite & Perpetue’, ‘Jacques Leotine’, and ‘Albertine’ on my own pergola, plus ‘Just Joey’, ‘Brass Band’, ‘Therese Bugnet’, and the mysterious “Resurrection Rose” that has managed to recover from my falling it last summer.

Tomatoes: the vegetable gardener’s Holy Grail. My must-have is ‘Siletz’, a parthenogenic (seedless) early tomato developed by Dr. Jim Baggett of OSU and sold by Territorial Seed Company. I always grow 8-10 of them in a 3 x 8′ raised bed, and they always ripen (sometimes in August, sometimes lucky by October)

Autumn Fern: This sturdy small fern rises on straight stalks then unfurls red and bronze and lasts all season. It’s multiplying in my dry shade ravine, a lovely warm color amidst all the dripping evergreen.

Hairy Geranium: Not so much Must-Have as Always-Around. A big patch came with the house, growing on CONCRETE and flowering in the north shade of our large house. So I have divided and redivided this survivor into dry shade places where I need quick coverage. Its myriad pink flowers sprinkle the carpet of apple-green leaves—very pretty in May.

Pinks: We’ve covered much of our ravine’s slopes with concrete rubble walls, and as that stuff leaches alkali into the surrounding soil, a groundcover that likes a high pH soil works where much else doesn’t. I’ve always loved its blue foliage, and how can you not bow low to catch a whiff of their clove scent?

Daffodils: What’s not to love? Cheerful when so little else is blooming, giving the heads-toss to spring’s bluster. Cheap, and deerproof!

Solomon’s Seal: I have a colony of them growing at the foot of a big-leaf maple, rising from one of those carpets of hairy geranium. Their tall 2-3′ stems nod over at top, dangling white bells—an unusual form for a perennial. They would just look weird in a flower border—like periscopes up for a peek—but in a shaded woodland they look like guardians of the wood, just right.

Daphne Odora: Ah, that perfume! I was first hooked, entering a hoophouse that captured the perfume of dozens, grown there. And I was recently sad to see that the Country Store’s venerable daphne, right by their front stoop, is no longer there. Daphnes need a sheltered spot (mine’s between two buildings) and tend to flop over as their roots aren’t very ambitious. 

Irises, German and Pacific Coast: This, for sentimental reasons, as I had a friendship that started with a mutual love of PNW irises. And I love the colorful frills of German irises: a whole 40′ bed of them underlies my living room windows. They look terrible after blooming, but you can always cover the smutty foliage with summer bloomers.

Dierama: This same friend had a garden full of Fisherman’s Wands, a grassy plant with those 4′-long stems that dangle purple, rose, or pink bells. In fact, this grassy tuft needs 360° of spread, otherwise its “wands” will get tangled in its neighbors. I’ve moved mine way too much in hopes of finding the perfect placement, and it sulks, so I have lost the plant or at least any sign of those blooms. But at the end of a narrow bed, allowed to ‘fish” over an ocean of grass or low groundcovers—smashing!

Drat this snow! When will winter be DONE? I caught this March snow on my vigorously blooming bergenia this morning before the snow REALLY got blowing around. Thankfully, the snow didn’t last. But STILL!!! Enough already!

A Nifty Garden Journal

Cathy Fulton of Mariposa Gardens sent me a notice yesterday about a sturdy Garden Journal she has made for herself, family and friends. This gift goes over so well, with repeat requests, that she’s now making them for sale thru Etsy. The link is to “CathleensHands” her shop at Etsy.

I used to keep my garden records in Ann Lovejoy’s “Three Years in Bloom: A Garden-Keeper’s Journal.” But it went out of print many years ago, and I have not been able to find a good replacement. This just might do. Its features include—

The Etsy store says she only has five available right now. 

Sylvia Matlock shares her 10 Indispensable Plants

Every year, the Seattle Times garden writer Valerie Easton asks a local garden expert to pick their “10 Indispensable Plants” and turns that list into a beautifully illustrated article (by Whitney Stensrud) for Pacific Northwest magazine Sunday supplement. This year, our Sylvia Matlock of DIG had the honor…

and yesterday presented her list of 10 Must-Haves to the VMI Garden Club. Immediate plant lust!

Sylvia chose most of her plants to do well in her home garden, which has dry shade and lots of towering douglas firs (just like mine and probably yours.) Unfortunately, the article only goes on so long in DIG’s website, then continues at an irritating crawl on the Seattle Times website. So I’m going to repeat her list with her comments. If you want to see the plants, I suggest doing a Google image search instead of looking (in vain) for those Whitney Stensrud illustrations.

The 10 Must-Haves by Sylvia Matlock

Corokia Cotoneaster. This wiry shrub has tiny leaves reflecting silver. Wirey stems a “charcoal gesture”. In spring bright yellow daisy flowers. There’s a variegated form “that lights up my garden.” Very hardy plant, 5′ x 5′. 

Azara Microphylla. Small tree 15′ high, 6′ wide. Vanilla scented flowers. There’s a variegated form. Needs little watering.

Lilium cernum. “turk’s cap” type petals reflex away from deep orange stamens in a 2′ high lily. Likes filtered light and dry soil–too wet and it rots. From Korea. Muliplies.

Tolmiea menziesii ‘Taff’s Gold’:  AKA piggyback plant, a NW native groundcover that gives a ‘chartreuse punch.” Can plant right next to fir trees. Looks beautiful with mondo grass; trails beautifully out of a container. (Deep like it, though, as I learned to my sorrow…)

Ocimum ‘African Blue’: Here’s a basil that actually tolerates cool summers. It’s drought-tolerant. As a cut flower, it will last “two months in a vase—really!” Is propagated by cuttings only, not from seed. Annual.

Pacific Coast Hybrid Irises: Many breeders are working with these crosses between iris tenax and PNW native grass irises, producing 3-4″ blooms fabulously streaked. ‘Joey’ is banana-yellow w/brown and purple streaks. ‘Sea Admiral’ and ‘Watercolor’ were flooded with shades of blue. These like dry shade or sun, good drainage, tucks in well with shrubs, providing dense weed-barrier evergreen growth.

Papaver rupifragrum: a tangerine poppy with turquoise-green evergreen leaves that takes deep shade and drought. Blooms March thru November if the seedpods are deadheaded. Looks great weaving through sword fern and hellebores.

Sedum Palmeri: a fleshy blue-green sedum that takes sun or shade and is EVERGREEN (well, ever-something…) Beautiful contrast with daintier sedums in containers. 

Mahonia nervosa: AKA Oregon Grape. This deerproof evergreen shrub-let can be, like piggyback plant, planted right next to firs and does not suffer from root competition. Good for bee and hummers as a winter nectar source.

Manzanita densiflora ‘Howard McMinn’:   ”My favorite native!” she proclaimed for the nth time. This PNW coastal native has clusters of bell flowers like those of pieris, but light VIOLET that bloom in January or February. It hates clay soil. 

Sylvia says the nursery carries all of these plants. 

Free-ranging Porkies

I was walking up a side road toward its intersection with Wax Orchard when I spotted an old collie about 100 yards away, shuffling along the road. It being a nice Sunday afternoon for dog-walking, I didn’t think much of it until I came out the side road and came face to face with not dog, but hog.

Two hogs, in fact—big, pot-belly porkers in black and dirty white. They peered at me, their noses high and snuffling in porcine curiosity. I waved my arm at them and said, “Go home!” and they did, trotting off toward the goat pastures of the Rent-a-Ruminant lady. 

Apparently these two get free all the time. And as one mounted the other, I was treated to the vision of how islands develop gangs of feral pigs that run amok in the forests. Wasn’t it Hawaii that lost the DoDo to gangs of wild pigs that ate the DoDo’s eggs? 

If you want a hog—call Ivan

Ivan Weiss, former market manager for VIGA, is raising 16 hogs this spring and will have some for sale in time for a May visit by George the Port Orchard slaughter-guy. Call Ivan if interested in Island-grown bacon.

Okara makes good feed

Ivan also told me that okara, the by-product of making tofu, makes wonderful feed for hogs, chickens, and the red wigglers in your worm bin. He’s been told it also improves–if this is possible–the taste of free-range eggs.

I’ve been picking up okara this month for use in hot composting. Its high level of nitrogen helps build proteins in animal bodies. In compost, it counters the high carbon content of decomposing “browns” such as leaves, straw, or animal bedding.

It does have a reputation for odor. As Lane told me, “The folks that till it right into the soil or feed it directly to their animals, LOVE it. The folks who let it sit around NEVER COME BACK FOR IT AGAIN.” I found the grainy white porridge smells like a vanilla milk-shake made with sour milk, and it smells more sour the longer it sits. 

It’s free for the taking from Island Spring Tofu Factory: call Lane, their facilities manager, ahead of time.