Though I’ve been gardening off and on for 25 years, it was the long snows of last winter that drove me absolutely MAD to garden (and maybe you, too?)

During weeks of white and cold, I kept my world green by rereading many of my gardening books. Then, for Christmas, I was given Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which has shown countless people how much energy goes needlessly into industrial food production, how much better it is for us and for the world if we could produce our food close to home.  As I nodded “yes YES YES!” all the way through the book, I was also saying to myself:

Maybe something like this happened to you, too. Certainly my growing interest seems in sync with a national trend. Maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s fuel/food price inflation, maybe it’s just that we want to be healhier, homey, happier. But news on farmers, slow food, the locavore movement seems everywhere, They’re even growing their own vegies at the White House!

It’s growing locally, too: when a class on starting a vegetable garden was announced last spring in the Beachcomber, 60 people showed up. The Food Bank got local funding to start its own vegetable garden. We’ve seen stories on small farms and giant-corn growers, classes on kitchen potagers and food preservation. Just last week, the Beachcomber ran a story about high school kids growing fresh produce for school lunches. Kids, eating their own vegetables!

So that’s why this blog: to learn what the Island has to teach us about planting, growing, harvesting, cooking, and caring for our pieces of the garden that is Vashon. 

We Islanders have wonderful resources for gardening. We have greater access to land than most. We can gather all kinds of natural amendments: leaves, seaweeds, barnyard poo. We can get gravel, stones and concrete cheaply, close by. We have great nurseries, wonderful garden tours, farmers and a farmers’ market, and more than our fair share of Cranks and Originals, those obsessive gardeners who show us what wonders can be produced from our land.

The articles and the blog are a natural offshoot of me tracking down Vashon experts to find out what makes Vashon gardens work. Some of that, you may already have seen in the Beachcomber: my articles on starting seeds, growing tomatoes, sowing a fall/winter garden.

I want to write about Vashon’s particular soils, its weather conditions and patterns, what plants do best in Maury gravel or in north-end blue clay. I want to walk the fields, snoop the gardens, ask the Cranks all the questions I can think of, just so I can learn to grow better vegetables and have a more wonderful garden. And if I’m writing for you as well as me, my information will become more organized, hopefully more amusing, and definitely more complete than some scattered notes scribbled for my personal use.

So watch for interviews from other gardeners, growers and experts. I’ll tell of my own goof-ups, dreams, and small victories, and I hope you will share yours via the Comments section. I’ll trial vegetable varieties in the garden and in the kitchen, and I’ll share photos of tours here and “abroad” off-island.

I hope these articles inspire you AND me to become better gardeners and to know our Island a little better.

Let’s Garden On, Vashon!