[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!

Crimson Christmas Coleslaw uses treasures of the season

I’ve gone dormant as a garden blogger, I’m afraid: blame the wintry weather and my new duties as caregiver to a husband with a new hip. 

But as my recent cooking adventures kept theming, like a Sesame Street episode, “on the Letter C”, how could I resist, finally, telling you all about my Coc au Vin? my cardamon red kuri chips? or today’s slurpy bowl of winter refreshments that started with the question, “WHAT do I do with all this red cabbage?”

Read on and “C”…

An Old Bird turned Coc au Vin

In early November, Plum Forest Farm put out the word they’ve be culling their two-year-old hens and would offer these old birds for sale. Joanne wrote, “They are soup hens and as such need to be stewed for a couple hours before they are tender.  They make the most flavorful chicken soup.”

Now husband has long said that if you want to make Coc au Vin, you need an older bird with sturdier, more flavorful meat that will stand up to hours of cooking. Seemed like a good project for Thanksgiving—what two people need a multi-pound turkey anyway?

When I pulled her from the freezer bag, she seemed a little scrawny, with ruddy-red flesh and fat yellow as bad teeth—a far cry from the virgin-white, baby-flabby Thriftway bird I’m used to. But oh well: money’s spent, store’s closed …so get out the cleaver, the bottle of “vin” and praise the gods the power came back on.

I combined Julia Child’s recipe with notes from Egullet.org, substituting chopped yellow onion for the pearl onions and white wine instead of red. Several hours later, the husband pronounced my french stew: “right in the groove, perfect example of the dish, intensely flavorful, one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.”

Days later, I made a stock of the leftover bones: covering the bones with water in a deep pot, adding half an onion, six peppercorns, a star anise, a stalk of old celery and two carrots, plus a bay leaf and salt. Typically we simmer chicken stock for an evening, pour off the liquid into jars that then chill in the frig overnight: this lets the fat rise to the top, easily lifted and discarded. The stock was darker than from a grocery bird’s bones, but it also did not have that somewhat sour high-note, either.

The old bird was definitely worth the $10 I paid for her. Thank you, Plum Forest Farm.

[PS: Plum Forest's Joanne Jewell read the above and sent this comment via email:  "I believe the deep yellow fat on our soup hen indicates it is high in Omega 3 fatty acids because the hens were raised on pasture.  We have noticed that our hens who are raised on grass lay eggs with dark yellow yolks and their fat is very yellow when they are butchered.  We also think all that delicious fat is why the soup hens and roasting chickens taste so good.

      Joanne continues: ‘According to Jo Robinson and the Eatwild.com website, ‘” When chickens are housed indoors and deprived of greens, their meat and eggs also become artificially low in omega-3s. Eggs from pastured hens can contain as much as 10 times more omega-3s than eggs from factory hens.’ “

Cardamon & Red Kuri Squash

One can bake potato “fries” in the oven—and then there’s those wonderful sweet potato fries offered down at the “Q”, at Quartermaster Pub. Why not squash fries?

I cleavered up a small Red Kuri squash into 1/2″ thick, crescent moon shapes, scraped off the seeds and peeled away the skin. Then I poured 2 teaspoons of peanut oil on a baking sheet, sprinkled on S & P and some cumin. But cardamon was calling to me, so why not? sprinkled on some crushed cardamon seed as well. Tossed all to coat, put into a 425° oven and baked for about 20 minutes, turning once halfway through. The cardamon has a surprising affinity for this particular squash. It may take less than 20 minutes: try one halfway through.

Crimson Christmas Coleslaw

I finally came up with a better name for this utterly refreshing bowl of slurpy, nubby nummy-ness. It has so many treasures of the season: pomegranate seeds, tangerines, pecans or walnuts, playing off a backdrop of crunchy red cabbage, finely chopped. This turns the slaw a rosy-pink, beautifully capped with a snowy dollop of plain yogurt.

Thanks to Aaron for the kernel of this idea: a red cabbage slaw dressed with orange juice and apple cider vinegar, spiced with cumin and cardamon. I took your idea and ran with it!

2 cups red cabbage, chopped finely coleslaw style

1/4 cup chopped nuts, either pecan or walnut

half an apple, chopped into 1/4″ pieces

2-3 tangerines, peeled and sliced across the pips, then those pips separated to make 1/2″ chunks

As many pomegranate seeds as you can pry from the fruit before getting exasperated!

Anise or fennel seed, standing by…

Combine all those solids except the anise/fennel into the dressing, which will be quickly stained pink from the cabbage and the pomegranate seeds. Taste for flavor and adjust. If you enjoy licorice (I don’t, but I do enjoy anise seed: others can’t get past the taste similarity), sprinkle on top a shake or two or anise or fennel seeds. Finally, top with a dollop of plain yogurt, creme fraise, or sour cream on top. The anise gives a focus to the bitterness of the orange peel and cabbage, the nubbins of nut and pomegranate add texture, the orange/tangerines clear the palate with their acidic sweetness… oh MY I could wolf down BOWLS of this stuff!!!

Merry Festivus and All the Rest. May you be merry, and merrily fed, for the holidays!

This is not a story about putting compost on your soil so you can put more homegrown vegetables on the family plate. I think most of us already agree that’s a good thing.

This story is about putting compost on five acres—and then 38,000 more. This story is about feeding a home-cooked lunch to the kids—about 800 of them. It’s about applying the good that comes from gardening on a much larger scale.

I visited two Island projects this week: the Carbon Project at the Transfer Station’s Borrow Pit, and the Community Dinner sponsored last Tuesday by VIGA and the Experience Food Project at the high school.

Both projects take something unhealthy—a barren soil, a fast-food school lunch—and replace it with something better. Both projects juggle multiple players and inputs. And, with high-minded goals of sustainability and local self-sufficiency, these projects are combating some BIG problems—global warming, childhood obesity & diabetes—right here on the Island. 

The Carbon Sequestration Project at the Borrow Pit

Bob Fuerstenberg is a retired Islander who keeps sheep. And, because he’s a former Senior Ecologist for King County and curious about things like global warming, he wanted to know how much carbon he could sequester in his soil if he enriched his 80′ square garden with sheep droppings. Answer: over six years, two tons of carbon. Not a lot, given that the average US citizen emits about 20 tons per year—but what if you had access to more land?

Soil, it turns out, loves carbon—the healthier it is, the more carbon (in the form of decaying organic matter for soil microbes to eat, plus plants breathing in CO2) it wants to hang onto. Add all earth’s soils up, and you’ve got a huge potential repository for all that excess carbon our society puts into the atmosphere. While the Feds are talking high-tech means of capturing atmospheric carbon and pumping it into deep underground wells, Bob thinks it would be simpler to feed carbon back to the soil. And OH did he know where to find a good source of carbon…

King County deals with the solids left from wastewater treatment by processing it into biosolids. It’s then composted with wood chips to make GroCo, a commercial compost you can buy. (CedarGrove compost, its cousin, is composted from Seattle’s yard waste.) It bothered Bob that, after the GroCo’s good and cooked, King County spends 900-miles worth of carbon trucking the stuff to Eastern Washington, where farmers use it to enrich their wheat fields. Bob thought, why not use that stuff locally, within 50 miles? 

Enter David Warren of the Vashon Forest Stewards. VFS has done some work on Island Center Forest, and David had been eying its neighbor, the borrow pit at the Transfer Station, as a site for reforestation. But he knew the effort would be fruitless unless the soil was improved. When soil was “borrowed” by front-loaders to go cover garbage at the dump, that hole eventually was dug down to Vashon till, a layer of  gravel, silt, and clay compressed into near-cement by the Vashon glacier some 14,000 years ago. As you can see from the clean line of dark-green herbage in this photo, not even alders or scotch broom will venture onto this soil.

At some point, these two guys met, got to talking about the borrow pit, and an idea for an experiment was hatched: test Groco, CedarGrove, and other “soil amendment cocktails” to see whether they can restore a depleted soil. If the soil improves, reforest the borrow pit, all the while studying the results to create a method for restoring King County’s 38,000 empty acres. (for more info, see this page about the project at the King County web site.)

Last year, Bob’s team covered twenty 75-square-foot plots on the slopes of the borrow pit with composts, then sowed a cover crop of sterile rye. You can see the plots above: they’re the darker patches on the slopes: the floor of the borrow pit is left unplanted because it remains waterlogged.

An academic partner from the UW Dept. of Forest Resources, Dr. Sally Brown, and her graduate student Kate Kurtz, have taken 1000 samples measuring carbon uptake, NO2 outgassing, plant mortality, and microbial activity. First results of their findings are due out next month.

During the tour Sunday, October 19, Bob said the results so far are mixed. Of the many trees planted last January, only those about 6-10′ above the till layer have thrived. Still, the soil microbes are working, the cover crop is tall, and the composts are outgassing less nitrous oxide (a common outgas from composts that have too much nitrogen in their mix) than expected. 

If the results are good, Bob points to several widespread potentials. King County has 38,000 acres of old farmland, old gravel pits, third-growth forests—land that, like Vashon itself, has lost about 30% of its soil carbon through clearing, agriculture, and land development. If the county can restore its 38,000 empty acres to full fertility through the borrow pit method, that land not only will grow food and forests faster, it just might attract carbon “dollars” in a future Cap-n-Trade Carbon Market. That’s could help sustain farmers financially and start a self-perpetuating feedback loop that could encourage even more soil restoration. 

Feeding whole food to all those kids: the Community Dinner on October 19

Last spring I got very excited about a TV series where British Chef Jamie Oliver came to the USA to transform the typical school lunch from a tray of beige and white faux-food to plates full of vegetables and “real” food. Seems those in charge at Vashon School District must have been watching, too, because the lunches offered at Vashon schools have been transformed.

Well over one hundred people lined up last Tuesday to taste a beef or vegetable stew, roasted squash, salads, and a blueberry cobbler dessert. This community dinner , the second in a series to introduce Islanders to the new cuisine, was co-sponsored by VIGA and featured Island-grown squash, potatoes, and greens that farmers donated for the dinner. 

I talked to Donna Donnelly, assistant to Michael Soltman, district superintendent, about last year’s offerings. “It was a lot of frozen, pre-packaged food like chicken McNuggets, and we did have the salad bar but it wasn’t as extensive as it is now. But when our head chef retired last year, we decided we had the opportunity to do something different. And Michael worked with Tom French and his Experience Food Project up in the San Juan Islands, so…”

In a Beachcomber article just before the school year began, Michael Soltman wrote that he and Tom French started a similar project on San Juan Island. “We learned that kids really do love tasty, healthy food. We learned that parents care deeply about the food that their children eat. We learned that communities unite together to foster healthy and fit children. We learned that farmers, grocers and politicians will collaborate to support healthy communities, local food security and sustainability.”

And at the dinner, Tom French stood up and told us, “Last year, we had 200 school kids signed up for the lunch program. Right now, seven weeks into the program, we have 630 signed up. We need 800 to make the program break even.”

Tom gets most of his produce right now from Charlie’s Produce, and he told me he’s able to get much of what he wants from within Washington State or Oregon. He had a meeting scheduled the next day with local farmers. I talked to one the next day.

“It was great to see all us farmers there last night, scratching our heads, thinking about whether growing for the school could work for us,” Celina Yarkin of Sun island Farm told me yesterday. “Personally, we were thinking of expanding, and having the school district as a customer could really help.”

She said Tom French was very honest about the challenges of working with small farmers. “We (Island farmers) can never grow everything he needs, but perhaps we can grow 10%, or perhaps there’s a VIGA Highlighted meal every week or so. It will be incremental—can we provide what we say we will? Success will be What Works.”

At least one measure of success has to be, Will the Kids Eat It? And Donnelly said, “They like the food: they’re asking for seconds. They’re taking the salad bar and the fresh fruit. The other day, I looked at their plate of homemade Jo-Jos and fall vegetable medley and I thought, ‘that’s a good-looking plate!’ No beige-n-white anymore.”

The next Community Dinner will be Wednesday, November 17th at the high school cafeteria. Donations help with funding the new lunch menu, so go get your bucks out and your bib on.

Synchronicity strikes!  Casting about for a soils expert on Vashon, I reached David Warren of the Forest Stewards. He was very excited to tell me all about an experiment the Forest Stewards are involved with at the transfer station’s “Borrow Pit” (so called because soil was taken from this spot to cover old garbage at the transfer station’s former dumpsite.) The diggings exposed some pretty poor soil—Vashon Till and its underlayer, the sand & gravel of the glacial outwash—that promptly killed off any trees planted in it. Forest Stewards wondered how they could help this soil grow trees. and with the help of King County and others, helped set up an experiment to see whether cocktails of soil amendments can turn this poor soil into a carbon sink.

Two hours later, I received this press release from Cathy Fulton, who is promoting her annual Compost Fest. But part of the festivities will be a Tour & Talk at this Borrow Pit Experiment, led by Bob Fuerstenberg, the very “Vashon Soils Expert” I was calling ’round to find. 

On Sunday, October 17, Mariposa Gardens on Vashon Island 
will be hosting our second “Let it Rot” Compost Festival!
Free, Open to all. 

Two activities at two sites: 
Tour the Carbon Sequestration and Forest Restoration Research Site. 
3:00 pm, Sunday, October 17
Bob Fuerstenberg will give a guided tour of this fascinating large-scale composting research site. Learn how compost will help King County sequester carbon AND restore damaged soils for reforestation and agriculture.  This project involves the Vashon Park District, King County, and the University of Washington. Meet Bob at 3:00 pm at the site trailhead located on Westside Highway just north of the Transfer Station entrance (approximately the 188th block of Westside Highway). Watch for signs. Park on the road. 

Mariposa Gardens Site
1:00-4:00 pm, Sunday, October 17
How many  ways are there to “let things rot?” Various composting and garden-bed preparation possibilities will be demonstrated between 1:00 and 4:00 pm. This is an open house, so drop by when it is convenient for you. Directions below.
 
Compost Festival Features:
Master Recycler/Composter Anne Willingham will talk about composting kitchen waste and using worm bins and garden cones. Anne will have worms for purchase for your worm bin.

Our chicken cultivators will be actively weeding and tilling a bed.

Try out a Broad Fork from Vashon’s Meadow Creature.

There will be active composting demonstrations with interpretive displays (including pros and cons) on:
    *  Quick/hot composting
    *  Sheet composting
    *  Slow/Cool composting
    *  Animal bedding/Offal composting
    *  Worm bins
    *  Hugelkultur experiments
    *  Chicken-Garden partnerships
    *  Early stages of a permaculture-style fruit tree guild
    *  Swales

We will have a resource table and a list of resources to hand out to all attendees.

Please pass this on to your contacts–this is a great opportunity for all who garden to learn many ways sequester carbon, build garden soil, and let things rot! More details and downloadable posters and flyers can be found on our “Let it Rot” web page:
http://mariposagardens.org/index_files/Page522.htm

Hope to see you then!
Cathy Fulton
Mariposa Gardens
www.MariposaGardens.org
463-5652

Directions to the Site: 
Address: 9228 SW 209th Street, Vashon Island, WA
From the intersection of Vashon Highway and 204th Street (the Sound Food intersection), go east (toward the high school and pool) about 1/3 mile. Turn right (south) on Monument Road. Go about 1/3 mile to 209th Street. 209th Street is a one lane road. To avoid a traffic jam, please park on Monument Road and walk about 500 feet to the site. There is accessible parking at the site for those who need it.

Finally! A warm, sunny day! So I went shooting to capture our farms in all their harvest glory.

At Hogsback down Gorsuch Road, one season is giving way to the next. I found Brian Lowry, Farm Manager, and his three interns clearing away their summer flowers, armloads of cosmos and sunflower being marched to the compost pile.

“We’ll be getting the pumpkin patch ready for U-pick by next Tuesday,” Brian yelled toward me. “They’ll be priced by size, in the $5-10 range.”

Hogsback is one well-kept farm, and it doesn’t look like there’ll be any let-up in their production. Tomatoes and peppers are still ripening in their hoophouses. The wide beds are carpeted with a mix of green mustards and lettuces red and bronze, while in the greenhouse more flats of lettuces wait for space to open. 

Plum Forest Farm

I walked up onto Plum Forest’s south-leaning fields and found Rob Peterson taking a break from building a new composting barn, a ten-year-old dream that this year is becoming reality thanks to some small farm aid from King County. When I asked him where was today’s beauty spot, he took me up to his quince tree and found me a windfall.

Quince is one of those old-fashioned fruits that’s more used in the Middle East than here. Don’t eat it raw—too bitter—but treat it like its relative the pear and let it sit on the counter for a few days. It will perfume your kitchen with a fruity rose scent. When cooked, the flesh blushes like a rose: try it in an autumn compote, poached with a cinnamon stick in a sweet white wine.   

Plum Forest sends out a weekly email letting you know what’s in their farmstand every Tuesday and weekend. Or you can check out their web site: www.plumforestfarm.com Among what’s available: these yellow onions I found drying in a hoophouse. 

Rob said their tomatoes grown outside hoophouses are showing some late blight. He showed me the blight’s charcoal streaks on plants’ main stems, the toasted brown color on the tops of the fruit. This discoloration I’ve noticed on my own tomatoes, along with the rubbery taste it gives to their flesh.

Plum Forest is keeping its famous carrots under reemay-wrap to protect this signature crop from carrot rust fly. Other crops—leeks, chard, brussel sprouts, cabbage—grow abundantly in the open. Chickens roost in the shade of their mobile home. No unused ground at Plum Forest!

At Island Meadow Farm

Mid-afternoon, I drove around the corner to Island Meadow, just uphill from Plum Forest. The gate was open so I went around the chicken corral and the duck house, went to inspect the squash bed, found some sunflowers standing strong.

His lemon cucumbers are large and almost orangy—but don’t be fooled by my juxtaposition here: they’re NOT as big as this “Cinderella” pumpkin. This variety, actually named ‘Rouge vif d’etampes’, makes a long-lasting table decoration AND a very good pie. 

When Bonnie & Bob Gregson first started Island Meadow Farm in the 90s, their acreage was full of old fruit and nut trees. Following the lane down the slope, you can still find many of those old trees, with the occasional new sapling planted in an open space. Lured by sun shining through tree trunks, I wandered down and discovered this view looking over another orchard toward Paradise Valley.

With the sun glinting through tree-leaves and new orchard trees growing in tall grass, it’s easy indeed to feel in that warmth and hope a touch of paradise. Maybe that’s part of the the reward for these farmers’ hard work!

Time.

Relentless and fixed, as any commuter rushing toward the ferry dock, eyes on the dashboard clock, knows. 

Yet it’s elastic, too. Long as a yawn when you’re bored, short as a finger-snap when you’re having fun.

Time folds upon itself, dragging the past up to meet the present-day. Witness: Saturday’s ceremony to open Dockton’s new Historical Interpretive Trail. In the photo above, Frank Zellerhoff of the Trail Committee rings the very bell that used to call day-workers to come down to Dry Dock. And instead of walking downhill toward a day’s labor, about 200 people marched UP the hill, following a commemorative set of signs explaining the history of old Dockton and its Croatian/Scandinavian community, along an easy half-mile trail around the village.

Anita Halstead and her trail committee got perhaps the BEST DAY OF THE SUMMER for their community celebration of this new half-mile trail. Congratulations to them, and to King County Parks, 4Culture, Vashon-Maury island Heritage Association, and the many other players that helped bring this piece of our Island past back into the present light of day. 

Seeing The Past in our Present-Day Landscape

I’ve been looking into Island history lately, doing background research for a possible book on Vashon gardening. Some great books now littering my couch—Isle of the Sea Breezers by Roland Carey, Fisher Creek Watershed Stories as told by its neighbors, and Vashon Island’s Agricultural Roots: Tales of the Tilth by Pamela Woodroffe—are changing my perceptions of what I see as I drive along the Island roads.

For instance, can you picture the fields behind K2 in row after row of strawberry plants? Masa Mukai, who developed a way to freeze strawberries at his VIPCO plant next to the much-wrangled over Mukai House & Garden, once managed those fields, plus more all the way to the airfield on Cove Road. Given that Masa was also a pilot who flew between his Vashon fields and properties in Lynden and in Oregon, I have to wonder: did Masa donate that field to the future Vashon airport?

Or take that cute little cottage with the cupola on top in Dockton. Did you know it was once the Cod House? where the paymaster (so I was told by its present owners) paid out the day’s wages to the workers walking up from the Dry Dock and the salt cod barreling operations. Today, standing at that spot on the Dockton Historical Interpretive Trail, you can compare the “Now” of the Plancich family docks and the sailboats moored off-shore with the “Then” of boathouses and masted ships shown in the photos on the plaque. The more things change, the more things remain the same, n’est-ce pas?

Time Turnovers

Now the alpaca farm where I co-share a vegie patch was once full of Olympic berries. According to Bill Green, these berries were developed by Pete Erickson as a cross between a blackcap raspberry and a loganberry. Bill told me they bear in June and are rather seedy: perhaps this is why the berries were turned into a syrup and served at the Bon Marché. No lady wants to be seen rustically picking seeds out of her teeth after lunching downtown!

I asked whether his land still had some Olympic berries. “Erickson’s grandson once dropped by here and asked if he could take some away. He did find a few plants, and I occasionally run into some. But it’s pretty overgrown back there.”

And yes it is—blanketed with himalayan blackberries and young alders, it’s evidence that on today’s farm, you just don’t need to squeeze a dollar from every inch of land you’ve got. We people of today have other resources, and other ways we want to spent our allotment of hours and minutes. Consequently, some land goes back to nature. But if we’re lucky, it doesn’t mean it’s gone from human memory.

I was talking to Kathy Wheaton today; she sent me some photos of her husband Loyd’s garden on the highway’s flat stretch between Sunrise Ridge and Morgan Hill. As we were talking about this and that, I told her about the alpaca farm and she cut me off with “YES I remember those Olympic berries. They grew in that field west of the old phone company building. You know that old green farmhouse? (yes…) and that tiny little cabin next to it? (yes… where Anne and Nathan used to bunk…) well, I LIVED there! And that long field that stretches up toward the Nike housing? That’s where I used to pasture our family’s horses.”

“Strawberry plants rolling right up to the edge of the sky, the troughs between the plants scalloping the horizon,” wrote Betty MacDonald in her book Onions in the Stew. There’s our history out in them dar fields.

One more reason I’ve got time on my mind?

Tomorrow, September 30th, marks one full year I’ve been writing this blog, “Garden On, Vashon.” 78 entries, more than weekly. And the more I scratch in Island soil, the more stories I find to dig up. 

Thanks for reading. Here’s to another Vashon year of putting down roots and pulling up treasure.

PS: Kathy wants you to know that, if you want fresh farm produce on a weekday (or weekend for that matter), Kathy’s Corner sells Loyd’s home-grown corn, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, etc. Corn 3 for $1; slicing tomatoes and romas $2/lb, lots of spuds including her favorite yellow, ‘Satina’ “better than a yukon” for 75¢/lb. Open 7 days a week until the season blows.

For over ten years, a little stand on the NE corner of the Burton intersection has been serving up flower bouquets. Nobody mans it: it runs on the self-serve honor system. From Thursdays through Sundays, though, somebody keeps restocking it with colorful sprays of backyard flowers.

There’s another, similar stand at Minglement. “Calico Gardens,” the signs read. Who ARE these trusting folk?

Noni Morrison & Delinda McCann of Calico Gardens

“Calico Gardens” is Delinda McCann and Noni Morrison, both long-time south-end residents. They first met at WSU, but moved on, got married, had their kids … then sometime in the 80s, Delinda walked into Vashon’s Methodist church and a familiar voice called out, “Hey! I KNOW YOU!”

As the two women got re-acquainted, as kids grew up and left, Delinda kept listening to Noni’s vision of a flower business. Finally Delinda nudged them into action, “Okay, here’s how we’ll start: tomorrow we’ll put some bouquets in my daughter’s coffee-wagon and try selling them to the south-end ferry commuters.”

It went well enough—how could it not, at $1 per bouquet?— but within a couple weeks, they decided they needed more traffic and got permission from the marina to use their parking lot in Burton “as long as we didn’t put up a permanent structure.” Today, you’ll find Delinda’s cart there, across from the Burton coffee-stand; Noni fills the stand at Minglement and another at her home off 248th & Wax Orchard. 

Keeping Flowers Coming All Week

As I stood with Delinda in her backyard, I found it hard to imagine bouquets emerging from a somewhat overgrown, sprawling backyard. She said, “You’ll have to excuse all this wildness: I’ve just been through a two-year bout with cancer, and I’m just now cancer-free. But Noni’s helped me a lot.”

The two women start harvesting on Wednesday evening and have their stands supplied by Thursday mid-morning. Then they check the stands through the day and restock as needed. Delinda’s 18-stem bouquets are $5, while Noni’s larger arrangements are $6. On a busy weekend, they might sell as many as 60 bouquets, but 25 is more typical. 

“What’s the record?” I ask, but instead of hearing the high, I get an earful of “Minus EIGHT!” from Delinda, who was shorted badly one holiday weekend. I then hear the story of a repeat offender, an older lady they’ve nicknamed “Flora,” who Delinda has seen cherry-pick the roses out of each bouquet and then drive away without paying. “She handed them to her grandson—what an example!”

She shows me around color-themed beds that hold roses, glads, dahlias, snapdragons, feverfew daisies. “This section is all yellows, and it goes into apricot there where those snapdragons are, and over there’s pink, then into the white corner that keeps me going in the spring: it’s full of white currant, daffodils, hyacinths. In back I grow those bachelor buttons, a lace-cap hydrangea. I almost always put a bit of blue in a bouquet because people will buy it: they love the blue.”

“So Islanders have color preferences?” 

“Oh, Islanders decide what color they want each year. This year, nothing pink sells.”

Noni, who’s just arrived, adds, “This year, Purple with Orange! Anything BRIGHT to counter the gray!”

Keeping It Going All Year

Since it’s started raining, I say goodbye to Delinda and drive after Noni to her home on 248th & Wax Orchard Road. Her stand is on the intersection’s SE corner, tucked among some alders. And there’s her flower field, surrounded as Delinda’s is by a high deer-proof fence. It’s a photo-op for a flower-nut.

The gate to Noni's flower field

“Let me show you my new greenhouse,” says Noni, leading me into a new SunGlo. “We put amaryllis into our Christmas bouquets, and I’m experimenting with propagating them. We also force our spring tulips in here.”

By Valentine’s Day, Calico Gardens has started its season with bouquets of daffodils, hyacinths, forced tulips and whatever else looks good. Business is good through Mother’s Day, then sales slow until the first of August, “when people are having parties and more guests. Bouquets make good hostess gifts.” Their season winds down into Christmas, then shuts down for January,” our only down month.”

“We LOVE to be called in for weddings,” says Noni. “Our specialty is when Mother arrives on Wednesday and no one’s arranged for the flowers! There are a lot of ex-hippie folk on the Island and they don’t like formal stuff—they want ‘fresh out of a meadow’ bouquets.”

“And I get a lot of business from men. A bouquet’s inexpensive, it’s a little something they can buy for the wife on the way home.”

As the rain picks up speed, her son Zack brings us hot coffee. We tour her rows of flowers, each dahlia carefully marked—Noni loves the names. Last year she lost 100 of her 130 dahlia plants, which she normally lets overwinter in her gravelly loam ground. So she bought more from Swan Island Dahlias in Oregon. “You know, our husbands wouldn’t budget in all this landscaping, so doing this business allows us to buy and grow whatever we want.”

Left dahlia is 'Gladiator'; the rose on the right is 'Marvell.' Right and bottom: She built me a bouquet.

Such an extravagance of flowers: I can see not only the reason for a business, but are those some of the zinnias, sunflowers, dahlias, and china asters that appear in Delinda’s bouquets? I ask whether the women share flowers. “A little—Delinda helped me out when I had knee surgery, and I’ve helped her out during her cancer scare.”

Later, at the stand in Burton, I see what seemed like slim pickins at Delinda’s, now concentrated into intense bouquets. They’ve got that Siren’s Call of Color that reaches clear across the street, that beckons to a potential customer to come over and buy one (above).

"Kate" choses some flowers from the Burton Calico Gardens stand

A bouquet does its best work inside relationships. A bride tosses her bouquet to her bridesmaids. A husband gives flowers to his wife. A hostess puts out flowers to welcome her guests.

All those loving gestures are available to Islanders, thanks in part to two old friends and their mutual love of flowers.

First, the News—

• This year’s Vashon Farm Tour will be Sunday, Sept. 26, from 10am–4pm. 

• I spotted the Food Bank’s groovy new logo on the side of its delivery truck today. Who created it? Sy Novak, of course—she of VAA’s brochures for art tour, garden tour, etc. Excellent work, Sy!

Thoughts on Garden Clean-up

Shagginess and sprawl has been getting to me lately, so a week ago, I got myself a haircut, and then yesterday I gave my garden the same treatment.

Monday afternoon being pleasant, I got out and trimmed the tomatoes from the top down to viable fruit. The lay-about calendulas and pansies were lifted off the paths and relieved of their seed-heads. Lettuce towers were pulled, and into their places I plopped the basil pots. Bringing this tender herb closer to the kitchen is my little way of nudging myself to USE IT, DUMMY! before the first frost kills it.

I’m also trying to persuade myself to yank some plants—how else can I make space for new plants and for bulb planting?  Those raspberries MUST come out of the flower border (what was I thinking??), the scabiosa has been a do-nothing for three years, and only one of the three bush peonies flowers. Right now, while rain’s here and soil’s warm, is the best time to move or remove plants (see “To Do” list below).

A Tip for Successful Compost: Time your Gathering

All this trimming added a foot of green layer to the compost pile, so I grudgingly gave it the last of the leaf mold gathered last autumn, plus a layer of summer compost. And as I stood watering the new layers, my idling thoughts ran on this: Successful compost depends on getting your materials while the gettin’s good.

The pile I made in late June, layered with summer weeds, autumn leaf-mold, and horse pucky full of tender spring grass, cooked up quickly to over 100°. But what our Island horses produce now isn’t as potent: according to Territorial Seed founder Steve Solomon, by late summer in the PNW, horses are grazing on grass that’s lost most of its green nutrients and has turned into fiber.

That was confirmed in an interview with our local Mann brothers, Bill and John, whose tractor service has kept Vashon hayfields mowed for decades. In Pamela Woodroffe’s excellent oral history book, Tales of the Tilth, Bill Mann says, “The summers have gotten later and later, and now we can’t do anything until the middle of July—we should be out there the first of June. Now it’s all turned to straw by the time we get to it, and it’s lost most of its protein.”

So as we come into a good season of gathering “browns” for the compost pile, don’t expect to get an good source of nitrogen-rich “greens” from your local stable. A more timely source might be to ask your neighborhood wine- or cider-maker whether they’ll give you the sediment left after the fruit is pressed. Another excellent local resource for compost green is seaweed that’s been washed in the rain.

Chores to Do Now

• TOMATOES: With weather cooling, it’s WE who must push plants toward ripening. Quit watering. Prune tops, foliage that touches the soil, branch tips down to green toms, and flowers. Cloche with clear plastic to harness heat, protect against rain.

• DIVIDE PLANTS: peonies, primroses, or early-to-midseason perennials.

• VEG to SOW: lettuce, peas, mustards, cilantro, chervil, arugula, radishes, and cabbage transplants to over-winter for spring harvest. In empty spots, add compost, then sow cover crop to over-winter.

• FLOWERS to SOW: biennials such as alyssum, foxglove, larkspur, love-in-a-mist, pansies, clarkia, toadflax. Harvest some poppy or columbine seeds into a brown bag to dry indoors, then sprinkle on snow for sure-fire germination.

• MOVE OR REMOVE: Evaluate your garden with an eye to the true performers and the lay-abouts. If you’ve given a plant three years to perform and it hasn’t, time to chuck it for something better.

And what NOT to do:

• DON’T OVER-CUT PERENNIALS: if you trim back plants with hollow stems, those stems will fill with rainwater that may freeze later, killing the plant.

• DON’T FERTILIZE: your plants need to wind down, not get wound up.

• AND DON’T FORGET TO DANCE WITH THE BUTTERFLIES

My kitchen garden, after a bit of tidying

Next Week: a tour and interview with the gals behind Calico Gardens.

September’s here: time to cover the tomato plants in plastic, to plant the last of the lettuce seeds, to reseed the lawn, and consider where you’ll fit in the fall bulbs.

First, the news:

Fall bulbs are now at Thriftway, including a 50-bulb bag of daffodils for around $25. A good deal for naturalizing your dafs.

If your vegetable garden grew excess you’d like to preserve, you might be interested in borrowing from the new Food Preservation Tool Library. This collection of tools for canning, drying, or juicing lives under the care of Cathy Fulton, who brought us the Food Summit. 

You can borrow for three days any of the following tools:  dehydrator, food strainer, home canning kit, pressure canners, juicers, vacuum sealer, water bath canners and an apple peeler/slicer/corer. For details, see http://vashonfoodsummit.org.fswg and click on “Food Preservation Equipment Library.” Then phone her at 463-5652 to reserve the equipment. She’s also got a video, Finding Joy in Canning and Freezing Foods,” from a presentation by Jan and Gene Kohns at the Food Summit ($5.00).

Ruth Sauer’s Garden 

For years, I have driven by this garden that’s just north of Burton, and I’ve always admired its layout, its terraced walls, its sheer size, and all the trees. Somebody was working on a personal arboretum, here.

Two weeks ago, I found the back way in, pressed forward, and parked in the midst of a profusion of flowers. What a treat! Here were mini-dahlias and coreopsis, zinnias and achillea, black-eyed susans and verbenas—circus colors running riot in a bed devoted to late summer blooms.

I knocked on the door, and a short brunette woman, somewhat stooped, came to the door. I asked for the gardener, and she said, “That’s me. I’m Ruth Sauer.”

Ruth and husband Merle (d.) have lived north of Burton since 1993, but their residency goes back to the 70s when Merle opened Vashon Island Real Estate (now John L. Scott Realty). Right away, she told me a wonderfully harrowing story about living on the beach below Pt. Vashon, when a post-Christmas tide rose and took out the floor and outer wall. “We woke up and could hear the sea in our living room. It happened to us and five other neighbors, but nobody was hurt.”

A longtime gardener since her Seattle days, she found the clay soil and dense shade of Pt. Vashon tough, even though Merle had terraced the back slope. When her husband showed her the spec house he’d built near Burton, she took one look at the full sun exposure and wide-open lawn and said “THIS is where I want to live.”

“At first, it was all grass, but I’ve kept nibbling away at it. We moved in February 1993, and by spring I had my dahlias in.”  She’s grown them every year for the last 50 years—can’t be without them and often plants over 100. She warned me never to use Preen with bulbs: “I used it once in this bed ten years ago, and even though the label doesn’t warn you of this, it killed EVERY bulb. I keep planting, but I still lose a few, all this time later. I do use Preen elsewhere in the garden, but I have to be careful because I have bulbs nearly everywhere.”

Her soil is sandy loam—”I think I got the good stuff that slipped downhill”—and it’s well amended with horse manure, grass clippings, and compost. Next to the dahlia patch is the remnant of a once-larger vegie patch, now growing beans and squash and protecting a few rose bushes.

As we walk the concrete path around to the front waterside of the house, she describes the order of their plantings—of rhododendrons along the foundation, of the peonies, dahlias, and shasta daisies  planted in rows along the path, of the massive thundering plum, now 30′ wide, that she moved from the Pt. Vashon house as a 2′ slip.

The trees are, for the most part, Merle’s purchases. “While I shopped in nurseries, he started to get interested in trees. Whatever he wanted to buy, I always agreed—I was just happy he wasn’t complaining!” 

Past the witch hazel just turning a brassy-gold, we start to look at her handful of tree labels to figure out what are the trees along the highway. We can identify… what.. is that a trident maple? There’s a korean spice viburnum before a large monterey cypress next to a blue spruce, a deodar cedar and a laburnum, a tulip poplar and a catalpa, a small enkianthus. A row of very large lilacs cover the retaining wall along the east side of the house.

On the opposite, west side—behind a wonderful collection of grasses and a yucca—we find an Austrian Black Pine next to the road and a flowering cherry. Behind them uphill, a Pin Oak that will turn orangey-yellow soon stands next to a Nootka Weeping Cypress. A young ginkgo is nearby. Another cypress crowds a Magnolia Grandiflora with a few blooms. Up near the pergola stands a red twig Japanese Maple—”I think that’s ‘Rosco’”— and a crytomeria already turning its smoky tones of plum.

Finally, we head back uphill to the house for a drink and some gardening chat. “You’ve found another gardening nut?” asks her son Henry, half-joking (half right!) We walk about her yearly routine of getting seed-starting mix from McConkey’s out past Tacoma, of planting her over-100 dahlias by every 15th of April, of her plans to “nibble away with my shovel” yet another triangle of grass for another perennial bed in the backyard “where it’s easier for me to work these days.”

I leave with a full bag of cucumbers for the Food Bank and, for me, a bag of ‘Celebrity’ and ‘Early Girl’ tomatoes from her greenhouse. What a pleasure to meet such a hard-working, able-handed gardener who, with her husband and his trees, has created a “gateway garden” for the north side of Burton. 

Due to a week’s worth of summer visitors, I haven’t been able to complete a blog entry this first week of September. However, I’ve got a good garden exploration in the works, and here’s some news about a BIG PLANT SALE this weekend down on the Burton Loop!

Plant Sale at Colleen James’s Garden—Perennial Propagator Extraordinaire!

This weekend, September 4  and 5, Colleen James will be having a massive sale to reduce stock and to help fund the purchase of more seed and soil to get me through the winder.

She would like to invite you to come and check out the good deals. Here is a sampling of what you will find!

• Several types of Dianthus in 4″ pots foe $2 each

• Several grasses: copper sedge, silver curls, and northern lights grass—all 4 ” pots are $2 each!!

• Lots of Gallon pots are $5 each: forsythia, arctic blue willow, trailing rosemary, abelia, persicaria, cape fuchsia. Several hardy fuchsias, hebe, golden sedge, teucrium, hardy geranium, australian bush mint, agastache, alpine Strawberry, yarrow, And LOTS of iris.

• Several types of Salvia and other unusual perennials!!

Colleen James’ garden is on the Burton Loop—you may remember it from this year’s VAA Garden Tour. At the Burton intersection, turn left onto the loop road, then at the “T” turn left, and follow the loop around less than half a mile. Her place is the yellow Victorian house on the left (water side of road) with the 2-story yellow garage out front and the black not-very-much-a-fence out front.