Garden On, Vashon

First, the news:

• Cathy Fulton will be talking about the Food Summit at this week’s meeting of the Sustainable Practices Committee, Thursday, 7pm at the Land Trust building.

• Ivan Weiss wants you to know he has farm-fresh eggs available for “the going rate” ($6/dozen) at his farm in upper Burton. Call ahead: 463-HOGS.

• Seattle’s Flower & Garden Show starts Wednesday and runs through this weekend. DIG will be there in the Vendor’s section, and local garden girl Patty Campbell will give a seminar on “Flower Pot Produce” at 5pm Sunday in the Mt. Hood room.

The Sap’s Rising, making Saps of us all

Have you noticed? The weather, the croaking frogs, and the American Capitalist System are conspiring to convince us it’s spring. 

This has been the warmest January on record: 48° on average, a full seven degrees warmer than the usual low 40s. With the jet stream sending foul weather to north and south of us, our plants think they’re getting mild spring weather. My wallflowers are trying to bloom: they normally blossom in March, with tulips. Just south of town, the forsythia hedge in front of the “Holiday House” is dotting itself yellow. And near the Athletic club, a couple of cherries have sent up a soft-pink cloud of bloom.

These so-called “autumn-flowering” cherries are meant to bloom in late winter. THEY’RE on schedule, but the rest of us, humans and plants, are being led down the primrose path. Our area almost ALWAYS has what I call a “January Thaw” when the oddly-warm air fools humans and flowers alike to think we’re getting an early spring. Our sap is rising, we’re ready to open the wallets and flush out some green. And the shops are ready for us…

Seedy Temptation

As you enter Thriftway through their primrose-lined entrance, you’ll find the seed-packet racks blooming with new arrivals. 2010 Seed packets from Ed Hume, Botanical Interests, and Territorial Seed Company can be found at True Value, Thriftway, Island Lumber, and Country Store (they also carryseeds from  Abundant Life, a company supplying organic and biodynamic seeds that was bought by Territorial seven years ago.) 

Country Store told me they’ve been fielding questions about seeds from eager customers for weeks now, and they are already selling seeds to folks who say they’re planting soon.

But for hobby gardeners, it’s still too early to sow. We may have the warmth, the seed-rotting rains may be averted (for now), but what we don’t have is solar power. Stray sunbeams may have played upon my greenhouse enough to warm it to 60°, but only from 10:30 to 2:30—about two hours shy of the bare minimum for healthily growing plants.

I suspect only the most favored sites—  top-of-the-island farms with open southern exposures like Plum Forest and Island Meadow—will start seedlings this early and only in their greenhouses. As Leda Langley told me last year, “most gardeners get stuck starting way too early, then end up nursing their transplants along for way too long.” Most seedlings only want to be in their little pots for about 4 weeks, yet our earliest frost-free day, according to Ed Hume, is March 24. 

It IS a good time to plan your seed order

In any year, late January through February is THE time to order seeds. If you order now, you’ll receive your seeds by late February, which will be a safer time to sow.

I spent last Saturday buried under one laptop, two gardening books, and five seed catalogs, typing my “Seed Spreadsheet” into google-docs as fast as my eyeballs could pull info from pages. Into this spreadsheet I’ve listed the plants I want to grow, noting varieties recommended by Steve Solomon (“Gardening West of the Cascades”) and Sylvia Thompson (“The Kitchen Garden”). With that list in hand, I can quickly scan the catalogs for those varieties and enter their prices/weight for a quick cost comparison when I’m ready to order.

I hope to diversify my plantings even more by trading for other’s extra seeds through the Seed Exchange at the Food Summit, March 5-7. (More on that in a later blog.)

While you’re at it, test your old seed

Before you order, you could test your old seeds—even last year’s packets—to see whether the seed is still viable or whether you’ll need to buy replacements. Here’s how to do a germination test:

• find a dark, warm place: the closet where the water heater lives, on top of an appliance with a pilot light, near the woodstove.

• Take two sheets of paper towel, lay on over the other, and moisten the upper half on your counter or a cooky sheet. A misting bottle works great.

• Take ten seeds or so from an older packet of seed you want to test. Spread those across the moistened sheet. Fold the bottom of the towels over this layer of seed, and moisten again so the sheets are damp but not dripping.

• Place this folded sheet into a ziploc bag. Seal and place in the dark, warm spot. To keep track of what’s in the bag (in case you’re loading it with several trials), take notes on the bag’s exterior or on a separate sheet of paper, not on the towel itself—wet ink RUNS, remember.

• Open and check seeds daily for sprouting. Within the week if they’re good, they’ll begin to sprout. Your packet may show the expected minimum germination rate (Johnny’s and Territorial for sure). If you get germination much less than that—or under 75%—either sow them as transplants so you won’t plant dudes, or replace the packet.

This idea comes courtesy of today’s Thriftway temptation: a special issue magazine from Taunton Press called “Starting From Seed.”

 Hey, I’m not immune! I may not buy THAT it’s spring, but can I resist buying INTO spring? Not a chance…

Bob looked at the grocery receipt this last week and announced “our bill is running twice what it was this summer.”

So what’s making the difference? Vegetables, of course: we have to buy them now that the December freeze turned my winter garden to mush. Still, “twice what it was” doesn’t tell you much about what you saved by growing your own.

But Nancy Lewis-Williams, Master Gardener and teacher of last year’s popular vegetable-growing class, HAS kept a running tally of what her harvest has been worth to her pocketbook. From June through December first, she weighed all the produce she’d harvested and kept a running tally, in pounds, of 33 different crops, from apples to zucchini. 

“Well, maybe 75% of it—I didn’t count the stuff we ate right off the vine,” she hedged. “And it also doesn’t include all the greens we grew in early spring, before I started this count.”

Her computer went on the fritz the same week I asked for her end-of-harvest totals, so I stepped in and looked up current prices at Thriftway. So here’s another hedge: we didn’t use height-of-season prices (except for the raspberries, which I had recorded for myself in Quicken when I bought a half-flat this summer).

Given all these qualifiers, what did we find? That Nancy had harvested nearly $500′ worth 0f organic vegetables per MONTH from her 2000 s.f. garden. 

The harvest total was worth $1810, using winter Thriftway prices for non-organic produce. If compared to organic prices, the harvest would be worth $2952.

“And I’ve still got a month’s worth out there in leeks, kale, carrots, chard, turnips, rutabagas and spinach,” she said.

The Big Pay-offs

The big pay-off, both in weight and in dollars grown, was from POTATOES. With a pound of seed potatoes for “Rose Finn Apple Fingerlings” from Ronnigers in Colorado (www.ronnigers.com), her return was hundredfold: 110 pounds worth $440 smackaroos. She also planted around 10 lbs of seed potatoes for regular spuds and got 250 lbs in return, worth $250 or $500 at organic prices. 

Leda Langley told me last spring that you get the biggest bang in calories and productivity/acre with potatoes, and here Nancy’s proved her point.

Other seeds with a large return, literally, were: TOMATOES at 109 lbs, worth at least $218 and probably well over $300 organic; 95 pounds of WINTER SQUASH (delicate and butternut) worth $1 per pound; 36 pounds of CUCUMBERS worth $72 or twice that if organic; LEAFY FRY GREENS like kale, chard, and spinach that come bagged at premium prices anywhere from $4-6 per pound. “I didn’t count all the corn: I must have pared kernels off of hundreds of ears.” 

If you’re a fruit-fancier willing to pay for fresh off-season berries, you might want to invest in a few bushes and a freezer. Nancy’s 28 pints of RASPBERRIES were worth at least $65 compared to in-season local berries, or $448 compared to last week’s Chilean winter imports at a Buck an Ounce. 

Other results: HERBS: 13 handfuls worth $65; 15 lbs of LEEKS worth $45; 32 pounds of BEETS worth anywhere from $1.50/lb to $5/lb for organic; 29 pounds of CARROTS worth from $22-30; 15 lbs of CABBAGE worth 50¢ a pound but four times that organically. 

The Investment

My husband, always the skeptic, pointed out that there’s costs involved: water, fertilizer, seed trays, seed. 

“And you HAVE to have a deer-fence,” Nancy added when I asked about her costs. Deer-fencing runs about a dollar a running foot; you could fence a garden her size (2000 sf, equal to a 40′x50′) for  $100 plus the poles and gate materials.

Looking at her records, she estimated she spent $100 on seeds, $30/month on water, and $100 on organic fertilizer and amendments. Given that one doesn’t water in three of the months of her trial, that’s approximately $300 a year to install a 2000 s.f. vegie patch producing $3000 worth of food. That’s a tenfold return for your money.

Now Nancy’s put in a greenhouse last year; with such a large expense, you’re looking at costs close to what the author of “The $64 Tomato” ran up. But you don’t have to spend a lot on gear, as Steve Solomon points out in his latest book, “Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times”: you can direct seed instead of growing or buying transplants, you can start warm-season fruiting plants in a sunny window, you can blend your own fertilizer, and you can restrict your tools to a hoe, a bow rake, a good shovel, a sharp knife, and a hose. 

You may not be able to grow as large a bounty as Nancy did, but most folks DO realize some savings. In a poll done last year by the National Gardening Association, they found that “a well-maintained food garden yields a $500 average return per garden.”  

So save yourself a few or a LOT of bucks: Grow Your Own.

Stories I’m working on:

• A Seed Swap at the Food Summit Meeting: bring some, take some.

• Gates for deer-fencing

If you have ideas for stories or inputs on the above ideas, comment here or write me at karendale@centurytel.net.

Nothing like a warm winter sun-break and a bit of chain-sawing to warm a girl up. Sunday night’s wind brought down a small hemlock, already bone-dry and perfectly placed: right next to a road, its butt end still hinged to its stump, the trunk held three feet off the ground all its length. With the sunshine and a newly-sharpened chain,  it was a pleasure to work. Hope you got a chance at the sunshine, too.

The News:

I got this notice from Cathy Fulton today: she’s planning a Vashon Food Summit ”for People Who Eat” this March 5-7. Meetings for volunteers will be held later this week at the Vashon Library (see details below).

Cathy’s web site on the event (link below) says the event is “for Islanders to meet and share information and experience on most any topic regarding food and its impact on Vashon Island. Broad topics include Raising Food, Acquiring & Preparing Food, and The Food Economy.

The purpose is to encourage Islanders to become more aware of the food we eat, to eat more food closer to its source, and learn how to prepare good food more economically. Raising food and food prep will be key areas. We’ll also explore how the way we eat is ultimately a political act. There will be lectures, workshops, panels, organization tables, a “Stone Soup” dinner, and a “Food Celebration.”

The only volunteer meetings for those who would like to help with the Vashon Island Food Summit ( http://vashonfoodsummit.org/) are being held this week at the Vashon Library. The meetings will be Wednesday, January 20, 7:00 pm and Friday, January 22, 11:00 am. You only need to attend one meeting–they will be identical in subject matter.  If you cannot attend either meeting, but would like to like to be involved, let Cathy Fulton know by email or phone: cathy@MariposaGardens.org, 463-5652. 

 A preliminary list of volunteer opportunities can be found on her website at: http://vashonfoodsummit.org/index_files/Page363.htm

And also: mark your calendars for a return of last year’s popular Vegetable Growing Classes: two weekends later, on March 20 and 27, taught again Cathy Fulton and Nancy Lewis-Williams. Nancy and I are developing an article on “The Dollars You Can Save By Growing Your Own.”

Bob Dale’s Hot & Sour Noodle Soup
When the rains return, here’s a very peppy, winter soup that will cheer your bones.

Take a quart of chicken or turkey soup stock, put in kettle and on medium-high heat.

Into the pot add:
1 cup white cabbage, shredded into 1/4″ ribbons
1/3 cup shredded carrot (about 1/3 a carrot)
1 green onion, sliced thin on diagonal
1 celery rib, diced to 1/4″ pieces
Season with:
1 tbls “Sriracha” chili garlic paste (less if you like it less hot)
1 teas. soy sauce
1 teas. rice vinegar
1 teas. rice wine
Once soup comes to a boil, add a handful of wheat noodles (we like straight “Marco Polo” noodles: a hand-grab around a quarter-coin’s thickness is enough for two people).
Stir so noodles don’t clump, then reduce heat to simmer and cook for about 10 minutes, until noodles are al dente.
Thicken broth to a silky texture with 1 teas. cornstarch dissolved in 2 tbls. cold water. SERVE.

Now THIS is reading weather…

With rain predicted through the end of this week (and with credits at both Island bookstores), I decided to ask some of the Island’s best gardeners & farmers for a list of their favorite garden books. And I checked on availability of many of these through the King County Library System (more on that below).

(PS: As the rain just WON’T quit, I also got online and ordered seed catalogs. Most catalogs are bulk-mailed this month, so get on their lists now. For me, some Must-Haves are Territorial Seed Company* (which bought Abundant Life Seed Foundation of Port Townsend, another good one), Johnny’s Seed Co., and The Cook’s Garden* (*Local stores will offer their seeds in carousel racks later this winter.)

Thanks to Joanne Jewell of Plum Forest Farm, Chandler Briggs of Island Meadow, Chris Greenlee, Mark Musick, Nancy Lewis-Williams, Cathy Fulton, March Twisdale, Julia Lakey, Michelle Crawford, Colleen James, and Anita Halstead for sharing your favorites!

Favs of the Farmers

These first two are touchstones of my own library. The last book, I’ve checked out at least twice when I’ve had a good growing summer (which is about two months too late, as you’ll see).

Steve Solomon’s “Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades” and “Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times.”  Do ALL our local farmers have this book? It’s now in its sixth edition (2007); Chris Greenlee says “Much of what Steve wrote about earlier, he’s refuted in his later versions.” Hummm… might be time to retire my 1989 copy.

“The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide” by Seattle Tilth. This year-round guide to growing organically in the Seattle climate delivers a ton of information within helpful month-to-month “To-Do” chapters. Islanders Rob Peterson, Joanne Jewell, and Kathryn True all worked on the 1998 edition, and Joanne reports that a new edition is in the works. 

Binda Colebrook’s “Winter Gardening in the Pacific Northwest.” Lots of personal observations on vegetables and techniques that work for the winter garden. TIP: if there’s the chance you might want to extend your growing season, get this NOW and read by July.

More on Growing:

I was thrilled to find at Granny’s last week John Jeavons’ classic on bio-intensive gardening “How to Grow more Vegetables.” Some of my correspondents liked:

“Better Vegetables Gardens, the Chinese Way” by Peter Chan. Chris Greenlee says “I love the simplicity.”

John Seymour’s “The (New) Self-Sufficient Gardener.” Joanne Jewell: “It’s so beautiful, and it’s good for home gardeners.” Amply illustrated, like all DK publications.

“Gaia’s Garden” by Toby Hebenway. Cathy Fulton (Mariposa Gardens, the Compost Fest) says “This is a very accessible book about permaculture. I checked it out of the library three times, then gave up and bought it.”

Anything by Eliot Coleman, says Chandler Briggs: “The New Organic Grower” and “Four-Season Harvest.”  Fascinating tools and techniques of an extremely successful organic grower in New England.

Nancy Bubel’s “Seed-Starting” and “Root-Cellaring” are essential handbooks for Nancy Lewis-Williams, who will rerun her popular vegetable growing classes this March.

Michelle Crawford, tomato diva of Pacific Potager, recommends “The Art of French Vegetable Gardening” by Louisa Jones.  Beautiful photos of all seasons of the ornamental kitchen garden, with great text; I first saw this awesome book at Michelle’s “Kitchen Potager Salon” last February. She also likes “Organic Farming” by Nicolas Lampkin… an English book, but similar to our climate. ” I must have read it 7 times.  Very good explanation of soil chemistry, how nutrients are released, etc. “ 

Links to our Land

As I’ve said before, Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” pushed me to grow more of my own food, rather than depend on “industrial food.” And as one season bends toward another, I felt kinship with Carol Williams as she gardens and writes up a year in her bio-dynamically influenced backyard, in “Bringing the Garden to Life.”

For his winter inspiration, Chandler Briggs is reading Wendell Berry’s “The Unsettling of America” and Wes Jackson’s “Becoming Native to This Place.” 

Speaking of being in place, Anita Halstead loves “The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating a Sense of Place” by Claire Sawyers: a book about seeking design inspiration not in Europe or Asia, but in the environs we live in.

Lewis-Williams is savoring “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate” by Wendy Johnson, a Zen Buddhist who is Head Gardener at San Francisco’s Green Culch Farm Center. “It’s one of those books you read a few pages at a time to make it last.”

Eye-Candy: Ornamentals

Les this list become dominated by vegetables, I asked Master Gardener Colleen James, whose Burton perennial garden was profiled here a few weeks ago, to contribute a few. 

One of them, I had just read: “Perennials: the Gardener’s Resource” by Susan Carter, Bob Lily and Carrie Becker. “This has replaced the Sunset book as far as perennials go,” Colleen opined. This coffee-table reference is written by three local experts, covering 2700 species and cultivars, their demands, upkeep, and performance, with commentary.

“Anything by Beth Chatto: her “Drought-Resistant Planting Through the Year” on gravel gardening is what really got me going,” said Colleen. “She turned a parking lot into this big drought-tolerant planting of all these flowering, gorgeous ornamentals—and she never waters.”

James also turns to Jane Taylor’s “Plants for Dry Gardens: Beating the Drought”  (”we’re only going to see more drought in the future”), “Covering Ground” about ground covers by Barbara W. Ellis, and “Seedheads in the Garden” by Noel Kingsbury.

Another from Nancy Lewis-Williams is “Passionate Gardening” by Lauren Springer and Rob Proctor. It too “emphasizes perennials for low water and extreme climates. And it’s got great photos to drool over.”

Garden Design

When I need to design a large area, I often have a stroll through “The Book of Garden Design” by English designer John Brookes. And like Anita Halstead, I find local writers Ann Lovejoy’s “Organic Garden Design School” and Valerie Easton’s “A Pattern Garden” both full of eye-candy—much of it from around Seattle—and practical hort advice.

Postscript

I checked on many of these books in the King County Library System and found high demand for a few—Colebrooks’s on Winter Gardening and “Root Cellaring”—and Seattle Tilth’s book has 19 holds on its few copies, so you might as well buy it.

Finally, I want to thank Julia Lakey, she GAVE me one of her favorite books: “Let It Rot” by Stu Campbell. I find reading about compost wonderfully soothing: its litany “1 part browns to 1 parts greens” so comforting and familiar, I suspect this book will lull me right into that other guilty pleasure of January, a long winter’s nap.

Happy, Fruitful Reading!

.”

There isn’t much light in winter: maybe that’s why what little sneaks through to us feels like airborne gold. I caught this backlit scene at Courthouse Square on December 12th, around 3pm, the late afternoon light snagging the plumes of Stipa and Calamagrostis grasses. And the shadows were just as beautiful: don’t you love how the cool blue of the winter sky colors the shadows, washing these granite boulders in turquoise?

At times like these, I envy those whose land is open to the sunlight of winter. You get better color in those plants with winter color or berries, such as bergenia, cotoneasters, or snowberries—probably healthier, too—and you get the play of light we shaded ones long for. Above’s a prime example: place plumed or felted plants in the path of the low sun and, at the right time and angle, your frizzy garden will glow in rim-light  (helps to have a dark backdrop in the distance). 

Winter Color in Spring’s Garden

I visited Jaralene Spring’s garden before Christmas and was reminded of the value of good color in bleak weather. Here on drippy afternoon of pure gloom, she toured me down the three paths of her mixed border, where we found plenty of colorful plants almost glowing in the low light.

Jaralene’s house is a nouveau-Victorian built in the early 90s on the slope above Shawnee Beach The site slopes downward to the east, so a sunny day hits it early and hard. She told me that the central tower—home to a hot-tub—gets so hot and humid that she thinks it’s better used as a greenhouse. “I start all my seedlings up there now.”

Looking uphill from the Mixed Border

Looking downhill from the house at the mixed border and the renovated "Coop" that houses Jaralene's art & garden projects

The land below the house had to be carefully terraced and drained, as there is an active spring up behind the house that soaks the ground all the way downslope. On riprap terraces, Jaralene grows some vegetables and about 16′ worth of strawberries in raised-bed cages to hold off the raccoons. The water-lines direct moisture to the lawn below, which is edged with blueberry bushes, their bare branches now cherry-red against the green lawn.

You enter the garden under a homemade willow gate that Jaralene created. The low bank along this flagstone path is planted with carex buchananii and calluna “firefly”, its raspberry foliage studding the path at eight-foot intervals. 

Calluna "firefly" against creeping sedum

Other color elements include (in the photos):

• bugle mixing it up with creeping sedum

• what I believe is a snowberry in its smaller, pink-berried form

• A heather, probably “Springwood White”

• Iris foetidissima, an evergreen iris that doesn’t have much of a flower, but instead sports these bright-orange, multi-berry dangles most of the winter.

One thing Jaralene does well is play one color or texture off another. In one spot, an old chair is placed where its faded paint matches the yellow of black-eyed susans.

In the right photo, that’s a ‘Rose Glow’ barberry wearing nothing but its red berries.

One of my favorite moments of color resonance was this native snowberry, its white berries staccato against that emphatic bleached grass (calamagrostis again?) Note how these plants pick up many of the colors of the renovated “Coop.” 

Jaralene works her artistry in the garden and FROM the garden. Here she is with a Christmas wreath she made of rose hips from a rosa glauca that’s taking over the south fence. Jaralene paints with a brush loaded with plants!

They say the quiet dark of winter is a time for dreaming. Planning. Resolving. The time for burying oneself on the couch under a blanket, surrounded by garden books, seed catalogs, spreadsheets, lists, and records of years gone by.

All so cozy … comfy … rational … and I’ll get to it once I drag myself out of the cold.

I spent the better part of this afternoon’s meagre daylight trying to weave wire in and out of bird-netting. My fingers were frozen—de-gloved because bird-netting tends to bind on thick fingers—and my deeply-squatted position was letting plenty of body-heat escape, shall we say, out the backdoor?

But winter’s the time to work on hardscapes, and this particularly project—four raised beds in a big square, criss-crossed by two paths to make four triangular beds—has been hanging around unfinished since fall.

The four beds are planted experiments in soil prep: one’s had its sod flipped and tilled; one is double-dug, amended, and tilled; the one on the right is a lasagna bed over newspaper-covered sod; and the last (near you, with newspaper peeking out from under newspaper) will be filled with “Mel’s Mix”—that combo of compost, coir, and vermiculite advocated by Mel Bartholomew of “Square Foot Gardening” fame. All were sown in a cover crop last September, which is now about 4-6″ high.

As soon as I planted this rich mixture of seeds, the Midnight Raider came a-sampling, and the morning after, my lasagna bed looked rather more like tossed salad. I know we’ve got raccoons: they sometimes stare at my husband from the office windowsill where Bob’s trying (in vain) to keep his bird-feeder full. So back in October, I resolved to cover the beds to keep out the furry, feathered thieves. 

Over my rectangular beds,  I had devised a quonset-style cover using bamboo, steel hoops, and netting (you can see it over my cabbage bed, foreground upper photograph). This system allows the gardener to lift the long sides up for access. I wanted the same kind of lift-up access with the triangle beds. 

In the garage, I found some old shelf-bracket columns that would stand in for hoops. Once I stuck the hoops in the ground and draped it with bird-netting, instance cover—or so I thought at first.

However, it’s not easy to cover a triangle and leave air-space underneath for plants to grow. My green manure—its most ambitious member a legume—took to the netting as its own trellis and grew up into a green snarl—an early warning system of how cramped my spring vegetables will be unless I devised a better system.

Bob (an 18-century man) suggested I make a test-model. So rational. I carved an old pizza box across its middle for the raised bed, brought together wire and netting, screw-eyes and wine corks. Came up with an idea that looked like two cornucopias meeting at the mouth, with outside corners lifting from hinges at the center, wine corks as T- joints to hold the meeting of many wires.

It looked a bit ramshackle and flimsy, but I couldn’t come up with any better ideas. Scaled up yesterday on site, the cover system looked even worse. It would have been 18-century rational to drill pilot-holes in the corks, to measure lengths, to pre-cut the wire. But I’m 20-century, trained to act on impulse and on the spot. So I tried to drive the wire through the corks with white-knuckled force.

The wire, naturally, did not run as through butter through the cold corks—instead, it writhed and bent under pressure, developed kinks, whipped about, got tangled in the netting. I clipped the wire-ends to a point so it would go through the cork easier. That worked: a quick through-and-through, right into the meat of my hand (Awwwh!!!).

Finally finished, I unbent my cramped knees and looked over my net-cover. It looked made of mangled coat-hangers. My own Homer Simpson spice-rack.

Still, the nets did cover the soil a good 16-24 inches high. My cover was no beauty-prize, but would it work?

I lifted the far corner and balanced the cover against the central spine. It leaned: it was definitely leaning. Then slowly, with kind of a roll, it listed to one side and fell to earth, the point protruding over the path like a buck tooth.

Hummm… where’s that couch-blanket when you need to hide?  Time to throw it over my head, consider the mess I’m going to make of the recycled-glass greenhouse I next have in mind.

You know that principle of gardening: You Thought You Did Everything, But Turns Out There’s More To Do?

  Mike McKelvey and Bea Johnson know this in spades.

If you went on last year’s VAA Garden Tour, you too probably visited this hillside garden on a southeast slope of Maury Island. It starts off conventionally enough: you enter the west front lawn through an elegant metal fence and walk along a paver path next to a mixed planting. Ahead is the rose garden, inside its own fence since it was created earlier. There’s a charming guest-house that beckons past the rose garden to the southeast corner.

And then, for a moment, the garden disappears. You have to step forward and crane out your neck out to see “Oh, it’s down THERE!”, then decide whether your tour-addled limbs are up to the return climb.

McKelvey & Johnson’s back garden is on a 40% slope. And, the property is near a “critical area” known for slides—Mike told me, “In the 90s, I remember driving out and the road on 47th below us was completely washed out.”

So in 2004 before they could build on their property, McKelvey had to fulfill some King County mandates: build a cistern to collect ALL run-off from roof and driveway. And build a second water- collection system across the entire bottom of the property. You’d think that would take much of the water-burden off their 40% slope.

Apparently not.

DIG put in the initial rockeries to create a flat place for the rose garden. Mike said, “We were going to stop there, let the rest be natural: rocks, grass, scotch broom. Then one day I came home and Bea had started weeding the hillside below the east deck. So I got the idea of buying those big pre-fab aggregate blocks to build stone walls, and I started building the stairs.” Bea then decided this stairs needed the rose arbor touch.

“There had been a lot of rain that autumn. And as I built from bottom to top, that’s when I noticed the big bulge in the slope, just to the south. And I thought, ‘This is not good!’ because the septic system was right above where the land was moving. So we decided to put in more rockeries to stabilize the slope.”

Mike did all the hauling and placement of the blocks himself. He worked out from the Archway stairs to left and right, finishing one then deciding “that’s not enough!” There are at least four terraces, from 7′ to 3′ high, traversing and containing the entire slope.

Bea came behind, creating the paths and adding plants. It’s in these paths that the McKelvey/Johnson garden reaches past its High Function and goes for Magic. Cobbles were sorted for size and color, then laid in complex mosaics, in patterns very reminiscent of the patios in the Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon. The blue cobbles come from a place in the University District called “Mexican Pebbles”; the earth-toned stones are “good ol’ Maury Island natives.”

Mike said his wife tamped the stones into the soil: “she has the patience to do that with her wooden hammer.” Laying them into the soil allows mosses and creepers to grow amidst these stones—but how does Bea keep out the weeds? I hope Bea has a Dragon Torch weeder—or is getting one for Christmas!

Besides the artful mosaics on the paths, the garden also sports several birdhouses, planted pots, and pieces of artwork. The Guesthouse, a gift from Bea’s mom, they use as a reading room because a couch they couldn’t fit into the house found its home there. “A guy here on the Island had a model sitting near Vashon Electric: they come in a kit form from Russia and it’s all metric. The guy built the house for us. 2×6′ tongue-and-groove white pine with a metal roof and completely insulated.”

One of the most delightful sections is in an unlikely space that most gardeners have trouble with: under the deck. Here, Bea created a tiny garden room for shade plants. The yellow spike flower is Eucomis autumnalis, commonly called  pineapple lily. Coleus mingles with begonia and small ferns. A metal-work screen makes the sharp slope, only inches away, disappear.

This garden just has to demand a ton of attention. “Put a lot of time into gardening?” I ask. He laughs, “That’s what we do. 

“We’ve changed so many things even since the garden tour. We like nothing better than spending all day at Molbak’s.”

photo credit: Rebecca Teagarden

There’s a theme of appropriateness running through the garden of Nancy & Len Wolff on the north end.

By the street, a lush perennial border is studded with arbors, pots, tall plants to block out distractions from the road. Near the house, plantings in the cottage style match the old/new style of the house. And out front with the view, a design meant not to interfere: low natives and trimmed-up trees elegantly frame a panoramic view of the Southworth Ferry Terminal.

photo: Len Wolff

Even the grandest of perennial borders would be dwarfed in front of this Big View. So Nancy’s garden border is out front—or as Wolffs say, out “back.”

The perennial border begins at what the Wolffs think of as their back door, which faces east toward Palisades Road. The plantings start at the foot of the steps, wrapping both tightly around the house and in a wide loop out the walkway, along the road, and back along the southern border of the lawn. 

photo: Len Wolff

“In starting, I really didn’t have any grand plan,” other than wanting a garden style in keeping with the house’s architecture, she told me.  ”I love cottage gardens, and I thought a cottage garden would look good with the house’s casual style.”

“I’m a novice at gardening, and it was an intimidating lot because it’s very big. So I talked to a LOT of friends, looked at other gardens, and the most valuable advice I got was ‘just start.’”

She began with a very narrow bed along the side, “then a wonderful woman came by and said ‘I want to tell you about composting’. So I ordered ten yards of compost from Vashon Bark & Soil, gathered every box I could find, and expanded the narrow beds by layering out with cardboard and compost layers up to 10″ thick.”

It’s interesting that both Nancy Wolff and Colleen James, the garden winner covered in my last blog entry, used the lasagna-layering technique over the course of a winter to create a good soil base for spring plantings. “I didn’t dig up the soil: the native grasses under the cardboard died over the winter.” 

The garden, now four years old, is at its height from April through mid-June and has an incredible variety of perennials: dayliles, delphiniums, lupine, crocosmia, mallows, poppies, lilies, agastache, to name only a few—and so many poppies, her neighbor joked he’d seen a DEA agent eyeing the garden. Sub-shrubs include box, lavender, the bush form of St. John’s Wort, phormium, hydrangeas, and an airy blue aster she got from a friend.

In the SE corner, cool colors dominate: hostas, “Tasmanian Tiger” spurge, and a white “Limelight” hydrangea grows next to a shrubby aster with tiny blue flowers, backed by an 8′-tall himalyan honeysuckle (Leycesteria formosa) with blood-red pendant flowers.

photos Len Wolff

Later in summer, coneflowers, cannas, lilies, white echinacea, dahlias, and rudbeckias complement tall ornamental grasses—inspired, she said, by the planting at Courthouse Square.

Son Christopher Koering helped Len build a stout cedar pergola as an entrance off the street; a cedar gateway with a metal crow perched on top leads visitors from the steps into the garden area. A lovely stone wall built by Per-Lars Blomgren terraces the slight slope and helps mark the separate zones of sunny east/shady west.

Nancy is an occupational therapist by day, so she doesn’t have a lot of time. She does have plenty of ideas, though: she wants to create a low box hedge along the walkway, a vegetable garden somewhere, “more and deeper” beds. “The idea was I wanted people to walk around, see what’s on the next side,” she told me.

One suspects there will be plenty of “next sides” for Nancy’s visitors to explore in the future.

350ppm—that is the upper limit of carbon dioxide (CO2) parts per million that can be in the atmosphere and still be that atmosphere we humans have enjoyed all our Homo Sap lives. And right now, it’s beyond that.

Julia Lakey, who’s involved with the Sustainability Committee’s work and who I know through yoga, organized a ringing of Island church bells at noon on Saturday, Dec. 12. Such markings of 350 are apparently happening all over the globe, in parallel with the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

How far back do we have to wind the CO2 clock to reach 350? Well, according to www.CO2.org, our atmosphere was at 350 ppm back in 1987. It was at 315 in 1959—things have changed quickly, haven’t they? 

It didn’t take long for we five bell-ringers to reach 350 strikes of the church bell—all of about 15 minutes. The Presby and Methodist Churches chimed in as well.

Nor did it take long for our atmosphere to reach and overreach 350ppm: only 22 years. That’s a gnat on a nano-second in the timeline of human evolution. And there’s nearly 6 billion of us homo saps adding CO2 all the time.

If you want more info, visit www.350.org or www.CO2.org.

from left: Julia Lakey, Weslie Rodgers, Rosellen Albers, Karen Dale, and Wally Fletcher under the bell at the Episcopal Church.

I’ve been trying to get to the garden club lately in an effort to meet more gardeners and discover what the club has to offer. So before I reveal at length this year’s winners of their annual awards, let me just announce:

2009 Garden Club Award Winners

Len & Nancy Wolff , Mike McKelvey & Bea Johnson, and  John & Colleen James, whose garden is featured below. I’ll interview the other gardeners in the weeks ahead.    

The James Garden

This garden is on the Burton Loop; the property slopes down to the front of the yellow Victorian house, which faces south.  John & Colleen James moved here from Gig Harbor in September, 2005. “It was a blank canvas, kinda nice because it was just grass, mostly dead by then.”

They stripped away all of the grass on the slope leading down to the house and smothered what remained over the following winter with layers of cardboard and compost mulch. Later, they brought in several truckloads of compost plus more loads of 3-way Mix (compost, sand, and manure) to add to their sandy soil. 

What’s really impressive here is the depth of the beds—but that’s what you’ll get when you replace a lawn with perennials. Here’s a view across the house front, looking from east to west.

 Standing tall above the perennials is a grafted salix integra (dappled willow), which she said “isn’t too happy: it wants more moisture.” Calendula have scattered themselves throughout the garden; she makes a medicinal salve from it and sells it at the Farmer’s Market.

Here’s the view from the opposite side, looking back east: note that dappled willow and flax in the upper-left corner, and the plentitude of plantings: calendula, hardy geranium, lilies, poppies, dahlias, mexican hair grass, lavender, echinacea—even, I believe, a eucalyptus in the background.

 Surprisingly, despite the slope’s 10-15 foot drop from the road, the only terracing is at the bottom, where a 2′ cobblestone wall holds the toe of hill up off a front patio.

Because this slope leans toward the north, larger plants overshadow smaller ones. So, Colleen has come to specialize in shade plants for her market offerings. One of her favorite plantings is this shade-happy arrangement of erigeron, pulmonaria, spurge, and royal fern in the dappled sunlight. Beautiful!

She also knows a lot about deerproof plants, recommending “ligularias, hostas, japanese forest grass, some really wonderful ferns like Royal Fern and Japanese painted fern, also sweet box (sarcococca). Below is such a pairing in a pot, demonstrating her penchant for high-contrast plantings: a towering, deep-burgundy ligularia underplanted with japanese forest grass. They’re happy together because both like moisture and shade.

And here’s more color play, this time with black-eyed susans against blues and silvers, the purple of smoke tree and the silver architecture of a cardoon.

Colleen uses pots frequently; here a massive, robin’s egg blue pot studs the flowery haze with something sold, substantial.

The foreground alliums are actually garlics: “I bought them at the grocery, plugged them in during fall, and they are wonderful. They last longer than allium globemasters: it’s December and they’re still standing.” Butter-yellow Cape Fuchsia glows on the right.

She accesses her deep beds with meanders of stepping-stone paths surrounded by ajuga (bugle) seen here in the foreground below the calendula. She cuts the bugle back in high summer to keep the stones in view. 

Colleen James spends a lot of time in her garden. And she’s become a Master Gardener, a plant vendor on Saturdays, and does some garden design consultant “to help people create something wonderful.” 

Here’s her front entrance pergola, which directs visitors toward the “real” front door (there was some confusion!) and provide some privacy when she wants it. John James laid the flagstone walkway and stairs.

And finally, a last look across the front yard of this talented plantswoman, Colleen James.