I just spent six days in The City of Roses, my hometown. Much of my visit was focused on a recuperating Mom, but hubbie and I did manage to get away to Crystal Springs Rhododendron Test Garden, one of my favorite Portland destinations for the month of May.

Located next to Reed College in southeast Portland, this Portland Park is named for the many natural springs that rise from a huge aquifer underground here—once considered for the source of Portland’s drinking water.

Two lagoons and a lake surround a rhody-planted island and peninsula, which you reach via two bridges and many wandering paths. The oldest rhododendrons here date from the 1930s, but you can also see azaleas, hostas, magnolias, ferns, wonderful drifts of candlelabra primroses, hardy geraniums, and a winter garden on the peninsula. 

So here’s a bit of eye-candy for your enjoyment. If you can get away to Portland soon, Crystal Springs can be found on the southwest corner of Reed College, on SE Woodstock off 39th.

Back in “Summerplace”, the development where my mother lives, the irises, pansies, azaleas and even the roses were coming on strong. Cruising other people’s flowers—the one thing I miss about living in a neighborhood.


But when I returned, my own iris bed was in bloom—irises given to me by friends in exchange for dividing their own. Thanks, Bea, Sharon, and Linda! So good to be back in my Island home!

One of the best-kept wisteria plants I’ve ever seen is starting up its annual fireworks right now. It’s at 20224 Ridge Road as you drop down into Ellisport, on the left/west side. 

You should see it soon—perhaps while you’re Art Touring—before it peaks mid-May, and before the house it fronts is sold.

Wisteria needs plenty of hard pruning to look its best. Margot Stokke, its long-time owner and probable planter in the 50s, has kept it in perfect trim for decades—certainly as long as I’ve been on the Island (1995). Her niece, Nora Wingate, who now lives in the house, tells me she now just cuts the long runners back to the main stem. I suspect there’s more of a pruning regimen then she lets on. But it’s not the moment to learn about wisteria pruning—yet.

At the Market: A Salute to Moms

Moms and gardeners will be saluted during the Vashon Farmers’ Mother Nature Gardening Day, this Saturday, May 8, from 10 am – 2 pm.  The event will include container gardening demonstrations, a kid’s pot painting project, free gifts for Moms from various market vendors and a drawing for a Gardener’s Delight basket.

Cathy Fulton of Mariposa Gardens will demonstrate how to make newspaper pots (you’ll take home a pot mold*) and frugal container gardens using feed bags and wading pools. The Community Seed Exchange box will also be on hand for deposits and withdrawals. Noted artist and Island farmer Will Forrester will help kids paint ceramic flower pots in the free craft area. Rainy Day Gardens will hand out soaps and glass artist Lindsay Hart will give away etched glass hearts to the first 50 moms. And sign up for the Gift Basket, worth $70.

Next week at the market: a fiber & yarns focus. Stay tuned.

An Island Guide to Buying Blueberries

It IS time for me to figure out what kind of blueberry I need to purchase. I was given six ‘Polaris’ half-high varieties for Christmas, and since yields improve greatly if you have another variety to help with pollination, I need not only more blueberry plants, I need space for a berry patch.

So I’ve been blueberry-shopping, and I can tell you, there are so many varieties available in our local nurseries, you’ll be seeing blue spots before you can figure out which to buy. So, I’ve made a table to help myself—and you—figure out which blueberries will best suit my needs and situation. It’s in PDF form that you hopefully can download and print out to take to the nurseries with you.

Blueberry plants have a lot to offer besides a healthy snack. What do you want: small berries for pancakes? Bright scarlet fall color? A blueberry in a pot? A ground cover? A hedge? This table will help you sort these features through.

For instance, for pollination I need another half-high cultivar that’s early: so ‘NorthBlue’ or ‘Patriot’ would work. Kathy Wheaton tells me to stick within type—highbush, lowbush, or half-high—and overlap rather than duplicate ripening time. “Most of the flowering times overlap except for a really early one like EarliBlue and a late one like Jersey.”

Though all blueberries want acid soil in the 4.5-5.5 range, some will tolerate slightly higher pH. Some, like ‘Spartan’, are really fussy about their soil, while others, like ‘Patriot’, aren’t as particular. Buy a soil-test kit for $5-8 and test: you could be surprised, as I was, by my 7.0 neutral soil reading. Sounds like I’ll be tailor-making my soil, so it’s a good thing I was given ‘Polaris’: those half-highs stay small enough for container gardening.

If your soil isn’t acid enough, you can either add sulfur or ammonium sulfate, or you can custom-mix a soil for a container blueberry with plenty of peat moss or decomposed doug fir bark or chips. I know that Kathy and Jonathan Morse of Island Lumber know a lot about this.

As for hardiness, the half-highs were bred in Minnesota to be covered by snow. For our usually-mild winters, I’ve seen recommendations for plants like “Sunshine Blue” that have some southern low-bush in their make-up and don’t require as many “low chill hours.” We DO get some mighty cool springs (like NOW), so it might be good insurance to get mid- or late-season plants that will still be flowering when warmth-loving bees come out to work.

Here’s some good online resources on growing blueberries: 

from WSU extension: “Growing Small Fruits in the Home Garden”

From OSU Extension: “Growing Blueberries in your Home Garden”

DIG has a Buy 4, Get One Free offer going. Country Store has the lowest prices. Kathy’s Corner and Island Lumber have the widest selections. Hope this table helps you choose the blueberry (s) that’s right for you.

Blueberry Table

(*My mea culpa: I need to learn a better way to make paper pots. My own, made as papier-mache with a flour paste & water, spouted a lovely crop of BLUE MOLD about ten days after being planted with my tomato plants. The bleach-wash I applied to kill the mold then brewed itself into an anaerobic FUNK in the bottoms of my flats. Oh, dear—and to think I actually recommended this method. Dear reader, I apologize!  If this also happened to you, I hope you did as I did and repotted into larger, non-papier-mache pots. My tomato plants were ready for another repotting by then anyway. Live and learn…)

Vashon Gardeners can enjoy not one, not two, but THREE interesting Plant Sales this weekend: the Garden Club Plant Sale, Appleyard’s Rhody, Maple & Tomato Sale on Maury Island, and a sale to support the Hort Program in the Vashon schools.

(And that doesn’t even count the biggie in Seattle—the King County Master Gardeners Sale at the Center for Urban Horticulture: for information on that sale, visit www.mgfkc.org/fundraising/plantsale/

First Up: High School Hort Sale this THURSDAY

From 11:30am-4pm this Thursday, April 29, the high school kids of the spring Horticulture class will be raising money to support their garden’s upkeep over the summer. They’ll sell vegie starts of “beautiful brassicas” —that’s broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage—as well as spinach, lettuce, chard, bok choi, and flowers that have been well cared for and are extremely healthy, ready to go. You’ll find the sale in the greenhouse, next to the swimming pool facility, on the eastern side of the high school campus.

Proceeds from the sale will fund the summer program’s supervisor and student workers, as they keep this school garden going over the summer vacation to supply the Food Bank. Look forward to another plant sale end of May when they bring out their warm-weather crops and more flowers. 

Saturday am: Vashon-Maury Garden Club annual Plant Sale

Garden club members have been potting up treasures and extras from their personal gardens all week to share with you. And they promise to restrain themselves for a whole hour, from 9am–10am, opening the sale to The Public Only so that YOU can get first dibs on hanging baskets, tomato starts, treasures from that propagatin’ diva Kay White, and lots of veggie starts as well as annuals, perennials, small shrubs, and grasses. There’ll also be a book section and a boutique with garden-related art and “treasures.”

This sale lasts from 9am through noon “or whenever we sell out,” says Sally Fox, this year’s club president. You’ll find it in the former Napa Auto Parts outlet, back by Vashon Market and the Vashon Post Office.

All Day Saturday: Appleyard Farm & Nursery’s Annual Sale

 Dr. Al Watts and his wife Muriel have lived on a former loganberry farm in Dockton since the 50s, where he’s been propagating rhododendrons, abutilons, Japanese Maples, and rare geraniums (among many other things, including prize-winning chickens) ever since his son opened up “Valley Nursery” in Poulsbo.

His yard is a sight to see—stuffed with rhodies, azaleas, dwarf conifers and a host of shrubs that he’s raised out of interest. They’re in ground, in special “root control” bags that he said “gives a tremendous root structure, no roots wrapping around like in plastic containers.” Many shrubs are in bloom right now, so if the weather’s as good as predicted, his farmhouse is quite the Maury Island destination.

He’ll also have loganberries and ‘Cascade’ berries propagated from the farm’s original plantings. And abutilons, about 25 varieties: marginally hardy here, so ask how he maintains them. And three kinds of tomatoes in gallon pots: ‘Early Girl’, ‘SunGold’, and ‘ExtraSweet 100′.

His sale will run from 9–5, at 10014 SW 260th Street in Dockton. Take the highway into Maury’s main village of Dockton; as the road makes that left-turn south past the old Dockton store, watch for 260th on the right, where you’ll turn and proceed west toward the water and the sign for Appleyard Farm. 

But insiders know the most Scenic Way to approach his place is to take the highway NOT as it turns left/south, but along the water to Stuckey Drive, where you’ll turn left and proceed SLOWLY (Stuckey’s barely more than an alley) upward until you see Dr. Watt’s yard full of rhodies ahead of you, sprawling downslope in all kinds of bloomin’ glory.

ALSO:  DIG has 30% off on marked-price pottery through this Sunday, May 2nd. And they’re still offering Customer Specials on herbs (Buy 3, get 1 free) and raspberries or blueberries (Buy 4, get 1 free).

I’ll leave you this week with a once-a-year occurance: Cherry Snow

This, out in front of La Boucherie on 100th, just west of town. I grew up on a street lined with cherry and plum trees; I remember coming home from church one Sunday and the street was covered with pink, drifting “snow”, the very essence of spring. Swing by before it so ephemerally disappears.

  

Paper Pot & Butter-tub Hang Tag: How-To Below

I’ve noticed—

—At Beck’s Market, they have tomato transplants, 2 for $4.00. Each pack has around four tomatoes, each about 4″ tall, and they must be hardened off by now as I’ve seen them parked outdoors since last Tuesday. Varieties: Early Girl, Better Boy (why do they bother?), Grape, Roma, SuperSweet.

— At Esperanza Farm, March Twisdale will hold another “Open Farm” on May 1st. It’s on the way to BarnWorks on Cove Road, just before the Hostel—watch for the balloons. She’s got a lot of good ideas to share, a vegie & berry garden, a nifty Chicken Complex, and some sweet ponies.

—We’re in what I call “The White Season”: a majority of flowering plants, from tiny twin-flowers to madronas, seem to be blooming in white. Just count them along the highway: Pacific Dogwood and Mountain Ash. Apples, plums, and the cherries Japanese, eatable, and wild. Serviceberry, elderberry, blueberry, and soon the strawberry. Viburnums davidii and carlesii. Sweet woodruff—from which the medievals made May Wine—and trilliums. Even the daffodils have given over to their white forms, the jonquil and the Poet’s Eye. What gives with all the white? More later…

Get those seeds in the ground

One of my favorite weather web sites is “Rufus’s WeatherCafe.” He does long-range weather forecasting for farmers and orchardists in our region. His tone is very UNtechnical: he writes as if you’re sitting with him enjoying a cup of coffee. A few days ago, he was predicting the upcoming April 30-May 1 weekend would be [paraphrased] “A-One, Gold Standard, Premium Deluxe gorgeous weather in the 70s-80s for Western Washington” (I wish I could pull down the quote, but his current forecast has moved on, though he’s still saying “Weekend of May 1-2 continues to look delightful.”)

If that’s going to be the case, these next two weeks may be your last best chance to get cool-weather seeds in the ground like lettuce, brassicas, spinach, mesclun, onions, etc. You’ll want them soaking up whatever rain falls so they swell up and sprout in time for that gorgeous sunshine. And whatever transplants you’re growing on also need to be potted up and grown on.

Seeds of radishes, beets, carrots, potatoes, peas, and spinach are all sown directly into the ground. Some voracious critter has been raiding my pea-ground of newly-sown seeds, so for my third planting (!!), I encased the pea seeds in a half-buried pouch of 1/4″ metal mesh. The digger is still trying, but his holes now stop when it meets the mesh. Whether the peas will become lunch when they come out of the mesh remains to be seen.

Seedlings in pots need to be fed. Jonathan Mercer, the garden specialist at Island Lumber who recently presented at the Garden Club, recommends a light dose of nitrogen fertilizer, such as fish fertilizer, to encourage new foliage to develop. ”It’s true that the cotyledons feed the baby plant, but once the cotyledons are grown out, that’s all the energy the plant has. So they need a nitrogen feeding to encourage leaf growth: with leaves, the plant can make its own food through photosynthesis.”

Taking his advice, I found that a foliar spraying of Alaskan fish fertilizer, about 1 teaspoon per quart spray bottle, gave my lettuce seedlings a boost of growth overnight. But since this same formula burnt my tomatoes two weeks ago, I’m sticking to 5-7 drops of Miracle-Grow Houseplant food in my pint watering can. Besides, Jonathan warned, “Fish fertilizer stinks! So not in the house!”

Potting Up and On

I have spent much of the last two days transplanting seedlings from 1″ cells into pots from 1.5″ to 4″. The tomatoes are an embarrassment of riches. I have garden space for about 12-14 plants. In the garden I’ll be sharing later this summer, there’s room for a good many more. However, by today’s count, I have ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT TOMATOES growing on—and that doesn’t count the extras in the 1″ cells. Think I’ll have a few to give away?

Joe Curiel of Monument Farm just wrote me, saying, “When our seeds first come up, I thin very early to a few more than we need just so they are not crowded.  Any slight shading or crowding can lead to spindly starts.  Then they get moved rather early to 4-inch pots to get even more space.”

And that’s pretty good advice if you can stand beheading all but the best per pot. Being a sucker for baby plants, I prefer “pricking out”—using a pen, chop-stick, or small knife to lift and separate seedlings. But then, this is how one arrives at 108 plants!

If the cluster isn’t too root-bound, a little jostling or a short drop to tabletop helps loosen tangled plants. Tease them apart and replant into the next size pot upward, filled with soil that’s enriched with a little aged manure or organic fertilizer. Cisco Morris, that well-known local columnist, expresses the idea well: the first pot has a lite breakfast, the second pot a more substantial lunch, and the final pot has a rich supper of compost.

Tiny seedlings don’t do well in a pot so large their roots can’t quickly reach the sides where the water tends to run. Even a 4″ pot can be too much, so I like to create in-between-sized pots in papier-mache, using a plastic container of “Kaukauna Club” cheese spread. Because this jar is flexible and tapered, you can get that goopy paper pot to release easily. 

Making a Paper Pot

Here’s how you make a paper pot: Tear 4-5″ strips of newspaper lengthwise. Into a bowl or old butter tub, put half a cup of flour and mix water into it until you have a flour-paste glue like thin pancake batter. With a wide brush, run 1/2″ of paste down one long edge of the torn paper and fold over to make a straight, reinforced edge. Put the jar on the near end, its lip against the folded edge of the paper, and roll once around down the paper strip.

Stop, pick up your brush, dab paste on the papers where they now meet, then coat the remaining length of the newspaper with the flour paste. Then roll the rest of the way up until the paper is completely wrapped around the jar. You can continue with a second glued strip if you want a sturdier pot. Stand the jar on its lip and “christmas-wrap” the bottom paper edges upon each other, gluing where needed.

The “kaukauna club” jar will fill a traditional garden-store flat with 18 paper pots. Put in a water-heater closet or other warm place for 2-3 days, until the pots are completely dry, then plant up. The beauty of these pots are that, like the peat-pot, you don’t have to remove it when planting. The paper will decay and the roots will push right through, or you can peel off the paper before you stick the plant into the ground.

[Eeeuuhh! A slightly unpleasant discovery—I pulled a flat of toms from my enclosed "start-cart" and found the paper pots had grown fuzzy with mold. Oh yahhhh... this happened to me last year. I cured the problem with a tiny bit of bleach in warm water, poured over the PAPER (not the plants).The paper pots enjoying a sunny windowsill weren't moldy—did better air circulation or honest-to-God sunshine keep the blue from growing on these pots?]

Another Homemade Helper: the Butter-tub Hang Tag

When you’re planting more than one variety of a plant—say seven different kinds of tomatoes–you need tags to distinquish between varieties that often look alike. At 108 tomatoes, let alone lettuces, chois, marigolds, cosmos etc, that’s a lot of tags.

Here’s a nifty design I came up with this week: take an old butter-tub and cut narrow strips from the lip down to the base, no skinnier than 3/4″. Using a paper-punch, punch a hole toward the bottom. With a scissor, cut to that center hole from the side. Instant Hang-Tag.

Use a black, permanent marker: my ol’ red marker faded within four weeks out in the greenhouse. When you plant the tomato out, hang the tag on a leaf stem: you can continue to move the tag to a more visible location as the plant grows.

When that glorious May weather brings us transplanting weather, you’ll be ready and your many varieties won’t get lost in the move!

When I’m not putzing around outdoors, I’m inside under my laptop. And when the weather’s too foul for gardening, I’ve found a virtual world where I can putz around the garden as much as I wish: online vegetable garden planners GrowVeg.com and PlanGarden.com.

Why Plan? And why Online?

Two impulses come over me in spring. First, when I’m confronted with ten blank garden beds, I get stalled. Where to start? Which seeds? What if I need that bed later for???—and soon, it’s nail-biting time.

Or, I’m so hot to trot, I plant the whole thing in one April weekend—and two months later, 3 dozen lettuces mature all at once, with no room left for the zucchini (maybe that’s a good thing…)

A plan, made indoors when it’s raining, makes me slow down and think. I can “virtual-plant” seeds, shuffle them around, see how it looks and start over again—all without committing precious seeds to ground.

I discovered these programs last year, and I’ve found they offer features that make an on-computer plan more helpful than one on paper. For one, they communicate. PlanGarden lets you create your own blog, share your garden plans with a fellow gardener, or email your plans or notes. GrowVeg can email you planting reminders, timed for your frost-free dates and any crop successions you plan.

If you plug in local produce prices and record your harvest, PlanGarden tracks how much money you saved—or if you’re a market gardener, how much you EARNED selling your produce.

Crop rotation is always a good practice, and GrowVeg remembers where you planted a given family of veg in years before and warns you against, say, planting cabbage where you planted broccoli, another cole crop, last year.

Both program will generate Plant Lists that tell you when to sow indoors, outdoors, and to harvest. Both give you places to keep notes and records. And while they aren’t designed for flower-beds, PlanGarden does offer seven “flowers” among its pull-downs; you could modify each program with some creative re-labeling. PlanGarden seems also to be able to send in EXCEL format.

How do they work?

In both these programs, you create a grid the size of your yard, even your whole property. Then you draw garden beds of any size, positioned in place. Then you fill your beds with vegetables pulled from a pop-up window. Voila: a map of this season’s vegetable garden. The plants come labeled either generically (“carrots”) or by variety (“Nantes Coreless”). 

As you drag-n-drop your veg, both programs build a database of your choices. It’s from these spreadsheets that GrowVeg is able to email you a reminder of what to plant and when. PlanGarden uses this information to record the market-value of your harvest.

Both plans let you label beds and plants, either by type (“carrot”) or varietal (“Nantes Coreless”). Both have schedules for planting, timed to the frost-free dates you plug in.

And neither has ads! Instead, these are by subscription ($25/year for GrowVeg, $20/year for PlanGarden) with 30-day and 45-day free trials. You can plan and print for free, and they’ll save your records and catch you on the come-back next year or whenever you’re ready for succession crops. Your first garden plan can be transferred to the new growing season, either as a blank slate or as a copy with all those plants used last. 

One weakness of GrowVeg.com: your plant-filled areas are either rows or squares, placed (and rotated if needed) upon the outlines of your garden beds.

WWW.GrowVeg.com

GrowVeg.com’s plans are designed for the smaller yard, no more than 96′ square. It CAN work on sites up to 1000′ sq, but it slows down a LOT. You can either create several smaller gardens, or investigate PlanGarden.) 

GrowVeg has a more pleasant graphic interface. You can rotate areas to be filled with plants, and they have gentler, pastel colorings that don’t conflict as much with labeling.

It also seems to have more plants in its menu. A ribbon of eatables, Apple–Zucchini, runs across the top of the grid; from that, you drag-n-drop vegetables, berries, or herbs down to the area you want to populate with that eatable. When you drag the icon’s corners, an area (or row, your choice) fills with more of that veg, each placed at the proper spacing for that plant (which you can adjust if you’re close-cropping as in the Square-Foot Gardening system). If you planted the same type of plant in that spot in prior years, the program makes that area glow red!, warning you to heed to proper crop rotation and plug that cabbage transplant elsewhere!

As you fill your space, the program creates a Plant List that tells you how many of each veg to plant or grow on as transplants (very helpful if your indoor growing space is small). 

If you double-click on the “i” button, a GrowGuide for that vegetable will pop up offering growing tips and information for that plant—a feature unique to GrowVeg.com. I’m looking forward to standing in my garden and iPhoning GrowVeg’s GrowGuides when I need a reminder how deep to plant, say, beet seeds. 

Double-click on an icon on your plan, and its own record pops up, with a space for your own notes and a way to specify its variety.

GrowVeg.com was started by Jeremy Dore, a Brit who dug up his front yard to grow vegetables in 2005 and, in November 2007, started developing this online planner for both UK and US gardeners. I have to say, his program is the better looking of the two: more attractive, more organized, more personable, and his vegie icons are downright cute.

PlanGarden.com's plant "fills" aren't as pretty, but the program can fill a garden bed with a square-foot-grid

PlanGarden.com

The size of a GrowVeg garden is limited to 96′x96′, while PlanGarden allows for properties large and small. You can define your whole acreage, then zoom in to the subset used for your 20′x30′ vegie patch and leave the rest developable for later. You can also pan much more easily in PlanGarden than in GrowVeg.

In its “layout” mode, PlanGarden offers a wider variety of shapes: triangles, for instance, can be dropped down and reshaped, while in GrowVeg, you must draw a triangle line by line. It’s “ellipse” and “curve” shapes allowed me to include my long, curvy boundary border. For “Square Foot Gardening” fans, PlanGarden can apply a SFG grid to any square or rectangular bed (GrowVeg says it will work in a SFG grid sometime this summer).

Its “Manage Veg” mode doesn’t give you as many choices of vegetables, nor does it include growing information—a real lapse. But it does offer flower icons. And it does build a calendar for planting, maintenance, and harvest times, and its spreadsheet for maintenance looks detail-heavy. And it already has succession gardening in mind, allowing you to schedule plantings and harvests by quarters or divided season.

For those who want to see how much $ they saved by growing their own, PlanGarden can keep a running tally, using local prices, of the value of your harvest. I’d think a Market Gardener could use this feature to track sales—WHAT a boon!

Other Planners

I’ve looked at a couple other planners. “Vegetablegardenplanner.com” is mostly an online gardening journal that’s free for up to 50 plants in a single garden. It allows photos, and it has a “Family Feeding Calculator” (which I didn’t try, but could be interesting).

Better Homes & Gardening magazine online (www.bhg.com) has an over-simplified planner. Frankly, they seem more interested in putting online ads before you. However, enrolling at this site will get you Garden Porn emailed to you on a daily basis.

Finally, for the true techie, there’s Google SketchUp. It’s a massive, free, downloadable design program in 3D. I’ve planned my kitchen potager several times over on it so I could “walk through” my garden and see it and its features (virtual greenhouse) through various points of view. This is a near-professional grade architectural design tool, and thus complex: I lost HOURS trying to build a simple 2×4, and trying to rotate it into position drove me crazy. Still… there’s a library of downloadable fabrications online that you can use, for free.

So next time you’re stuck indoors, go check out www.growveg.com and www.plangarden.com.

  

photo courtesy of March Twisdale; portrait by K.D.

Kathy Wheaton’s Advice: For Now, Only The Cool Survive

I ran into Kathy Wheaton of Kathy’s Corner at the health center this morning. She’s letting her arm with its broken shoulder out of its sling gradually to encourage the muscles to rebuild, but she said, “I need to put it back in the sling while I’m at the nursery so I don’t try to pick anything up. I can write now, but after awhile, even a pen feels heavy.”

After talking more about the injury—which frankly is too grisly to include here—I asked what’s good to go at the nursery, plant-wise. “Well, cool-weather crops, of course: lettuces, cabbages, broccoli. But can you believe it—people are already asking me about tomatoes, peppers, even basil. It’s TOO early. But people see them on sale at the stores and think ‘It must be okay.’”

She said this craze for early availability started with Eagle Hardware years ago “when they told their Skagit-area growers, ‘We want our plants a week earlier.’ So Eagle got a big jump on the flower trade that year, and the next year Home Depot said ‘WE want our plants TWO weeks early.’ The trade magazine even ran an article complaining about this practice. For instance, we could order and get petunias in bloom three WEEKS ago. But you buy it, you plant it, it dies, and you get to buy it again.”

So I asked, are there any annuals—the so-called “color spots”—that you can buy now? “Petunias, maaayybe. The reds and yellows are the most frost-sensitive.”

“So plant the cool-colored petunias,” I said.

“Yesss…” she replied hesitantly. “BUT! Nine years out of ten, we get a freeze in late April. So before you plant out annuals, wait until the third week of April, then look at the long-range forecast. If there’s nothing under 40° predicted, you’re probably okay. But wait until May for tomatoes—and until June for basil.”

Why Comparison is Odious

I planted my tomato seeds indoors in early March. They threw out their seed leaves, then have just sat there under growlights ever since. 

In the Beachcomber calendar last week, I saw that March Twisdale would be holding an “open farm” on Saturday (4/3) on Cove Road. Last year, when I wrote my first gardening article, “Island expert growers give tips on jump-starting seedling growth,” Twisdale was the first to respond with answers to my questions. Out of gratitude, curiosity, and because I always learn something on a garden visit, I dropped in.

There, on shelves bright with glo-lites against a south-facing window, were her baby vegies. Back in late February, she’d sown her seeds in Jiffy Pellets, which expand with watering to the size of golf-balls. Her plants were already 3-4″ tall, their roots pushing like chin-hairs out the sides of each pellet. 

Thus sown are the seeds of Envy. Ahhhh, trouble (more on that below).

photo credit: Aaron Bjork

Two Asides: Nettles, plus a bargain on Jiffy Pellets

March led us down across her field, into the forest and up and over a very cool fence made of old bicycles to her favorite nettle patch. She wanted the kids to learn how to harvest them safely. “You pinch each leaf in half from the top so that the back of the leaf presses together. That way, you’ll squish the little ‘tinglers’ that grow on the back of the leaf. Now fold it again, and again, and you can put it in your mouth safely and eat it.” While we sampled naked nettles, she got busy clipping the top 8″ or so of stem with her hand-snips, using it to lift each cutting into a grocery bag. 

Handling nettles by your clippers is the best way to harvest nettles, and I’d also HIGHLY recommend wearing good gloves and long sleeves. March steams the leaves, then sautes them. Boiling the leaves (discard the stems) kills the sting; after a few minutes steam, boil, or sauté, chop the dark green leaves finely and use in your recipe.

According to one online source, nettles have the most iron of any plant, besides a long list of minerals and vitamins including Vitamin K—which is why you shouldn’t feed this plant to folks on blood-thinning meds. Eating nettles—whether fresh, in a cream sauce, a quiche or even as a pesto—makes a great spring tonic for the blood at a time of year when most gardens aren’t producing much greenery. Check online for recipes.

Back in town, I dropped by True Value and picked up some Jiffy Pellets for 19¢ each. When I returned for more the next day, I noticed a better deal: 36 Jiffy Pellets in their own flat + clear dome for $6.99—or 15¢ more than what you’d pay for the pellets alone. So I bit. Turns out, these are filled with coconut coir, a much more renewable resource than peat moss—so I felt even better about buying them.

Jump-Starting with Liquid Fertilizer: BeWARE

Back home, and with March’s brawny, bewhiskered vegie babies fully in mind, I hunted down whatever my books could tell me about fertilizing my own whimpy transplants. Most recommended a half- or quarter-strength dilution of liquid fertilizer.

I found my ol’ jug of Alaska Fish Fertilizer, but the dilution recipes on the label had faded away. So, guessing, I ran a stick down into the goo, fished out what looked more or less like a teaspoon and dipped that into my quart spritz-bottle. Then I added a soupçon of Morblend for phosphorus and potassium, shook it, and spritzed it on my two flats of tomatoes and marigolds.

Within the hour, my tiny tomatoes were bent over double—some even fainted to the ground. Alarmed, I re-spritzed them with pure water, then ran water through the soil … two hours later, rinsed and respritzed again… and by 3pm, I was giving each tiny plant its own sponge bath. All 96 of them. Times 2. Each stricken leaf curled around my left pointy finger while I dab-dab-dabbed with warm water.

The next day, 80% of my tiny tomatoes were standing again—some even looked like they had finally put out a first true leaf. The marigolds, though, looked stunted.

Surprisingly, I had spritzed the same fertilizer mix on the little starts out in my greenhouse, and they seemed to love it. Why? Who knows—but they are the COOL-weather plants, so a little hardier, perhaps?

When I “googled “Fertilizer burn with fish emulsion,” I found a fellow on GardenWeb who’d made the same mistake. One respondent recommended 1/2 teaspoon per gallon, and that only after some true leaves showed up. I had probably put in a teaspoon per QUART—no wonder my tender ones got burnt.

So: the many lessons from today’s rambling tale?

1) Kathy could still use her community’s support.

2) Comparison shop, but don’t comparison-garden

3) Size your fertilizer doses to the plant size: 100% only for 100%-sized plants, and tiny dilutions for tiny plants

4) And in these cool April days, know that only the Cool (plants) Survive.

Esperanza Farm will hold another “Open Farm” on Saturday, May 1st. Visit them on your way to catch the Barnworks show during Vashon Art Studio Tour.

Next week, I hope to do a run-down about online garden planners. But for those of you brought in by the rain, yet hankering to garden, go visit www.growveg.com and www.plangarden.com. You can design your garden online and figure out what, where, and when. Both programs give you several weeks free trial, so you can make a garden, test the system, and decide even until next year whether you want to spring for the subscription.

Taxes done. Fence finished. Starts growing on, taking their own sweet time. And after watching “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” on Friday night, there was no WAY I was going to skip another Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning. Surely one farmer had some spring greens to satisfy a wannabe locavore?

Got there at the stroke of 10. Beautiful morning: warmest of the year so far (3/27). Walked through the surrounding crafters to the smaller population of growers under the big roof. Hummm… there’s eggs, transplants, some flowers, some perennials. But where’s the veg?

MaryLou of the pharmacy looks over pea starts, on offer from Pacific Potager.

In fact, what seemed most available were transplants and eggs. Pacific Potager had 4-6 tables’ worth of baby starts: lettuces, mustards, onions, broccoli, peas and sweet peas. And seemed like every grower had eggs to sell: hens must be laying.

Then I spotted them: a beautiful mound of spring radishes. They were small, true, the round ones not quite the size of a quarter, the french breakfast ones on top about the size of my pinky. “Those are ‘Avignon’, said Linda Copper. “The ones in the corners are ‘Easter Egg’ and the white ones are “White Icicle.” Her Calypso Farm was also selling bags of mixed greens (you can see what’s in the bag on the sign). Ah, what wonders a hoophouse can produce. I snagged that top bunch out from under Barbara Wells’ nose, then invited her to our house for a lunch of buttered radishes and french bread.

Joe Yarkin had found some unusual things to sell: bags of big-leaf maple flowers, flowering kale stems, and nettles. The customer next to me said he likes his nettles in a white sauce “like creamed spinach”—I told him I liked it in quiche. 

Joe also had sunchokes. Also known as Jerusalem Artichokes, they look like knobs of ginger. Never had them before, but I remember that my college housemates grew a 10′ tall hedge of them—they ARE from the Sunflower family. Joe said to roast them—”they’re kinda like potatoes.”

Roasted Sunchokes

To me, sunchokes taste like a cross between a baby red potato and a roasted chestnut, especially if you roast them long enough to get that “creamy baby potato” interior. Here’s how: Put on about two cups of water to boil, and heat your oven to 500 degrees. Scrub the sunchokes’ skins thoroughly, then cut them into 1″ chunks (you can peel off what skin you can: the knobs are a challenge.) When the water’s boiling, drop them in and parboil for 7-10 minutes, then drain. In a shallow pan with 1-2 tbls. of olive oil with a pinch of salt, roast the sunchokes for 15 minutes or more, until the interiors are quite soft. In the last five minutes, separately melt some butter with two chopped garlic cloves (plus herbs and/or lemon zest if you want), then dress the sunchokes with that sauce and continue roasting until the “creamy interior” is gained. Serve immediately in a warm bowl.*

Barbara found spreading butter onto moist radishes quite the poser—”it will NOT STAY ON!”—but she ADORED the sunchokes. After lunch, we sat out in the sunshine of my east vegie patch, comparing gardening notes—”chewing the carrot” as she calls it. Can you BELIEVE somebody actually stooped so low as to STEAL her compost?  

Cooking experiments with fresh, local produce. Sampled with a friend invited at the spur of the moment. Sitting around a sun-filled garden afterwards, drinking coffee and “chewing the carrot.” Boy, can you get some wonderful things at the farmer’s market!

* The recipe for Sunchokes, though written up in my own words and from my own experience with it, is from Andrea Chesman’s “The Garden Fresh Vegetable Cookbook.” If you wish to comment, you can do so here, or email me at karendale@centurytel.net. Thanks for reading, and Garden On!

photo by Patty Campbell: mixed lettuces she grew in a wheelbarrow

 
There’s a lot of reasons you might want a container garden. You might not have land to call your own—or your sunniest spot is covered with a deck or patio. Your back may not want to bend to earth anymore. You have a move in your future and want to take your garden along.

Or like me last summer, you might find your garden beds stuffed full by May—with only 100 square feet, that’s easy to do. So we stuck our zucchini seeds in the top of tall terracotta pots, sprouted them with a seran-wrap cover, and grew happy plants that were surprisingly beautiful at eye-level—with no place for whopper-zukes to hide!

Vicki Clabaugh in Burton also started a container garden last summer, growing snap peas, leeks, lettuces, kale, chard, broccoli, and lemon cucumbers in 24″ black Costco tubs filled with cedar grove compost. “I kept throwing in seeds and had lettuce all summer,” she told me.

So when Patty Campbell, long-time Island garden designer, sent out a notice about repeating her Seattle Garden Show talk, “Flower Pot Produce,” I went to see just how much produce could be grown in containers.

What you need before you plant

“So what’s your favorite combo for a wine-barrel?” I asked her.

“Oh, that’s easy,” she told me. “A bush tomato in the center, lots of parsley around the base, some chives, some scallions, a dab of lettuce here and there, and basil— as much as you can plug in, purple AND green. And put a 5′ stake  in the middle to keep the bush tomato from falling on the other items.”

Patty’s been a gardener all her life, earning a B.A. in botany from Central Washington State and, after moving here  27 years ago, running a landscaping service that cared for many of the big container plantings you see around downtown Vashon. So she has strong opinions about what a potted garden needs.

“You need SWEN,” she quibbed. “South-West-East-North: that’s the order of light orientation, from the best to the worst. And you need a lot of dark loam—which most of us on the Island don’t have.” She recommended buying (“And don’t be cheap!”) a quality, organic potting soil that already has mycorrhizae and amendments—I won’t name brands, but you can figure out it—or making your own with your home soil, aged compost or manure, and a bit of lime to counter an acidic soil (“Moss is a good indicator of acid soil.”)

She also fertilizes regularly with Alaskan fish fertilizer at 2-3 tablespoons per gallon. And she deadheads spent blooms and flowers to keep plants from trying to set seed.

What kind of pots work?

She’s planted up containers of all kinds, in all sizes: bowls, garbage cans, baskets, boots, even old milk cans. Baskets need a coat of marine varnish to protect them. When shopping terracotta pots, look for the “cm” measurement that’s the giveaway the pot’s italian: she says they last longer. Old black nursery pots hold heat well.

“Potted plants need drainage, but you also want to keep them watered. So put a saucer underneath: face it down in the spring so it’s a little pedestal for the pot, then in the summer, turn it up so it will catch all your water. Bricks under your pot will help protect your deck.” She keeps slugs at bay with Sluggo.

I asked her about the wisdom of putting pot shards or rocks in the bottom of a pot, and she agreed you should use one or two. But when I asked about putting in packing peanuts to lighten the spot and not use so much soil, she laughed and said “I’ve got a great story about that. I tried that once when I was planting up some office plants. I used those biodegradable packing peanuts, and they ROTTED and smelled HORRIBLE, right under the nose of the bank president. Oh, she didn’t like that—and neither did I!” 

What vegetables grow well in pots?

BASIL: It likes to be hot. Square pots seem to heat up more than round ones. Pinch basil to encourage it to branch out. Plant purple and green ones: they look great together. Other herbs that work well in pots include trailing rosemary, lemongrass (“bring indoors in the cold months”) and chives in a smaller terracotta pot.

LETTUCE: It wants a pot half again as deep as the lettuce is high: for instance, an 8″ looseleaf needs a 12″ deep pot. Use ceramic or clay pots that you can move into half-shade by summer to prevent bolting. Lettuce comes in a wide variety of colors, from lime-green to “Merlot” burgundy, so they make great accents.

PEAS: A bit problematic: they need staking and cool roots, so put the pot behind others when the weather warms. Try shorter varieties such as “Maestro” that only climb 3-4 feet.

BEANS: “Bush beans are wonderful in pots,” says Patty. “Try them in long window-box style planters.” Pole beans aren’t unless you’re “a serious trellis and staking person” as they climb 8-10 feet high—and that’s in addition to your pot’s height.

TOMATOES: She recommends getting transplants at Pacific Potager. They can be grown either in a pot at least 12″ deep. Or, you can plant a tomato bush in a sack of potting soil: poke drainage holes into one side, flop over, make an X slit in the other and set your tomato transplant inside. She likes ‘Sweet Million’ grown in a big hanging basket: “makes harvesting easy and prevents the little tomatoes from splitting.” 

COLE CROPS: Easy in 5-gallon pots. Plant ‘Rainbow’ or ‘Bright Lights.’ Chard for some dramatic color. Pak Choy and other mustards would probably also work well. Vicki Clabaugh had good luck with broccoli that produced through the winter. And I grew extra red cabbage starts in 24″ terracotta tubs along with zinnias and marigolds; silvery-blue, they were gorgeous, dramatic, and when their leaves flagged in summer heat, they reminded me the tubs needed watering (the leaves would perk right up by evening).

BERRIES:  She showed us a wine-barrel planted up with strawberries. I have seen a hanging basket planted with strawberries: this puts the berries on display while keeping them clean and free from slugs. The smaller blueberries like ‘Polaris’ (to 3′ high and wide) can also be grown in pots: loving acid, moist soil but also good drainage, they can be given a soil rich in barkdust or peat moss and kept as watered as needed.

Jump-start your Spring Garden: grow in pots

One of the advantages, she said, of growing in pots is that they heat up earlier. And, you can chase the sun, pots in hand, if you’re really eager. Vegetables need at least 6-8 hours of sunlight every day.

Asked if this would be a good time to start, she said “It’s okay to sow in pots as long as you keep deer, raccoons, and birds away and keep the pots watered. It’s good to use transplants, too.”

Inexpensive pots include wine-barrel liners, available at Island Lumber and at DIG. DIG will probably drill holes in the bottom of ceramic pots if you request it. They also have nice “lifters” that match the pots you purchase. 

For myself, I’m going to dig out those old black nursery pots and paint them up wild. I’m picturing a curtain of ‘Sun Gold’ cherry tomatoes dripping down my orange concrete wall, with cobalt blue pots underneath stuffed with purple and lime-grass basil. Eye-popping as well as appetizing!

(Patty Campbell runs a design consultation and garden installation service called “Amazing Earth Landscapes”;  463-1502, or email her at pattyjeanz23@yahoo.com.)

Patty Campbell showing off Produce in a Pot at the 2010 Seattle Flower & Garden Show

Here’s some news bits, a potato dish that’s perfect for St. Patrick’s Day, and what I found when turning the earth this weekend.

First, the news:

YESTERDAY, Wed 16th, 1-3 pm or 7-9pm:  Patty Campbell, a professional Island gardener, reprises her “Early Season Produce in Pots” vegie growing class that she taught at the Seattle Garden Show. It’s at the Presby church TODAY (the pinky church in downtown Vashon). She’s going to share “simple successful methods” of growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers in containers. PLUS, she’ll give tips on propagating, transplanting trees & shrubs, and a simple method for composting. 

CLASS: Raising Your Own Food.  Last year’s popular class pops up again this weekend on Saturday, March 20, from 9:30 am – 3 pm. Cathy Fulton (lately of the Food Summit) and Nancy Lewis-Williams, the thrifty home gardener who raised about $500/month of her own produce last growing season, will team-teach this day-long class for beginning gardeners.  

Nancy says, “We will attempt to cover all the basics for someone wanting to start a vegetable garden: soils, seed starting, irrigation, weeding, mulching, and harvesting.”  Call Cathy Fulton for details on location and to sign up, 463-5652 or email her at cathy@mariposagardens.org. Pre-registration is required (help them determine where the class site will be!)

Grass-Fed Beef shows up in Burton:  For the last several Saturdays, two guys with a truck sporting a sign reading “100% Grass-finished Beef” have been hanging out across from the Burton coffee stand. I talked to them on March 5th: “Sweet Water Farm” is Jon & Mark Hornby, third-generation sons off a 1925 Glenoma, WA farm near Mt. Rainier. Their small herd was bred on the farm by their father—”We still have the grandma cow,” Jon told me— and completely raised in the pasture, on grass. Now Michael Pollan and our Island’s own Jo Robinson (eatwild.org) have a lot to say about the benefits of meat raised on pasture, instead of  ”finished” on grain and antibiotics in confined animal feed-lots (C.A.F.O.s). The Hornby boys seem to be bringing that kind of beef to us. Why here? Their Uncle Jon, who first suggested they try to sell direct, lives on the Burton peninsula. If interested, check out their web site and contact them to see if they’re coming back to Burton. Their prices are within a dollar of Thriftway’s comparable offerings by Oregon Country Beef or Painted Hills. They’ll be back in Burton on Saturday the 20th. www.sweetwaterbeef.com

Vegie Transplants:  Michelle Crawford down at Pacific Potager tells me that she’s now selling vegetable transplants from her farm stand.  She’s got most of the cool-weather veg, hardened off and ready to go in the ground: pak choi, mustards, lettuces, onions, kale, peas including sweet peas. Her farmstand is about 5 minutes north of the Tahlequah ferry terminal, and she’ll be at the first VIGA Farmer’s Market this Saturday, March 20, from 10 am – 2pm.  (I noticed on the 16th that vegie starts are now also at DIG and at Thriftway: there, Langley offers a 5-pack of organic starts for $2.25, Rent’s Due Farm in Snohomish offers non-organic 6-packs for $1.99.)

Treasures from Turning the Soil

The soil wakes up when its temperature rises above 40°—fungi grows, seeds sprout, tiny soil critters start to move about, digest what’s on offer, and reproduce more soil digesters. When that happens, it’s time to throw food into that soil and turn it, to give all that life a chance to explode and then simmer down so I can plant vulnerable seedlings in a couple weeks.

So lately I’ve kept my compost thermometer stuck shallowly into my east-facing, downslope beds. Struck by morning sun, that soil hit 45° and kept going. With weeds cleared off, the naked soil hit 50°—five degrees warmer than the neighbor bed still covered with green manure and overwintered cabbage. THIS is why we clear winter mulchs and cover crops off the soil now: to let it warm into temperatures that seeds want to germinate in.

To give that awakening soil life something to gnaw on, to all but the potato beds I added 1/2″ of screened compost, 1/4″ of chicken manure, and a pint of bone meal. (Potatoes apparently don’t appreciate manures). Then I got out the garden fork and stabbed it deep into each bed, flipping the sods of green manure, wacking and scraping the amendments and green matter down under. Then I mixed it all with the fork cultivator and raked it fine and level with the bow rake.

And finally—and because my husband suggested that Rocky might leave the beds alone if I did this—I tamped the whole bed lightly down with the back of a flat shovel. Would this seal in any interesting smells? Provide a discouraging crust? Only Rocky knows, but he’s not been visiting this week—that smooth bed-top would show his tracks if he had!

As I worked through last year’s cole bed, up popped a few last carrots and beets. I suspect they came from last summer sowings: they were small, tender, and unmarked by the creepy-crawlies of early summer. Boy, they were good for lunch!

Golden Grated Salad with Cherries

This salad comes from half a dozen small beets both red & gold, plus two carrots, 1/3 cup of currents or chopped raisins, chopped dried cherries,and a vinaigrette of 2 parts rice vinegar, 1 part cherry-infused balsamico, 1 part olive oil, and 1 part splenda or sugar. Mix the vinaigrette in the bottom of a small bowl, put in the currents and cherries, then grate into the bowl first the red beets, then the carrots, finally the golden beets. Show off this sun-burst of colors, then mix at the table. DELICIOUS! healthy & quick!

Irish Champ: a traditional potato dish the very color of St. Patrick’s Day

I went looking in Sylvia Thompson’s “The Kitchen Garden Cookbook” for a recipe involving nettles, which are emerging around the fringes of my garden. Found this traditional dish from the land of the Celts: it’s called “Champ” in Ireland, “Stelk” in Scotland, and by either name it uses potatoes, spring onions, nettles and melted butter in a mash whose color screams “Put Me On Your St. Patrick’s Dinner Plate!” 

4-5 medium potatoes, any kind — steam in their jackets over boiling water, about 3o-4o minutes

Then go to the garden with scissors or snips, a bowl, and kid gloves (ok, latex or leather will work) to harvest a bowlful of young nettle tops. Clip stem about 6″ or less from top, use scissors to grab and drop into your bowl (the underside of the leaves sting awfully: thus the gloves and gingerly handling).

Also harvest about 3-4 green onions or young leeks, and a clutch of parsley.

In the kitchen, clip the nettle leaves free of the stems & stalk, back into the bowl. Pour some of the boiling potato water over them and let steep for 5 minutes: this will kill the little stingers. Replenish the potato water if need be. Then drain off ALL the nettle water, plop nettles on a cutting bowl, and chop fine FINE FINE! as possible. It’ll make a mound about 1/2 cup or more.

Chop the spring onions finely, too. Start with 3—keep the last in reserve. Make a mound about 25% larger than the nettle mound.

In a small pan heat about 2/3 cup milk: when starting to scald, add the nettles and onions and turn down heat to medium-low. Cook this for about 5 minutes. Taste: if the onion flavor doesn’t dominate, add the last onion, chopped fine. S & P to taste. Cook for another 5 minutes or until the potatoes are done.

Test the potatoes: when forkable, remove and peel. Turn off heat under green mix. Melt about 1/4 cup butter. 

Get out potato ricer, food mill, or food processor. Bring green mix, potatoes, and salt & pepper to the mill and start grinding them together into a mash. S & P to taste. Add a little of the butter and mix.

Spoon onto warmed plates. Make a trench in the middle and fill with melted butter. Chop fine the parsley and sprinkle over this mint-green mash. Serve immediately while still hot.

I wasn’t going to blog this week—my byline is already all over this week’s Beachcomber in the “Home & Garden” section (in the March 10 issue, pages 15-27, plus a delightful musing on making dirt by Debbie Butler on page 7).

But reader, I need to commiserate with you. I need your insight, your tips, your fellow tales of woe. Because in my garden, it’s Rocky 3, Karen ZERO.

My new kitchen garden, as some of you know, has been under development for months. First went in the four triangle beds last fall. Then in went the cover crop. Then we built a new rubble wall, 30 feet long and 4 feet tall, to prop up its boundary slope . In front of that went a new flower border to edge this potager.

You can imagine my dreams of edible gorgeousness: rainbow chard and raspberries, pea towers fronted by massive purple cabbages, spiky artichokes posing like living sculpture in front of a wall painted orange.

Now imagine my dismay when, one morning, I found my dreams turned like tossed salad. The cover crops of grass, vetch, pea & clover had been pulled and flung across two of the triangle beds. Six-inch holes were pawed into the dark humus. 

I couldn’t figure out which varmint to blame, because I’ve seen both deer and raccoon tracks in the soil. But I knew that raccoons have raided my husband’s birdseed on the other side of the house: we’ve had staring contests with them through his window. And my compost pile has been dumpster-dived any number of times, even though I’ve thrown a weighted tarp over it. THAT’s not the crows.

So, I tried to net my triangle beds against the raiders (see “A much-considered mess” posted Dec. 30, 2009). When that failed, I took Ken Miller’s advice: put in a deer fence.

I bought 1″ metal conduit poles, stabbed them 30″ into the ground and spray-painted them black to make them invisible against the dark forest. I bought an endless roll of 7.5′ deer fencing—the kind with 2″ cells—and wrestled it onto the poles, holding it with zip-ties that came either from my pocket, or off the ground where they’d fallen.

And because a web site on deer fencing warned that deer could crawl, I added skirting all along the bottom, burying it under sods, wiring it to the top course of the rubble wall, or  stiffening it with a stick or heavy-gauge wire painstakingly woven in and out, in and out, of every couple 2″ cells (by then, I’d run out of zip-ties).

We made rustic gates. We made temporary gates. We closed off a breezeway we use constantly, opting instead to “go through the garage.”

And keeping in mind the raccoons, I fastened fencing to pole-tops with fragile “break-away” rubber-bands, thinking that the raccoon’s weight would break the rubber-bands and the fence would flop backwards, throwing Rocky back where he came from.

Finally, yesterday, at 4:30pm, all was finished. I had my gloat and my husband’s applause, and in a moment of hubris, I stood our empty-but-still-fragrant compost pail right in the middle of the most frequently hit triangle bed, and then thumbed my nose in Rocky’s supposed direction. Just TRY to get THIS, I was thinking.

Next morning, I woke to find the pail on its side, scraped clean, next to a new 6″ deep hole.

And I do believe, for the first time in my life, I felt MURDEROUS INTENT.

So readers: I am sure you too have your own Coon Tales to share. As Joe Yarkin, Maury island market farmer, said at the Food Summit, “There’s more raccoons on this island than people.”

I have visions that, unless something is done, when I plant my seedlings out they will end up as Scattered Remains across my garden beds, savaged by You-Know-Who. Readers, I need your War Stories. I need your BATTLE PLANS.

What I’m NOT going to do, is to relocate the food source to OUTSIDE the fence. I had a friend, once, who decided to feed the coons instead of fight them. Whenever I visited him, his basement picture window would be lined with raccoons, up on their fat haunches, scraping at the windows until he threw out more dog food. 

So readers: what’s YOUR solution to a raccoon problem? Send me your stories either as a comment here, or to karendale@centurytel.net. I’ll collect and post them sometime this spring.