A few weeks ago, I blogged the results of a small soil sample test that I made on 20 properties around Vashon Island. The reason why I conducted that test sprang from my experience last spring with two soil samples tested for me by University of Massuchusetts Soil Test Lab. The surprising results led me to wonder about soils elsewhere on the Island. Today, looking back over the blogs, I realized I had never published this article, drafted last spring, about my UMass Soil Samples. When we’re all itchin’ to start digging, seems a good time to ask “Do you really KNOW what’s in your own soil?”

UPDATE 5/21/2011: a friend who works for METRO just told me about the FREE SOIL TEST available to King County residents. You can send in up to five samples and get results back within 3 weeks. Since this tests for the same things the UMass tests for, save yourself $13 and go for the local freebie! Here’s the link: Free King County Soil Test Available

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No waiting around for me: I’m a ‘Jump In’ kind of gal.

For years, whenever I’d read up on planning a new garden bed, I’d leapfrog right over the advice to “Get your soil tested” to the much greater fun of “Add Organic Matter.”

When you’ve got that spring fever to dig, who wants to wait for labs?

Turns out, I should have.

Since I’m doing this blog to force myself to garden better, I thought it was high time for me to get my soil tested “officially.” So three weeks ago, I googled “soil testing” and found a reasonably-priced test through the University of Massachusetts Soil Testing Lab. 

For a $13 basic soil test, you get readings of pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium (the big NPK), plus calcium, magnesium, and trace minerals. It compares those levels with normal ranges and gives recommendations for improving your soil’s fertility. For an extra $3, I also asked for a reading of how much organic matter was in my soil. 

I thought I’d test the potato bed because it’s virgin: its soil hasn’t been amended at all. The potato soil would be my baseline.

And I wanted to test my tomato bed because, over the years, I’ve fed it a LOT of amendments: manure, wood ash, seaweed, compost, and organic fertilizer. They say sandy soil loses its nutrients quickly: would any of my good organics, after a season of heavy-duty tomato growing, be left in the soil? By comparing the two beds, would I see whether all those amendments had made a long-term difference?

Results are in—now the head-scratching begins

Early in March after I’d winter-cleaned the beds, I scooped 12 spoonfuls from various spots in the tomato bed, blended them in a bowl, poured one cup’s worth into a ziploc baggie, and labeled it “tomato bed.” Ditto for the potato bed. Stuffed the baggies into a Priority Mail box and sent it to UMass Soil Lab.

Two weeks later, I got the tests back: two pages each, plus an “Interpret Your Findings” sheet and a Fertilizer Recommendations page. (Wish Washington or Oregon state universities still do soil testing, but seems they don’t.)

And the bad news is—

OUCH!— I’ve been poisoning my tomato bed with wood ash!

The test results began with a pH report and a warning for my tomato bed, “Reported pH is higher than desired. Do not apply limestone, wood ash, or any more amendment that might raise soil pH further.”

In a region where acid soils of 5-6.5 pH are the norm, my tomato bed registered 7.6. We’re talking the alkalinity of a desert here.

In an attempt to keep our tomatoes from developing blossom-end rot—a product of irregular watering or calcium deficiency, in which wood ash is rich—we threw on WAY TOO MUCH. 

The potato patch, by contract, had a pH of 6.6, which is within the optimal range for MOST vegetables but is still high for potatoes, which prefer a range of 5.5–6 pH. The lab recommended I choose scab-resistant varieties of potatoes if planting them in that spot again.

The Good News

Other results were more pleasant to read: phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) were very high, as was calcium and magnesium. The CEC rates, which measure the soil’s ability to hold nutrients available for plants, was “adequate” in the potato bed and “very good” in the tomato bed. [note: tests using the simpler Rapitests bought at True Value didn't register the presence of phosphorus at all.] 

Apparently the tomato bed’s soil can supply as much nutrition to my plants as a clay-loam soil. Since adding humus is said to help sandy soils bind together, as well as hold water and nutrients in the root-zones of plants, I guess all those applications of seaweed, manure, and compost gave my sandy soil the ability to hang on to the good stuff I was heaping on it.

Trace minerals were in the normal ranges, and there’s little lead in the soil. (I didn’t chose to be fearful about, or test for, arsenic, which fell on southern Vashon lands during the run of the Tacoma smelter. Other gardeners with kids might want that test.)

Nitrogen seemed to be the only nutrient lacking; the Explanation Sheet said it’s assumed “that very little nitrogen remains in the soil after the growing season.” The report recommended various quantities of this-n-that fertilizer or amendment to make up the missing nitrogen.

When I took the samples, I was surprised at how similar the soil looked between the much-amended tomato bed and the “virgin” potato soil. So I should not have been surprised at the organic matter readings: with a desirable range of 4-10% organic matter in the soil, the tomato bed had 6.5% and the potato bed 6.1%—not much difference for all the amendments that had been thrown at the tomato bed.

The Moral of this Soil Test

If I’d done a soil test years ago, I wouldn’t have dropped all that wood-ash on my sweeter-than-average dirt. And judging from how fast the organics and nitrogens burn out of the soil, I think I might need a bigger compost pile.

I got a lot of information from the UMass Soil Test, much more than from the little test kit you can buy at your local hardware store. In fact, a couple weeks after I’d posted the “20 Soil Samples from Vashon” blog, a soils specialist I know told me “those soil testing kits you can buy at the hardware store aren’t any good at all, you know.” Oh—well—oops! but then, I wasn’t going to spent $13 x 20 just for curiosity’s sake. 

But for your OWN place, and for your vegie’s sake, spend a few bucks and send in that soil sample. Two weeks later, you’ll know everything there is to know about your soil, BEFORE you thrust your plant-babies into that dirt. 

And let’s find another place to dump the wood ash!

The Farmers’ Market opens this Saturday at 10am, April 2, and YES there will be farmers with stuff to sell. Expect plant starts, radishes, nettles, maybe some other baby greens. Last year on Opening Day, I bought a bag of sun chokes off the Yarkins and enjoyed that potatoey tuber for the first time ever. And you will find that it takes very LITTLE prompting to get Islanders to brag on the best way to cook nettles!

But before the mayhem of weekly harvests start, Chandler Briggs of Island Meadow Farm organized another farmers’ get-together last Tuesday, March 29, at the Grange hall, this time to hear stories of ol’ time island agriculture.

Two of the speakers have written books: Mary Matsuda Gruenewald wrote an autobiographical tale, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps, and Pamela Woodroffe interviewed 12 (at least) former tillers of Vashon soil for her book Vashon Island’s Agricultural Roots: Tales of the Tilth as Told by Island Farmers. One of those farmers she interviewed was Tom Lorentzen, and he was also on hand to entertain us with stories from his youth in what he called “the Norwegian ghetto up in Colvos.”

Pamela started first because in talking about her book, she could also introduce Mary & Tom who she interviewed for the book project. Tales of the Tilth started out as a small 20-page chapbook suggested by David Warner, then president of the Land Trust, but quickly expanded when Woodroffe realized what rich material she was getting from her interview subjects. (The original interviews are now in a big notebook in the library reference section, and Tales of the Tilth is available at local bookstores, the history museum, and amazon.com.)

Woodroffe came from a journalism background, but she farmed here for ten years on “Sweet Woodruff” farm and pieced together a living from that and a couple other jobs. “The only people who consistently made money are the Mann Brothers (earth-moving, tilling, haying). When times were good for farmers, the Mann Brothers would go till their fields, and when times were tough for farmers, they’d sell land and then the new owners would hire the Mann Bros. to clear it.”

“There were a lot of teary-eyed breakdowns during the interviews,” she said. “Economic changes, like the energy crunch of the 70s that forced the Beall Greenhouses to close, that stuff just breaks your heart. So it’s beautiful to see so many generations coming together tonight. Keep it going.”

Mary Matsuda, Japanese-American farm girl of Vashon

That farming is a tough way to make a living was also the running theme of Mary Matsuda Gruenewald’s talk. Her father left Japan when he was 18, paid off his passage by working in Hawaii’s sugar-cane fields and then in Alaska coal fields, worked farms for awhile in Fife, then moved his young family to our Shawnee area. Mary was 18-months old at the time. They worked a farm with sour cherries, “and in those days we didn’t have insecticides so the cherries were wormy, but it didn’t matter because we sold them to a winery so people would never know—clever, huh?” (big laugh).

“We had a horse named Dolly. When the folks harvested vegetables, they’d put them in gunnysacks and my dad would toss those sacks on Dolly’s wagon and she would take the wagon down to Shawnee and the passenger boat. Dad would toss these sacks of vegies on board, the boat would go to Tacoma, a Japanese man from the market came down, took these sacks of vegetables and sold them.” 

She described how her father worked for minimum wage for 27 years, but saved enough money to eventually buy ten acres behind what would become the K2 factory. 

“One horse, one plow, one harrow, all those 10 acres. These people worked hard,” she said, leaning toward her audience. “We learned how to manage.” When someone asked about money, she said, “Income was earned during the summer months, and you made do through the rest of the year. You figure out very quickly what’s important. Someof my happiest days were spent here picking strawberries behind K2.” 

Eventually, her father possessed 52 acres of farmland. “My papa-san tried Olympic berries, gooseberries, blackberries, eventually settling on strawberries.”

“I remember when we had gooseberries, they’re very prickly, all the pickers had very thick leather gloves, Papa made flats and the pickers would scoop over this big flat and the berries would fall off. He’d climb up this ladder and a chute went down from its top, at the bottom a big electrical fan would blow all the leaves away and the berries would drop into the flat clean. You learned to make do with what you had.” 

Mary eventually moved to Seattle and became a nurse at Group Health; she started the Consulting Nurse Service that’s still going on. When her father died at age 93, she inherited the southern half of the acreage behind K2. “In 2004, my younger son and I planted native trees, which will eventually become a forest. Our plan is to donate it to the Land Trust.”

Tom Lorentzen, scion of Colvos’ Norwegian “ghetto”

Tom stood up and immediately had us laughing when he said he was glad “None of my neighbors are here so they can tell me when I ‘m lying and when I’m not!” Tom was born in the area he calls “Calvis—and we were not allowed to leave that part, what we called the Norwegian ghetto. That’s Cedarhurst down to Robin Wood Road, west to the passage and east to Mukai’s fields (now the airport). So I don’t know about the rest of the Island!”

He told us that area was logged off in the 1880s and 90s, then platted into 10-acre parcels with the roads running north/south. “And then they begun the halibut fishery off the coast and the Norwegians came running over. My dad and his sister and husband came over in 1907 and bought 10 acres on the Westside highway for $450—and then they split it. All these fisherman from the same northwest coast of Norway, they came, too: my neighbor George Olson, he lived two places NW of my dad in Norway, and he bought a place two places NW of my dad here. I guess they got used to looking at each other!” 

“All the income came from farming, except if you were a halibut fisherman, then you had a little bit more money. You went to Alaska for six months, and in the off-season, you cut wood, you harvested what you had, and you worked for a local farmer.  It was all chickens and berries. During the winter, it was still berries: you cut vines, you hung vines.”

“People got jobs working for the farmers, all kinds of jobs: cleaning and grading eggs, trucking. I used to work for August Wax: I was his swamper, I helped him load and unload the trucks. I worked for Masa Mukai as well: once school let out May 28 because the strawberries were ripe, so over the hill we went and Masa Mukai paid us 10¢ a carrier. I picked 26 and I thought I was pretty fast. Then I talked to some of the Canadian Indians who said they’d picked 40!” 

At Mukai’s cannery, they had a conveyor belt and 20-30 women there, picking out the hulls and the rotten berries. The berries were packed with sugar in big wooden barrels, then trucked down to Portland, where they were made into jams or toppings.

“Eggs, eggs, eggs. My neighbor was a shoemaker in Norway. Here he had 3000 white Leghorns and five acres of loganberries. Work, work, work, he died of overwork in 1935, his wife got married again rather fast.” 

“Some of us don’t change so fast. I wake up every morning in the same bedroom I was born in. Different bed, though” (laughs around). ” I don’t know what caused the change, but used to be when I went down in my lower field, my social life was the people coming by. Now I go outside and I don’t see anybody working outdoors anymore.”

The evening ended with a slide show of Vashon Agriculture Then and Now, put together by Jenn Coe for the Compost Fest. Amazing to see all the labels of Vashon value-added products, long gone: the Honey Fig Jam from Burmyrna Fig Gardens of Burton, Harley C. Hake’s Washington grape wine from Dockton, the Lande and the Fitzpatrick dairies. On the Wallflower corner, there was once the Kimmel’s “Shop-Rite” grocery with the “Every Day Low Prices!” sign. The movie theatre lot, once surrounded by martial rows of red current bushes. Refrigerated train cars on barges, brought right next to a dock filled with trucks loaded up with berry flats. 

Amazing to drive around town and see with these shared memories what once was here. If you want another big view of Vashon’s old time farming, have a gander at Will Forrester’s mural on the back of US Bank, which you can easily look at on your way to the Farmers’ Market next door. 10am-2pm—and the first 100 get a free cuppa and a baked good.

I’m off tonight to take copious notes at the VIGA potluck / presentation by three ol’ time Vashon farmers. Hope to compile all that info and blog it here next week.

For now, dashing outside between the raindrops and starting seeds on the windowsill / greenhouse will have to do. If you want to read up on seed-starting techniques, click on my story written for the Beachcomber issue of March 31, 2009 (at least you can get the intro: the bulk of the article is hidden away from all but online subscribers.)

And here’s a notice about an upcoming Bio-Char Workshop on April 9th, hosted by bio-char champion Ken Miller of the north end. Cathy Fulton took the workshop last year, and her comments top the information below. Early in this blog’s life, I wrote up a visit to Ken Miller’s vegetable garden, which clearly showed the growth boost to broccoli given by bio-char; you can read that story on page 8 of this blog (You’ll find the page index if you scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN to the bottom of this blog page).

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Says Cathy—In case you missed the very excellent Bio Char Stove workshop last year, here is another opportunity. I took the workshop last year and it was a lot of fun and very educational. I brought home a nice little stove for myself. Below are the details. Contact Ken Miller if you have questions(contact information at the bottom).
Cathy Fulton

You are invited to attend a Biochar Stove Building Workshop on Vashon Island, April 9th from 10 AM to 5 PM. The instructor will be Art Donnelly of Seachar, the Seattle Biochar Working Group. 
 
You will build a simple biochar-making stove out of a metal 5-gallon paint can and other recycled cans. Come and learn about biochar, how to make it, and what to do with it. Art will also tell about his experiences with building stoves with migrant coffee pickers in Costa Rica. 
 
The workshop location on Vashon is:  24104 Wax Orchard Rd. SW (just south of Misty Isle Farms air strip.)
 
All materials and tools will be provided. The cost for this workshop is $45.00. 
A $20 dollar deposit is requested. Please make your check out to SeaChar.Org and mail to: 
 SeaChar.Org
603 Stewart St.,
Suite 906
Seattle, WA 98101
 
Or go to www.seachar.org and use Pay Pal under the donate button.
 
Please bring a sack lunch and water for the event.
 
For more information call Ken Miller at 206-947-1895 or email at islandcanyons@yahoo.com
 

This Saturday Colleen James will be giving a free presentation at the Vashon Library on keeping deer from decimating your flower beds and ornamentals.

She will have a list of plants that the island deer are not fond of and will share some of the tricks for keeping them from killing plants and driving you crazy!

Colleen’s garden on the Burton peninsula was on the VAA Garden tour last year. She propagates many unusual perennials from seed or cuttings, and she also makes ointments which she sells at the farmer’s market.

Event Location –Vashon Library

When–  Saturday, March 26^th

From 10am- 12 noon

Last week, obedient to my own blog, I planted up flats of chard, green onions, and cabbage and tucked them into the warmth of my Start-Cart.

Two nights later, as I was reaching down to pull the plug on the plant-lights, I noticed a bit of green emerging in the cabbage row. What—sprouting already? Yes indeed: more than a few ‘Golden Aces’ were sticking their little heads above ground. Green onions, too—and oh! there’s the broccoli!

Pleased but surprised, wondering why so fast, I pulled the power-cord—and a silvery light flooded my dark kitchen. So I went outside and, amidst the din of a thousand frogs, stared up at the brightest moon I’d ever seen. It wasn’t even full yet. And yet the frogs were yelping it up like wolves howling at the moon. What in the world is going on?

What the frogs sing Spring, believe

Two years ago, when I was researching my first gardening article on starting seeds, I talked to Jasper Forrester of Green Man Farm. “How do you know when to sow seeds?” I asked her. She replied, “Oh, when the frogs start singing, I can feel it’s planting time.”

Apparently the Pacific Tree Frog emerges from winter dormancy when they feel there’s no longer any danger of freezing; the boys find a nice spring mud-puddle for egg-laying and then put out the call: “Hey lady: I’ve got a nice pond, so come down and see me sometime!” 

So if the frogs think it’s spring, we must be getting close.

The Moon Theory of Starting Seeds

The notion that plants respond to the moon has been around a long time. The theory is that, similar to the tides, the sap in plants rises as the light of the moon increases. There’s no science to back this up, but our own PNW expert, Ed Hume, has run an unscientific survey that shows statistically better results if gardening chores are done in sync with moon phases. His little Garden Almanac, available on his seed racks in local stores, is largely devoted to month-by-month moon sign gardening.

This schedule of planting suggests chores in sync with each lunar phase. For instance, when the moon’s on the increase, it’s a good time to sow seeds of leafy plants, groom perennials, graft fruit trees, and fertilize. When the moon’s on the wane, it’s a good time to sow root plants like beets, carrots, and potatoes. When the moon is at its lowest ebb, its power to attract fluids is weakest, so this is a good time to prune trees or dig soil because there’s less water in there.

So the frogs say “it’s safe” and the moon says, “let’s go.” But you, looking at the muddy, funky, mess that is the remnants of last year’s garden, might think “Maybe later … much later.”

But then you’d miss out on the power of the “Super-Moon.”

Adding to the lunatic theories…

By tomorrow night, March 19, the moon will be the closest it’s been in 20 years. It’ll look 15% larger, 30% brighter, and at least according to one person, have a powerfully seismic influence on our planet.

According to 70s astrologer Richard Nolle,  75% of recent major storms and earthquakes on our planet occur during the 2-week window surrounding full Super-Moons.

Anything significant happen during the waxing of this moon? If a Super-Moon has the power to move the earth, think what it can do for your seedlings…

Don’t Miss this Chance to Power Up your Seedlings

So all this may explain why my leafy seedlings are jumping out of their soil. A Super Moon. Croaking frogs. A warm indoor greenhouse, with plenty of lights and a watering can standing by, doesn’t hurt either.

As I learned last year, the seed packs available in our stores, at least of Territorial Seed Company, are no more expensive than from the catalog—though the racks offer a smaller selection.

Jenn Coe of the Food Bank Farm will give you seeds, if you’ll start a flat of vegetable seedings for the farm. She likes to take a drainable tray, line the bottom with newspaper, than fill the whole tray with soil. “The divided cell trays dry out pretty fast, while a whole soil-filled tray doesn’t. If I dent the top of the soil with the bottom of a cell-divider, there’s my plant spacing, and the seedlings lift out pretty easily when I’m ready to plant.” Get in touch with her at Jenn@VashonFoodBank.org.

With all these special March powers working in your favor, surely you can squeeze room for an extra flat before it’s tomato-starting time?

Jenn Coe, the Food Bank’s official Farmer and Volunteer Coordinator, caught up with me yesterday while I was doing our Tuesday stint at the Food Bank. “Say, do you think you could ask your garden group (that’s you, dear reader) to grow some vegetables starts for the Food Bank farm?”

The farm’s two hoophouses were taken down last fall so winter wouldn’t tear them to tatters. Consequently, the farm doesn’t have a springtime greenhouse in which to grow on flats of young vegies and get a jump on the growing season.

She knows folks are happy to grow starts. “We had TONS of tomato starts last year, and that was GREAT! We plan on doing another hoophouse just for tomatoes, and one for just basil. And I hope that folks will grow those on and donate those starts again.”

But first, she needs broccoli, chard, and spinach starts for spring and early summer harvest. This season, the farm will be devoted to just nine crops: broccoli, chard, and spinach first, snap peas, carrots, and beets, tomatoes, basil, and ‘Sweet Dumpling’ winter squash.

“Last year we grew a wider variety of plants. But that meant that each week we harvested maybe twenty of any vegetable—and we have 200 families to feed.”

I asked her, why not lettuce? She said, “we get plenty of donated lettuce. Spinach salads have so much more nutrition, and it’s not so perishable.” And I might add that it grows early and fast, making it possible to use the same row for a second, even third crop through the season.

So Garden Readers: would you be willing to grow a flat of spinach, broccoli, or chard starts for the Food Bank Farm? If so, Jenn would like to hear from you soon. And she ‘ll give you the flat, the seeds, and even the potting soil (if you really insist). Email her at Jenn@VashonFoodBank.org or phone her at 463-6332 (food bank) on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

I asked her how last Saturday’s spreading of the fence went. She said, “Fine: we didn’t get all the fence posts set, but we got the post holes dug. If the weather’s good this Saturday, I’ll put out the call for another crew to help set those posts and spread the deer fencing around them.” So if you’re interested in helping, get in touch with Jenn or swing by the Food Bank Farm on Saturday, March 12, after 10am. 

Some Good Tips on Starting Spinach

A couple weeks ago, I read about starting spinach indoors at my favorite gardening website, www.growveg.com. Spinach always sprouts erratically for me, so I’m going to try Barbara Pleasant’s tip for priming spinach seeds indoors by first soaking them, drying them at room temperature, and then storing them in an airtight container in a cool room for up to a week. Here’s the link to the article, “Getting a Good Stand of Spinach.”

I might go beyond that and try chitting, or pre-sprouting, a flat of spinach, so that I plant only the viable seeds. Scatter spinach seeds in a thin layer across a couple paper towels, then spritz the towel with water and lay a last layer of paper towel over. Pack this damp seed sandwich into a plastic bag and leave in a warm place in your house (my water-heater closet works well). Check every day, looking for the seed coat to crack and a tiny tip of the baby plant to emerge. Plant such seeds into your flat of potting soil IMMEDIATELY, before that tip grows into the paper towel.

Last year, I took soil samples from two vegetables beds—one new, one long devoted to tomatoes—and sent them off to the University of Massachusetts to be tested. When I got the two reports back, to my surprise I read that both samples were more alkaline than acid. In fact, the tomato bed was up to pH 7.6, and I was warned IN ALL CAPS not to apply lime.

Why was I surprised? Because over the years of gardening and of reading & listening to everything I can find on garden soils, I’ve run across a number of Received Truths about PNW soils. For instance, Steve Solomon in his popular “Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades” states categorically “Your soil is acidic, deficient in calcium, and almost certainly deficient in magnesium…. so apply lime.”

I’ve also been told that Vashon soil is poor. Yet the UMass report said that my soil was chock-full not only of the potassium Steve Solomon claims is ALWAYS found in maritime northwest soils, but is also rich in phosphate, calcium, and magnesium, the nutrients Solomon claims are easily leached from soil by our maritime rains.

All these contradictions provoked my curiosity. ARE Vashon’s soils as nutrient-deficient and acidic as we are led to assume? Only an Island-wide experiment could tell.

The Soil Experiment begins

I asked my fellow yoga students if they would contribute a baggy’s worth of soil from their properties. I asked not for their best, probably much-amended garden soil, but for a sample taken from untouched soil. To each willing participant I gave a baggy with a card inside it to note down their name, address & neighborhood. Sixteen people  responded; to those I added samples from two farms, the Borrow Pit, and my own property, for a total of 20 samples.

I bought two Rapitest Soil Test Kits (available at True Value) which each contained 10 tests for pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash (potassium). I also gave each soil sample the Jar Test to determine each soil’s mix of sand, silt, clay, and humus. I created a spreadsheet to hold all the information. Then, over two weeks, I conducted the tests. (Each sample takes two days to test, as in both the Jar Test and the NPK tests, you draw from water in which the sampled soil has settled.)

The Rapitests, designed for non-scientists, don’t give you literal amounts of the tested nutrient, but instead report on each element’s presence in a range from “Depleted” through “Excess.” The card that comes with the test then tells you how much of typical fertilizers (usually chemical) to apply to that soil to boost the desired nutrient. The fertilizer prescriptions from the UMass Soil Test report was much simpler (“Apply 2-3 lbs of 10-10-10 per 100 sq ft in early spring”) and easier to translate into an organic equivalent.

Observations:

pH: Most soils were between 6.0-6.5 pH, which is optimum for growing vegetables. The two farms, however, both had a neutral pH of 7—perhaps they have have been limed more than most?

NPK: Most, though not all, the soils had insufficient nitrogen and need more. As for phosphorus, it was so scarce in these soils, the tests could barely pick up its presence. Potassium varied widely: 4 had none, 5 had not enough, 3 were rated Sufficient, 7 had more than enough, and 1 had WILDLY more than enough (rated 7!) 

COMPOSITION OF SOILS:   It’s Sandy Loam, folks.
A sandy loam, according to Pacific Northwest Guide to Home Gardening by Ray McNeilan and Micheline Ronningen, is about 65% sand, 20% silt, and 15% clay. These percentages can be revealed in a Jar Test, in which you fill a jar halfway full of your soil, top it with water nearly to the top, close the jar and shake for one minute, then set aside and let the soil settle out of the water. Sand particles, the heaviest, will settle down first, creating your bottom layer. Silt follows next, then (usually hours later), the minute particles of clay settle, with organics floating on top of the water. 

In all the Vashon soils I jar-tested, sand made up the thickest layers, from half to 80% of each sample. Silt made up most of the rest. I couldn’t even FIND clay until I learned what to look for (THAT fingernail-thick layer?”); I finally tested for its slippery presence by rubbing the slurry between my fingers. Even those samples I expected to have lots of clay, such as from the North End or Burton Peninsula, were dominated by sand. 

Conclusions

Vashon Island has a sandy loam soil of pH between 6-6.5. It is thoroughly depleted of phosphorus, that nutrient needed for good fruiting and flowering: bonemeal is a good source. Our soil’s also thin on nitrogen, for which there are a number of organic amendments (chicken manure, blood meal, fish fertilizer). Some soils are deficient in potassium, and while it’s tempting to supply this with wood ash, that’s also the way I pushed my tomato bed’s pH to 7.6, which is WAY too alkaline for most vegetables.

Despite Solomon’s recommendation to add lime to new garden beds and every few years after, I don’t believe that we should take the recommendation to “add lime to new beds” as an Article of Faith. Test your soil first. 

Had our island conformed to the idea that it is “acidic and needs liming every year,” I would have expected a lower pH. A pH of 4.5-5 was what I had while living on the Oregon Coast in a spruce/alder/salal/huckleberry environment. But then, Oregon—the state where Steve Solomon lived and farmed—was never covered with gravel from the Vashon glacier… 

I believe it’s the gift of the glacier that Vashon Island has a mineralized soil with a pH friendly to growing vegetables. But the nutrient level is poor, and the results of the tests show a wide variability across the Island, within neighborhoods—even within single properties. No one gave me samples from Maury Island, so it was not tested.

I got quite different results from the UMass soil test and the Rapitest Soil test. The UMass test is more comprehensive, but often makes you wish you’d paid more attention in Soil Science class. The lab charges $13.00 per soil sample, with another $3 to test for levels of organic content. The Rapitest can be had from $13-19, giving you enough equipment and chemicals for ten soil tests.

My testing results will be posted on the entry hall of Vashon Athletic Club, should you be interested in the details.

Last year about this time, I was given some raspberry plants (thank you, Julia!) and, for lack of a better space, I heeled them into the new perennial bed within my fenced backyard vegie garden. I thought they’d be there only a short while… but you know how THAT goes.

Being raspberries, they grew lustfully up, down, and sideways, sprawling over the lawn. Then, on the one day I left the gate open, they got pruned (thank you, Bambi, but not so much!) just as they were coming into fruit, and I had to wait until autumn for ripe berries. They were SO good, SUCH a good complement to autumn cooking, so tasty in my breakfast yogurt, that I renewed my vow to find them a better home.

So during last week’s cold-n-clear days, I stacked the last course on a rock wall project started back in August. Here, where the ground’s a little higher, dryer, and sunnier, I plan to move those raspberries and let them have their raspberry run. 

With berries on my mind, when I saw the sign at Kathi’s—”Raspberries, here by Feb 12″—I pulled a U-turn and went in to talk to her.

Raspberry Plants at Kathi’s Corner Soon

She too had raspberries on her mind: I found her writing a flyer on the subject, stuck on page 3 at “Pruning: This is the most confusing part…” I think she was glad to stop writing and talk instead.

“The top question people ask me is ‘which one tastes most like a raspberry?’ But I think the top question is ‘What do I want to do with my berries?’ Do you want a long-lasting source of fresh fruit for your cereal or yogurt? Or do you want a whole bunch at once to preserve or freeze?” 

To answer such questions, her hand-out lists the varieties she’ll offer, adding comments on the taste, disease resistance, soil preferences, cultivation history. She’s tried most of these in her home plot (“These are the creme de la creme”) and includes her own observations. 

For instance, if you have heavy clay soil, you might want to try ‘Cascade Bounty.’ If you don’t want to train the plants on wires, try  ’Saanich,’ the plant that fruits on shorter lateral branches. If you want a long harvest, choose ‘Tulameen’ or an everbearing plant  like ‘Autumn Britten’ or the yellow ‘Anne’, the raspberry that might also be your best bet in a sun-challenged spot. If you know you won’t remember how pruning is done, pick the fall-bearing plants and simply “mow all canes to the ground after they’ve dropped their leaves” according to the Spooner Nursery website.

That last note comes from the website of Spooner Nursery in the Puyallup Valley, where Kathy sources her plants; they’ve been raising raspberries for the wholesale trade since 1955. 

Bare-root Plants in by this Saturday

She’ll receive the bare-root plants by February 12; they can be planted right away in fluffy, well-drained soil enriched with plenty of organics like compost, peat moss, manures. Her flyer states that you should NOT use an area that has grown potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, or bulbs within the last five years, as these plants are hosts for verticillium wilt, to which raspberries are susceptible. Nor, for many reasons, should you try to raise them in pots.

“I hear many people complain that their raspberries go downhill after a few years. But what people forget is that raspberries are heavy feeders: they want LOTS of organics like steer or chicken manure or compost, PLUS mulch, PLUS fertilizer.” She uses any all-purpose fruit or flower fertilizer like a 5-5-5—NOT a lawn fertilizer that’s predominantly nitrogen—and applies it in March and again in June when the plants are flowering. “If you do that, the bed will last for YEARS.” They also want plenty of water and sun, just as your flower beds do.

If you have already have summer-bearing raspberries, these mid-winter weeks are your last opportunity to cull away last season’s spent canes. Though summer raspberries bear on either 1-year or 2-year wood, don’t bother to decipher those because the past-it canes will be obvious: they’ll be brown as a latte and so brittle they’ll break away easily near the ground.

Around April & May, you’ll want to hoe out canes escaping outside your row, and you’ll want to tie up/train the taller canes to the tallest wire in your support system. For an excellent description of trellising and training, see Washington Extension’s “Growing Small Fruits for the Home Garden.”

Back at my rock-wall terrace, I dumped wheelbarrows full of compost, peat moss, and leaf mold into my sandy soil. Ready for raspberries. And in a few weeks, I’ll return to Kathy for word on strawberries.

Other Resources:  www.spoonerfarms.com, Iowa Extension Service, and eHow for videos and articles.

Interesting how news flies around these days: I first heard of this book reading event through Facebook. Cheesemaker Kurt Timmermeister has come out with a book, Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land, and he’ll be giving a reading at Cafe Luna this Sunday/tomorrow, January 23, at 4pm. 

Books by the Way already have the hardcover on sale, and I picked up a copy yesterday and am already halfway through. It’s an absorbing read, almost a confessional, of how this city slicker turned himself by trial-n-error into a dairyman and fine cheesemaker.

 If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to run a small farm on Vashon, this book will give you that experience. Even without a farm, I’m sure a lot of us will recognize parts of our own Vashon stories in his.

How your dream of country living can put a rosy glow over that patch of weeds you just made an offer on. The blackberries. The deer. The half-buried bits of hardware that your riding mower—or your cow—manages to suck up into its guts. Who knew that cattle can pick up something called hardware fever? (I thought husbands only caught that, in True Value. If only shoving a magnet down his throat could be the cure…)

Even though Timmermeister says this is not a how-to manual, you the reader ARE THERE as he receives a new set of bees and sets up a hive, milks a cow, harvests honey, and gathers the courage to stick a needle of medicine into a sick cow. The tone is straightforward, full of facts, and honest; though he’s probably an old hand at these farm ways now, by writing of his early misgivings and failures he makes the experiences fresh and eye-opening for us. His tone is not, “You can do it!” but more “This is what it’s like, and been like, in making me into a farmer and this pint-sized homestead into a working farm.” 

I’ve got a wheel of his camembert, often available in Thriftway’s gourmet cheese case, in my cheese box. Now I know the work and investment it takes to bring that cheese into existence. So don’t feel bad if there aren’t any free cheese samples at the reading Sunday afternoon.

[Warning: the following blog entry may offend those of vegetarian or delicate sensibilities. This blogger does not want to remove any more names from her mailing list, so if last week's tale of locally harvested Coc au Vin offended you, GENTLE READER, DO NOT READ ON!]

I got an email a few days ago from Cathy Fulton, she of the Compost Fest and other sustainable food endeavors. Tomorrow, Saturday, December 10, she and her fellows will be pulling out all the stops vis-a-vis locavore food and island self-sustainability. She and her fellows will be—

DEMONSTRATING HOW TO TURN A DEER INTO FOOD!