Garden On, Vashon

This little darling is cyclamen coum (judging by the leaf shape and early spring bloom) in Julia Lakey’s backyard garden in Upper Gold Beach. A perennial that grows from a tuber, these smaller cyclamens prosper in part shade—they’re a good choice for under trees. Julia has beautiful soil, fed annually with six truckloads of horse manure in sawdust sweepings. All this, for a yard only suburban in size: no wonder the soil is so open and rich. She let me take handfuls of daylilies that were growing into a trail, and I do mean BY HAND; her soil was so friable that I was able to sink my hands in, lift and easily divide plants notorious for hanging onto the earth and each other. Another lesson learned from another gardener.

Kathy Wheaton Update:

I visited Kathy’s Corner this morning and found a few perennials on my Wish-list. And I found Kathy at the cash register, her injured arm pressed tight to her body in its brown sling. She saw me, took a step back, and said “I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate how supportive this community has been. Last week I was this close” (pinching her thumb and finger close together) “to calling it quits altogether. But what people having been doing for us has just filled up my heart again. I still have the surgery to pay for, the bills to pay for, and the money wasn’t there, but now…”

She said she lost “THOUSANDS” of starts: this year’s geraniums, fuchsias, and all the plants she propagates for her hanging baskets. But again, people are helping. “You see that guy? He just gave us 50 rhodies to add to our inventory. He’s just a regular customer.”

Keep the support coming, folks. The “benevolent account” that accepts funds toward her surgery payments is at Chase Bank (formally WaMu).

Seed potatoes

And if you want plants, you’ll find her nursery all spiffed up with some new stock (though the pickin’s are  still a little slim), plus about nine varieties of seed potatoes in bins to the left of the office door. Fingerlings, yukon golds, russets, something called ’satina’, and other varieties for about $1.49/lb. Just in time for March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, the temperate zone’s traditional spud-sowing day.

Buy them early so you can “chit” them before planting; that is, you expose the seed potato to cool light so that the eyes sprout a bit. This might take 1-2 weeks. By the time eyes form, the spud might be turning green—that’s okay—and you cut the spud into chunks with at least 2 eyes per chunk before you plant it.

Fish Compost

Huhh???  I’ve heard of old-fashion “fish-head fertilizer,” but I was surprised to see “Fish Compost” on Kevin Bergin’s lot sign. So I called him. “It’s Oly Mountain Fish Compost: fish waste + regular compost. Look it up on the web,” he suggested when I asked for more details. He’s selling it $50/yard—$5 more per yard than CedarGrove compost.

Online, I see that it’s made by North Mason Fiber Company, using fish from hatcheries, processing plants, and fish farms. They say they get the fish into the compost “within five minutes” and process it for two years. It’s apparently certified organic for organic agriculture. Here’s the link if you’re interested:  http://www.northmasonfiber.com/pages/olymtn_details.html. 

And does it stink? “No—not unless you stick your nose in it,” said Kevin.

Vashon Food Summit

I went to the Food Summit film festival last Saturday and enjoyed myself—this food summit is proving a great opportunity to share and compare with your fellow Island gardeners. The grapevine growers really missed a true gem: the short documentary “Portrait of a Winemaker: John Williams of Frog’s Leap” the short documentary by Deborah Koons Garcia.

The actual Food Summit starts at the high school with a 7pm talk Friday by EagleSong of RavenCroft Garden in Monroe, WA. This herbalist is also the designer and director of the kitchen garden for the new Herbfarm Restaurant in Woodinville (please bring slides!) She’ll talk about food security and (presumably, because her nonprofit RavenCroft Garden is devoted to “Community Centered Herbalism”) the interaction between food production and community.

Workshops and panels fill Sat/Sun, with a full of schedule of things like “Raising & Butchering Hogs”, “Growing for Market”, “Finding Joy in Canning, “Mushrooms for Food & Soil,” and the one I’m eyeing, “Artisan Blue & Hard Cheesemaking.” Though all the events are free, some of these desirable workshops request advance registration against limited seating. There will also be a community dinner (bring a vegetable for the soup!) and a contra dance Saturday evening with caller Larry Muir.

I’ll be there hosting the Seed Exchange, where you can bring excess seeds to exchange for others. I’m testing the existing stock right now for viability. Bring a few, take a few—or donate a few cents toward the Summit and I’ll let you just take some.

Check out the Food Summit’s full schedule of workshops, events, tables, etc at http://www.vashonfoodsummit.org

Pruning an Old Orchard

Our neighborhood has a community orchard of mixed fruit trees: english walnut, plum, italian prune, fig, cherry, and apple. They are of standard size, and with years of neglect some of them have gotten pretty darn tall, infested with mistletoe, snarled with crossed branches and winter-kill. But at our last community meeting, we realized that nearly every family had checked out the orchard this summer and had either snagged fruit or was disappointed to find they’d been beaten to it. So we voted to try to bring the orchard back into production.

That, according to Michelle Ramsden, our hired orchardist, will take a 3-year schedule of pruning. She came last Sunday to instruct and advise our work party of nine. First, she gave us a short lecture about removing only about 30% of the branches this year, removing first those suckers growing straight up out of main branches (“they’ll have a smoother texture and go straight up”), crossed branches and deadwood, and then too-long branches running parallel to the ground (“they won’t be able to hold the fruit without drooping into the reach of raccoons and deer.”) 

With three orchard ladders, a nifty little chain-saw, and some younger-than-midlife-creaky men playing monkey in the trees, I suspect we took rather more than 30% of the branches that should be removed. But after four hours of a beautifully clear end-of-February day, our dozen trees looked more open and definitely shorter than before.

And if you attend the Food Summit, you might see some of our trimmings, because Barbara Wells loaded up the back of her Mazda with pruned branches, well-budded, in hopes of forcing them into bloom for giant bouquets to decorate the high school lobby.