The garden is a revolving wheel of ripening fruits and vegetables right now: each week something new rises to the top of the “must pick” list, then gives over to the next. It’s not that there’s a new ripening: it’s that a crop reaches critical mass and you MUST do something before the excess you can’t use yourself goes to waste.

At Monument Farm, Joe had more cucurbits than he and Tony could use, so he brought sackfuls of patty pan squashes and cucumbers to the Food Bank last Tuesday. 

Down in Burton, the peach tree of Jim & Linda Rogers had MORE than enough for jam, for Ann’s cobbler, for my evening’s peaches-n-cream, with plenty left over. I dropped by with a reciprocal head of ‘Buttercrunch’ lettuce and found them deep in the jam-making. The place smelled heavenly, because “we found a recipe that uses lemon rind and crystallized ginger,” she explained. “Please, take some more!”

At GreenDale farm last week, it was cilantro’s turn to dominate. All our conversations ran like this—

ADRIENNE: “I made cilantro pesto last night—first time I’d even had it. REALLY yummy.”

KAREN: “Hard to believe it’s so much better than basil pesto!”

BILL:  ”We made cilantro pesto last night, and this morning I had it on toast. Sooo good!” 

This particular cilantro managed to feed three couples because it’s a HEDGE—two, six-foot-long rows of the stuff, each plant flowering at four feet high.

It caught the eye of Nghia the Vietnamese FedEx guy, prompting Bill to offer however much Nghia wanted to take away. 

I too came back for an armful, en route to my yoga teacher’s potluck. “What will I do with all this?” Amy asked. Can you guess?

“Make Cilantro Pesto!”

In a blender or food processor, pour about 1/4 cup of extra-virgin olive oil and 2 tablespoons real butter. Add 1 tsp salt, 3-4 crushed garlic cloves, about 1/4 cup toasted pine nuts (I use a small iron fry-pan, shaking the nuts for 4-5 minutes until they’re turning from gold to brown), about 1/4 cup finely grated parmesan cheese, and about two cups of cilantro leaves, loosely packed, then hit the “grind” button. You’ll probably have to do some careful jabbing with the end of a wooden spoon, along with more pourings-in of olive oil, before this rather dry mixture will work down into a paste. But once it has, adjust it for your own taste—more nutty? more cheesy? more garlicky? Then either serve it immediately on cooked pasta, green beans, or sauteed zucchini noodles—zuke sliced so thin (1/8″) that when sauteed for 3-4 minutes, it comes to an al dente just like fat fettucine noodles—or store it in small jars in the frig, packed to the brim and topped with a bit of olive oil to keep oxygen from darkening it.

Kohlrabi Pickle

This week’s rising crop is kohlrabi. I’ve never had it before this year, but turns out it’s good raw as a crudité, or it can be cut up and roasted with other root vegetables in the oven, coated in olive oil and mediterrean seasonings such as an herbes de provence mix.

Before Nghia left with his armful of cilantro, he reciprocated with this asian recipe, a bracing appetizer or side dish that’s pictured above. When I arrived at GreenDale Farm on Tuesday, Bill came out from the house with an Tousley bowl full of this pickle, eager to offer Bob a taste.

Trim and peel a fresh kohlrabi, then slice into 1/8″ slabs and quarter them. In a large soup bowl, mix 1/2 cup white or rice vinegar, 1/4 cup water, 1-2 pressed garlic cloves, 1/4 teas. salt, enough sugar to take the sourness away, and a teaspoon of hot garlic Sriracha sauce (or whatever hot pepper sauce you have in the cupboard.)

Bill said, “Nghia told me, ‘This is really good with steak! Before you grill the steak, cut off the beef fat, render it, and use it as a baste for the steaks, then serve this pickle to cut through the fat.’ Isn’t it refreshing?”

With each week’s new crop, there’s new recipes, new experiences, new friends with which to share this elemental experience of food. What riches lie in garden generosity!

Looking on the (almost) Bright Side

I hope you read Susan Reimer’s article in today’s Beachcomber (8/18) on the delayed harvest of tomato, corn, and other summer crop classics. Good article, Susan!

But while the coolness of this summer is definitely a drag on the fruiting veg, let’s choose to be positive and look on the (almost) bright side. The leafy vegetables have been more than happy this year. Some might call it a “Cabbage Year”, but hey, that’s not so bad!

Chard, spinach, beets, turnips, kohlrabi, lettuce, parsley—all of these have loved this cooler weather. The chard at GreenDale farm has been growing leaves a foot and a half long for two months, with no sign of relenting. The roots of beets, turnips, and kohlrabi are the size of softballs, with tall, lush greens.

Granted, GreenDale Farm grows off the power of alpaca poop and plenty of sunshine. In contrast, my at-home “hole in the forest” can only get chard and beets to half that size. But in my garden’s half-shade, and in this cool weather, my succession plantings of lettuce have grown well.

Yes, my tomatoes are green, and their numbers sparse. But let’s not mistake last summer’s conditions for a new “normal.” My garden records over many years show that half the time my tomatoes ripened in mid-August; half the time, not until MID-SEPTEMBER. And some years, my tomatoes go room-mate with my Thanksgiving guests.

Great Conditions for Planting that Fall Garden

Those of you trying to start your fall garden will appreciate this week’s cooler temperatures. It’s warm enough for seeds to sprout, but not so blistering hot that small seedlings or transplants will shrivel in the heat. Seeds to plant now include arugula, carrots (keep soil moist), lettuce, spinach, endive, radishes, and cabbage to let overwinter for eating next spring. Heck, I’m STILL making good coleslaw out of my over-wintered cabbage.

Or you can buy transplants of lettuce, broccoli, fall cabbage, brussels sprouts or cauliflower from VIGA vendors or our local stores, on offer now. Farm stands, such as Pacific Potager on the south end or Island Meadow Farm around the corner from Minglement, will also sell transplants.

Divide and Propagate Now

After summer’s peak, when stems are hardening into woodiness, is an excellent time to take cuttings from shrubs. In my garden, that will be buxus (box), hydrangea, cistus, daphne, and rockroses. I like to take heel cuttings: you pull away a minor stem from where it attaches to a major stem, pulling away a little cuticle of the joint with your cutting. Dip in rootone, stick into a soil/peat mix, and put into a warm, moist place. 

The Arboretum Foundation has an excellent, yet brief guide to propagation, called “Cuttings Through the Year.” Only $8.50, including tax & shipping. To get it, click on the link above, or call 206-325-4510 between 10am—4pm, Tuesday–Sunday.

And if you like poppies, clip and bag some poppy seed capsules now, before they shatter and scatter. If we’re “lucky” enough to get snow this winter, you can sprinkle those stored-away seeds onto the snow and get very good germination toward next summer’s flowers. 

Zucchini, Coming On Strong

I’m reaching out to the two “Zucchini Taste-Off” winners at last week’s farmer’s market— Risa Stahl for her “Grilled Zucchini Quiche” and Karolyn Hoffman for her zucchini “mapleicious” cupcakes. I’ll post those recipes when they return my phone calls.

For me, this year’s zucchini surprise has been how good it is when grilled. Slices of round ‘Eight Ball’ (also sold as ‘Ronde de Nice’) are as easy to flip as pancakes, and they make a good base for grilled meats or asian noodles. 

Before you fire up the coals, take a moment to slice your zuke  1/4″ or thicker. Set the slices in a colander, salt all sides, and let them sweat while your coals are prepping. 20-30 minutes later, rinse off the salt and pat dry, then rub with fresh cut garlic and some olive oil. Thrown down on the grill, they take just a couple minutes per side. Add a little worcester sauce or steak juices—now THIS is essence of August!

UPDATE:  Risa Stahl’s Zucchini-poloosa Winning Recipe for Grilled Zucchini Quiche

Preheat oven to 375
Assemble 1 basic pie crust
Brush zucchini slices with olive oil & balsamic vinegar and grill on both sides
Chop, then Sautee one onion
Roll out dough and put in pie pan
Sprinkle grated cheddar cheese onto crust
Spread onions onto cheese
Arrange Zucchini on top of cheese and onions (see picture)
Combine eggs, milk, parmesan, flour, salt, rosemary
Pour liquid mixture onto the other ingredients
Bake 40-45 minutes

Want to Learn to Can?

And a few other techniques for preserving the products of your vegie garden?  Here is a word from Cathy Fulton, who is putting on the Food Preservation Fair this weekend.

Vashon’s Second Annual Food Preservation Fair
Saturday, August 14, 10 am to 2 pm

This year, we will be located just north of the Farmer’s Market (in the Vashon Physical Therapy parking lot north of the Village Green). 

The fair will include several stations and demonstrations of food preservation methods. Ask questions, discover resources, and get advice from Vashon Island food preservers about:
  * Steam canning
  * Dehydrating and Solar Drying
  * Pressure Canning and Boiling Water Canning
  * Low Sugar Jams
  * Fermentation (pickles, sauerkraut, and vinegars)
  * Steam Juicing
  * Freezing
  * Dry-pack canning 

Learn about Vashon’s new Food Preservation Equipment Library and how you can borrow equipment for a nominal donation.

Show up anytime between 10 am and 2 pm and visit the stations that interest you.  A donation of $5 at the door is suggested but not required. The Vashon Island Growers Association is giving away $2.00 coupons good for produce at the Farmer’s Market to the first 100 donors.

More information at: http://vashonfoodsummit.org/PreservationFair/

Yuli's Green Onion Pancakes—recipe below

 First, the news:

IF YOU’RE THINKING OF CANNING:  I ran into Cathy Fulton at the True Value; she was looking over cookware for her upcoming “Food Preservation Fair” on Saturday, August 14 from 10—2. She’ll give a PREVIEW this Wednesday afternoon (that’s today) from 2–5pm at the VIGA market in downtown Vashon. Topics will include hot-bath canning, steam juicing, pressure canning, drying, fermentation, freezing, dry-pack canning, and the new EQUIPMENT LENDING PROGRAM. 

FOOD BANK FARM sent its first harvest to an off-Island food bank this week: White Center was the lucky recipient. Sharing with other food banks is part of this year’s mission. Congrats to Jenn and her volunteer growers!

WINTER GARDENING is starting in our local small farms. Chandler Briggs of Island Meadow Farm has been transplanting fall brassica starts, put brussel sprouts in the ground last week, cabbages, leeks, and purple sprouting broccoli in the coming weeks. Jenn Coe of the Food Bank Garden is planting cabbage, broccoli, collards, kale, carrots—”everything there is still time to plant!” And yes, for some long-growing plants like cauliflower, the winter window is already closed! She recommends Territorial Seed Company’s Fall Planting chart, while Rob Peterson of Plum Forest Farm touts the Maritime Northwest Gardening Guide. If you’d like to read more on this subject, here’s a link to my article printed last year in the Beachcomber: “Make Way for Winter.”

FLOR-IFFIC!  I spotted this van parked in front of the VIGA stand this Tuesday. It’s the rig of IslandGirl Ride Service (463-4602). So if you need somebody else to drive you, here’s her offer: “Chill. You Sit. I’ll Drive.” 

If you grow food, wouldn’t you want to COOK food?

I’m grateful for my garden for many reasons, including its demand that I learn to cook. When you plant a big veggie garden (and I planted TWO), it would truly be a Lost Opportunity not to learn how to use all that green stuff. And here we are at the height of the growing season: chards, lettuces, beets, peas, kales, parsley, carrots, potatoes…it’s all bursting out of its beds, a constant parade of green through your kitchen door.

How to make use of it all?  Here are some tips—

GET SOME VEGIE-CENTRIC COOKBOOKS:  Through winter and early spring, I got myself a few cookbooks aimed squarely at handling garden produce. One of the best is actually a pair of books, both by Sylvia Thompson: The Kitchen Garden, which tells you how to grow, and The Kitchen Garden Cookbook, which shares many tricks of food prep and preservation both in a conversational narrative and in recipes.

Also in my constantly-on-the-counter stack: Andrea Chesman’s “The Garden-Fresh Vegetable Cookbook, Janet Ballantyne’s Joy of Gardening Cookbook, Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, and a magazine from Vegatarian Times called Farmers’ Market Cookbook.

MAKE VEGGIES THE MAIN INGREDIENT: We’re supposed to eat less meat anyway. A good inspiration can be Asian cookbooks: they seem to have more recipes where the veg, not the meat, is the featured eatable. Vietnamese cooking in particular emphasizes fresh vegetables: think of their rice-paper salad rolls wrapped in lettuce leaves, or a bowl of pho with its companion plate of herbs & sprouts.

Vietnamese Cabbage Salad: For lunch today, I shredded white cabbage as fine as possible, added a handful of minced basil, mint, and cilantro, dressed it with vinaigrette of 2 T fish sauce and 2 T lime juice, sweetened the dressing with Splenda, and topped this salad with chopped peanuts. VERY refreshing on a warm day.

TALK TO YOUR FOOD-SAVVY FRIENDS: I get great ideas from fellow gardeners and foodies. For instance, my food bank buddy Mary Margaret told me to boil turnip greens in some broth spiked with cider vinegar. After my co-gardener Bill told me he’d enjoyed new potatoes and peas in a cream sauce, I tried something similar using milk, in a white bechamel sauce, instead. 

Green Onion Pancakes (or Turnovers): Ny friend Yuli, who grew up in Taiwan, showed me this recipe that her mother used to make. If you ever have a great abundance of green onions, chives, or garlic greens, THIS is the recipe for you! Every “pancake” is actually a pouch of white bread dough, rolled out into 6-8″ tortillas (my pasta roller worked great for this) and then stuffed with at least a half-cup of minced green onion heavily moistened with peanut oil + S & P. After you cover the center with onion, wrap the edges up and to the center, pinch together into a pouch, then press it flat between your palms  to 1/2″ thick; alternatively, you can fold the pancake over into a turnover form. Put about 3-4 in a big skillet with a little peanut oil, heated, and cook each each side until golden (about ten minutes total). If you google this recipe, you’ll find most recipes use less green onion and a more elaborate, “snail-shell” construction, but Yuli’s method is simpler AND uses much more onion.

MAKE YOUR OWN READY-TO-EAT FOODS—My mother gave me an ancient “Seal-A-Meal” contraption, which is proving QUITE HANDY for processing many greens. It’s easy to get tired of sauteed leaves, so I’ve been looking for ways to dress up and store (read hide away for later?) the chard-choy-kale-spinach-cabbage abundance.

Because we enjoy spinach quiche, I’ve braised and “seal-a-mealed” plenty of 1-cup and 2-cup packets of spinach and chard. I could also use this spinach in soups, as a base for sole florentine, or with ricotta or potatoes to make spinach gnocchi, ravioli, or a lasagne.

To add special treats to a noodle soup, we make wontons filled with white cabbage, chard, broccoli or broccoli raab, plus a little pork and/or shrimp. Store in a freezer bag, and just drop a few into chicken broth and simmer for 3-4 minutes.

Tortelli di Erbette, or Swiss Chard Ravioli—(above) My summer’s big success story is ravioli with chard, a Florentine feast-dish for St. Giovanni’s Day, June 24th. Because there’s a lot of steps to this (making pasta, rolling it out, steaming the chard, making the filling, and FINALLY filling the raviolis), I like to spread the project over two days.

First, make a batch of fresh pasta: 1 cup flour to 2 eggs, mixed, kneaded until smooth, let rest for at least an hour. Take 10-20 swiss chard leaves, remove stems, rinse the leaves and braise them in a large skillet in their drip-water until wilted. Drain, chop finely, and when cool squeeze out as much water as you can (a rolling pin works well). To this mound of green add a not-quite-equal quantity of ricotta cheese, half again as much grated parmesan, an egg, a pinch nutmeg and 1/2 teas. salt.

Both pasta dough and filling can then rest in the frig until you’ve got an hour to make the ravioli. When ready, divide the dough into approx. 1/4 cup chunks. Squeeze one through your pasta machine to thickness 5 (the next-to-last setting). Lay this long rectangle of dough on a floured table; down its lower length place a rounded tablespoon of chard filling every 2-3 inches—usually 4-6 per rectangle. Fold the upper half of the pasta to cover the chard mounds, press down between each mound and cut between, then seal the cut edges with a fork. Place on a floured baking sheet: you can then stick this in the freezer to freeze individual raviolis to pop into a freezer bag, or go ahead and boil water to cook the raviolis for 5-8 minutes.  10-12 raviolis will fill your plate. It’s delicious in a cream sauce, a red sauce, or just in a garlic olive oil sauce with scraped fresh parmesan.

And if you want a thematic dinner to serve before the Vashon FUR BALL, google “Merde di can,” a similar concoction that turns beet greens into a brownish, tapered gnocchi. I daren’t translate it for you here—this is a FAMILY newspaper, you know.

Silver and Kay White walk past their soft-fruit net-house. Note that the roof is tied back: it will be rolled out when the first fruit ripens.

Last week, I shared with you an e-rant from Sally Fox, last year’s president of the garden club. She complained that, while in years past she enjoyed a large harvest of raspberries, “This year, I have harvested FIVE.  Why?  The birds came and ate them ALL.  But why? For two years we shared nicely. This year it is very different. Clues?”

So I asked around and, turns out, everybody is having trouble saving their raspberries from birds. Finally, I called Bob Norton, one of the founders of the Vashon Fruit Club. “Yes, I’ve heard that complaint from everyone, and I have a theory: want to hear it?”

Of course… 

Bob’s explanation has to do with our cool spring. This time of year, fruit-eating birds such as robins, starlings, and cedar waxwings eat predominantly the fruit of Prunus avian or bird cherry, also known as the mazzard. This wild tree, says Norton, is the parent of our domestic eatable cherry and is still often used as a grafting stock for orchard cherries. These tall, slender trees bloom in March, lighting up our woodland margins in clouds of dainty, dingy white.

This year, says, Norton, our spring was so cool that the bees didn’t emerge until after the mazzards flowered. With no bees to reach the flowers, there’s no pollination: thus, none of those wild cherries that the birds prefer to eat. Though robins, for instance, are adapted to eat primarily cherries, they’re certainly put a peck into any soft fruit they can reach—like your strawberries, raspberries, or currants.

“The problem is probably worse this year because we had such good bird-raising conditions last year,” Bob conjectured. “The birds had a good hatch and probably more chicks survived to this year, so now there’s more competition for food. They’re even in my plums, these days.”

So if you’ve got berries, you’ve probably also got birds gobbling them down. 
What to do?

The only real solution is to tent your berries with bird-netting. For raspberries, it’s probably too late, said Bob, but he warned, “blueberries are next, so if you want to keep them for yourself, better net them now.”

Bird-netting—black webbing at 1″ intervals—is available at our local hardware stores. My friend Sandy, who has grown blueberries for decades, thinks that draping the bushes in tulle—the same fabric as ballerina tutus—works better. “I clothes-pin tulle net fabric over them when they’re loaded with berries.  You can buy ‘bird proof’ netting, but the mesh on it is large enough that the clumps of berries get tangled in it and it makes picking the bushes a hassle.” 

Yes, when branches grow through the netting, there’s no way to lift the netting without ripping off leaves—and berries. And birds can get tangled in the nets, too. I recently participated in a discussion on www.growveg.com about that predicament, one which “G” had that changed her ways.

“ I’ve always shared with the birds, ever since I found a live goldfinch tangled in the previous years’ bird netting.  I cut him out and carefully picked all that black, sticky netting from his wings. He sat rather stunned for awhile on my hand and then jumped on my shoulder, where he sat for several minutes.  It felt like he was saying, “Thank you.”  I haven’t had the heart to use the nasty stuff again.”

Another good, though large-scale solution is to build a berry-house. You may have seen Kay White’s berry enclosure during the VAA Garden Tour: it’s a big square enclosure built with 8′ tall poles and lightweight wooden beams between them, with bird-netting wrapped all around it to make both walls AND a roof. To avoid collecting leaves, Kay’s crew leaves the net-roof rolled back through most of the year, unrolling it over the berries before the shrubs set fruit. It’s a permanent solution that works best if you have many shrubs; maximize the protection by including strawberry beds and grapevines in it.

Ken Miller and Barb Adams on the north end also put a net-house around their berries. He says, “We call it a “room with a view,” looking at all those nice berries. We too can roll the top back.”

I’m not going to net this year because my blueberry bushes are new and in their first year are supposed to be pruned of fruit anyway. Whatever berries escaped my notice, the birds are welcome to. But not next year!

I was going to attend a photography workshop at Anita Halstead’s garden this beautiful Saturday morning. But I’ve been over-subscribed this last month, so when my 14-year-old niece, touring our ravine garden, reached out to a flower and it was a STINGING NETTLE, I realized it’s my own garden (as well as Kelly) that’s screaming for attention.

And so, out with pruners, weed-wacker, and a guilty conscience to beat back July’s unruly growth. Now I KNOW I did a clean-up before the Garden Tour so that I wouldn’t come home and feel bad about my own garden. Yet here’s nettle leaning into the paths of the ravine, an ilex vomatoria blocking the way down my wooden stairs, and a retaining wall that’s disappeared under a rug of hairy geranium. You think you’re keeping the green tide at bay, but just like with the sea and ol’ King Canute, it will sneak its way in somewhere, somehow…

Dig The Reds at DIG

Noticing last week that DIG was offering 30-50% discounts on hardy perennials, I stopped in and asked her about perennials that will still put on a show this late in the growing season.

She waved her hand at “Any of these will work”—and I was Seeing Red. Her front tables was bursting with red penstemon, red montbretia, red sage, raspberry-red gaura, apricot agastache, and coral cape fuchsia. FIELDS of red dahlias surounding fountain, outdoor carpet, big gray ginger jar. That Sylvia: she’s a dab hand with color. Above left, that’s a penstemon with smaller cape fuchsia blooms on the right and montbretia foliage behind; red dahlias are on the right. Below are more dahlias and a lobelia laxiflora which, Sylvia says, “Hummingbirds just adore.”

lobela laxiflora left; red dahlias right

Speaking of “Seeing Red”…

I’ve had some good rants in my email inbox this week. Michelle of Pacific Potager sent me a notice about an organic farm in Washington that lost big crops to a compost they brought in that was contaminated with the herbicide Clopyralid. She wrote, “I know I feel crazy when people tell me what they are adding to their soil, what compost mix they are buying, what they have purchased to “make” their garden… as if they would KNOW what that stuff is…  I always advocate improving your soil in place, with cover crops, compost you make, etc… It takes longer, maybe, but you aren’t adding problems…”

I know when I’ve gone to pick up manure at local farms, I’ve asked whether they’ve sprayed their fields or given the animals any medications that might have passed through the gut still potent. If you’re uncertain about an imported soil amendment, test it in some small, out-of-the-way section of garden first.

And Not Seeing Red

Sally Fox, last year’s Garden Club President, wrote me about her missing raspberries.

“Last year I had HUNDREDS of raspberries — maybe thousands.  This year – I have harvested five.  Why?  The birds came and ate THEM ALL.  But why? For two years we shared nicely.  This year it is very different.  Carolina Nurik of Maury, who sells at the marke,t has had the same problem.  Clues?  Do we have to net our raspberries now?”

Pursuing the situation more, she wrote later, “I heard from Rob Patterson of Plum Forest that it might be because the wild cherry crop was so poor this year – so they have turned to our berries.  He has seen a correlation between cherry crops and berry attacks.” And yet later, “My former east coast riding instructor told me they always had to net their raspberries and that once the birds make a habit of attacking them, it is over – they will be back.”

Anybody else losing their berry crops to birds worse than usually?

Some Summer Reds on the Burton Peninsula

Driving back from DIG, I pondered that whole question of Summer Flowers: after the late spring bloom-party of roses, rhodies, lilacs, irises, and peonies, what’s going to give your garden equal impact during the Days of All Outdoors? Driving up the lead road to the Burton Loop, indeed the lawns looked a little, well, SPARE of flowers.

Still, there ARE some plants that are looking good right now. My favorite cottage near Guv’s Lane had this colorful collection around its chimney: a red rose, red valerian, thread-leaf coreopsis, and shasta daisies.

And around the corner to the left, once again I was Seeing Red: some Shirley Poppies, with red montbretia and more red dahlias behind. 

Lots of Red, Overhead

Finally, this beauty-shot is from Pt. Defiance Park. I had a little time to kill before catching the south-end ferry, so Mom and I walked through the Pt. Defiance Rose Garden. But the beds of hybrid teas and floribundas, though nice, can’t compete with the rose-covered pergola that leads to the entrance. Personally, I think Climbing Roses give more bang for the buck: just one plant will out-shine a bed of a dozen shrub roses. And a climber keeps your ground free for other plants.

So in your garden, if you want a color to ride the rising Green Tide of high summer, think RED. 

from left: Alex and Kathryn True, Little Story, mom Sarah Laine and Canyon, Leslie Patheal, Cathy Fulton, and Jenn Coe.

Jenn Coe put out the call for garlic harvesters last week, and wanting to see how mature garlic looks coming out of the ground, I wrestled the wheelbarrow into the pick-up and drove off to Happy Garden on Maury Island.

This was the site of last year’s Food Bank Farm, but the land-owner, David Kirkland, died over the winter and his children have other plans for the place. Meanwhile the farm-stand’s gone skeletal, the fields shaggy and blown, and the harvesting of the garlic felt more like plucking survivors from the waves of grain, clover, and thistle coming on strong.

Elephant Garlic

The harvesters were already hard at it when I arrived at the opening bell of 1pm. Mounds of elephant garlic—a leek, actually—were piling up in the trampled rows as shovels and forks popped them out of the ground. My, they were large: heads about 4″ across, the plants as tall as this busy younster who didn’t want to be photographed as he hauled his harvest to the nearest drop-pile.

Hauling the Elephant Garlic

You can see that the garlic has gone brown at the tips, and this apparently is the perfect stage to harvest. Ron Engeland, author of “Growing Great Garlic” who farms the stinking rose in the Okanogan country, says each green leaf represents one bulb wrapper—that papery stuff you have to peel from the garlic head to reach individual cloves—and if you let all the leaves fade to brown, your wrappers are fading away, too. Since you want those wrappers intact to protect the garlic from drying out, the perfect time to pick garlic is when more than half your plants are going brown at the tips of the top-most leaves. 

Since the elephant garlic was nearly all pulled, Barbara Stratton and I applied our forks and shovels to releasing the hardnecks and softnecks. From their magenta color, I suspect that the softnecks were the variety “Spanish Roja”, considered one of the very best. These you can braid, but not the hardnecks, which as you’d expect from the name stay stiff-necked from ground to truck. These are the heads where the cloves cluster around a central shaft, and they are the original form of garlic. Softnecks have been bred over the centuries for market trade; what we buy in the grocery store is probably the softneck ‘California Early’ or ‘California Late’ grown in Gilroy, California.

from left: Leslie Patheal, Cathy Fulton, Barbara Stratton, and Jenn Coe.

With the 500 row feet of garlic all pulled, we sat down to bundle the garlic for hanging in the barn now at the present Food Bank Garden on Wax Orchard Road. Though you can cook garlic “green” as soon as you get it out of the ground, it will keep only if you “cure” it in a warm, shady place around 80° with plenty of air circulation. In fact, the “experts” recommend using fans if your garlic is even a little moist or if there’s little air movement in your “curing” room.

When Jenn’s truck started to fill up, I tried counting the bundles of dozens and lost count at 65. Jenn said, “I know I’m putting more in a bundle than 12,” so I’m guessing we must have harvested 1200-1500 garlic plants. In 2-3 weeks after their “cure”, another work crew will brush the dirt off, peel back outer wrappers to a clean one, trim the roots and stem from each bulb, and crate them for the Food Bank.

Freshly exposed to what a mature garlic looks like, I went home and poked my fingers into the soil around my own garlic plants. Sure enough, there’s a nicely swollen bulb down there. But only 30% of my 24 plants have gone brown at the tips, so I’ll just pull away the drip-hoses to dry them out entirely before pulling the plants at the end of the month.

If any break open in the meantime, I’ll set those aside for re-planting. And come October, when Jenn puts out the call, I’ll go get another lesson in garlic farming and this time, learn to plant.

I took this photo about ten days ago. Since then, this Red Romaine and its brothers have been bulking up in Row 5 of what I call “GreenDale Farm,” the vegie patch I get to help with at Bill and Lee Green’s alpaca ranch.  

For me, gardening in a different Island microclimate is an eye-opener. Because GreenDale Farm enjoys full sun and sandy loan soil, tilled rich with alpaca manure and maple leaves, the patch grows most vegetables bigger and quicker than my own hole in the forest. 

Watching how two different gardens grow is thrilling, stomach-filling, and sometimes downright scary. My home garden in the half-shade grows lettuce a’plenty, so the GreenDale lettuce, undisturbed, grows on and on to Gigantor size.  Blink, and the radishes turn into golf-balls. The komatsuna mustard grew from hand-long leaves to boat paddles in three weeks. 

And this Red Romaine—sheesh!—it’s like our Stuffed Moosehead of the Garden. Some prize-winner, sure, but what do you DO with the monster?

(below: Same Seeds, Different Soil.  In the circular inset, the slim, 6″ long leaves of the Red Romaine grown in my shady garden. The big Red Romaine towering over the ripe looseleaf in front of it, came from the same flat as the other, grown from the same packet of seed. What a difference soil and site make!)

Bill, my garden mentor, had the answer: braised lettuce. “I made it for breakfast the other day. Bacon and vinegar in a skillet, then throw in the chopped lettuce just till it wilts—delicious!” 

Wilted Romaine Salad with Bacon

Half a romaine this size feeds two for lunch amply. And like most cooked-greens recipes, this will shrink the lettuce to half its original size or less.

Harvest a big romaine or other lettuce that’s crispy, and wash carefully; cut or tear leaves into 1″+ strips, put in a big salad bowl. Cut three pieces of bacon into cross-wise strips, 1/4 or more wide.. Put in a big skillet, cook on med-high, and when it’s almost cooked through, take 1/2 cup of malt vinegar, pour it in with the bacon (careful for spatters), sugar it to make tangy, salt and pepper it, then pour this tangy sauce over the lettuce and toss until the leaves wilt. Serve immediately.

First, the News:

Cathy Fulton of Mariposa Gardens will hold an Open House & Potluck this Saturday, July 3rd to show her many sustainability projects such as the aquaponic (fish-growing) system, the permaculture guild, frugal container gardening, and bed-turning with a Broadfork. The Open House starts at 4pm, the Potluck at 6pm: bring a dish and maybe musical instruments for some jammin’ later. The address is 228 SW 209th Street, about 100 yards down Monument Road where you can park and walk up her rough gravel driveway. If you just want to help, she’s having a work party Friday to prepare, or you can be a “docent.” To contact her, visit http://mariposagardens.org. 

Greens on a Deadline

Are we on the cusp of real summer?

One hint is that the cool-weather crops, mature for a few weeks now, are showing signs they’re getting ready to bolt. My loose-leaf lettuce sprawls open, some spinach plants have seed-pods in their top-knots, the mustards and choi wave yellow flowers in the air. Even the Langley Farms’ cabbage, which over-wintered well, has chosen this moment to head up and keel over.

Yes, there’s a LOT of leafy greens out there, thanks to all the rain we’ve “enjoyed.”  After eating as much as two households can, Bill Green and I gazed over rows still stuffed with produce and decided to donate lettuce, spinach, cress, pak choi, and armloads of Komatsuna, an Asian mustard spinach, to the Food Bank. 15 pounds worth—felt good. 

And I wasn’t the only one: as I was loading bags out the front door into the Food Bank’s delivery van, another gardener heavy-laden with greens walked in the back door and called out “Can you use these?”

Who knew Spinach would be good with Strawberries?

Henry, head of Thriftway produce, approached me as I was digging for the second day in a row through the flats of Sakuma Brothers strawberries. “They’ve been flying out the door ever since we decided to sell by weight and put up the ‘take as much as you want’ sign.” He said the store will be getting Sakuma Bros. raspberries later today (Wednesday, 30th), with blueberries later, finally blackberries and boysenberries. 

If you’re lucky, you might also score some locally grown strawberries at the farmer’s market or at farm stands this weekend.

I’ve been enjoying the California organic strawberries this spring—in a green salad dressed with a fruity vinaigrette, they add good color and a tart, refreshing taste. In fact, they’re better this way than in a dessert.

But these are WASHINGTON berries, from Sakuma Brothers, the largest berry grower in Skagit County. And while not organic, these strawbs are truly Dessert-Worthy—all the way red, sweet and soft, and ripe THIS MINUTE. 

And only with such ripe berries can you understand why Italians love strawberries in balsamic vinegar. Here’s two recipes that marry the berries to this magic dark elixir.

Strawberry Spinach Salad

Wash and cut fresh spinach across the leaf into ribbons. Top with slices of plain feta cheese or dollops of creme fraiche (I’ll explain how to make that below). Place 6-8 sliced strawberries on top of the cheese and drizzle a vinaigrette of 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar, S & P and a bit of sweetener.

Black-Tie Strawberries & Creme (fraiche)

You start this the day before with a pint of yogurt and two empty plastic containers, one a pint, the other just large enough to hold the pint with room below (We use pint and quart versions of salsa containers). In the pint container, cut a slit in the bottom that’s 3/4″ wide and shaped like a half-opened eye, not quite all the way across the bottom. Put a coffee filter on top of this, then the pint within the larger jar. Here’s your creme fraiche maker, cheap and simple.

Buy or make a pint of plain, rather stiff yogurt: Nancy’s yogurt works well. Pour yogurt into the coffee filter in the pint container until nearly full, then place the whole contraption into the refrigerator to let the yogurt shed its whey into the “well” in the quart container. In 24 hours, you’ll have a yogurt cheese that’s remarkably like creme fraiche, thick enough to stand up a spoon. Sweeten with sugar for a sweet treat, or season with savories, garlic salt, or herbs for a cracker spread.

(DON’T pour the whey down your plumbing: Cindy Morrison confessed in her recent cheese class that when she did that, cheese formed up in her pipes! So toss it into your garden beds or compost, or use the whey in bread-making.)

The next day, in the hour before dinner, wash strawberries, sweeten, and over them drizzle a scant tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. Mix and set aside for flavors to develop. 

After dinner, sweeten 1/4 cup (per person) of creme fraiche and layer in the bottom of dessert bowls. In a separate small bowl, make a chocolate paste with that squeezeable Hershey’s chocolate sauce you bought (for your kids, yah RIGHT!) and a tablespoon or two of powdered cocoa (sweeten if bitter); dollop a spoonful of that in each dessert bowl. Finally, artifully arrange the strawberries over the chocolate and sprinkle on a “snow” of sweetener if needed. A sprig of mint will dress this up nicely. And if you want to really amaze your guests, ask them if they’d “like a grinding of black pepper on that?”

Of all the gardens in the VAA Garden Tour, this one is the most relaxed—now that it’s done.

When Greg and Lisa Elliott moved in, the landscape around their house was a tangle of undergrowth beneath the trees, sopping wet from run-off coming from uphill. Today, it’s a landscape of soothingly flat lawns separated by rock terraces and wide beds, surrounded by paths Greg bushwacked through his forest.

When you approach, notice the two large coral-bark maples, brilliantly lime against the galvanized metal garage. Descend the steps down the center of Greg’s favorite border, now blooming with red-blooming heuchera against golden abelias and grasses. Framing the front door are two box-leaf azara trees, one variegated, one not; ‘Variegata’ lost much of its top in the winter storm of 08/09.

To the east is the first stone wall, created to ease the uphill water run-off; there’s a french tile at its toe. Mahonia, Cistus, Hardy Geraniums, and small trees punctuate it. Near the border’s center steps is another near-casualty: a snowbell tree now in bloom that lost its top when part of the willow uphill fell on it.

Opposite, against the house, is a series of variegated plants: Iris pallida, Hosta, and a surprisingly large variegated Buxus. At the SE corner, a Phlomis jabs its weird yellow flowers in front of a mounding golden Berberis. Beside the house, yellow dwarf Callas bloom. Uphill, yellow Asiatic lilies are just coming on. 

And around the corner, slightly up in the woods, a splendid dogwood tree—Cornus kousa—glows like the moon rising in the shadows, preceded by a purple Berberis contrasting with a Spirea bumalda ‘Gold Flame” in front.

This is a restrained garden, but all this variegation, silver, and gold, move the Elliott Garden from dull to sparkling. As you move to the west side of the house, notice the groundcover Corydalis lutea (yellow fumitory) covered with tiny yellow funnels against tear-drop leaves. These plants are descendents from the garden of Greg’s grandma, who died in 1970. “I kept the seeds in my desk drawer through college and beyond, and threw them on the ground here years ago.  I love that they self-sustain and move around the yard.” In fact, they’ve crowding up against a large stand of Solomon’s Seal. Also here is a Fatsia that once rose to the house gutters before being struck down by, again, that winter storm of 08/09.

Greg says, “the garden’s basically finished now,” but I get the sense there’s a new interest budding. In that favorite border, he wanted me to see two diminutive plants: a tiny Pagoda Holly by the steps, stubby at 16″ high and further on, what looks like a spray of evergreen fiber-optics. “That’s an Alaskan Red Cedar—it’s called ‘Whipcord.’ Isn’t it great? I got it from Portland Avenue Nursery in Tacoma. I really like their stuff.”

Maybe the Elliott Garden isn’t done after all.

UPDATE: Jenn phoned me with the news that Q13 TV is coming TODAY—that Tuesday, June 22. They’ll probably arrive with cameras 2:30-3pm. So come with weeding tools and in your “most authentic” gardening togs.

If you haven’t had your 15 seconds of fame yet, here’s your chance. Jenn Coe, farmer for the Food Bank Garden, send this message around this morning—

“Hello fellow gardeners,

I will be at the Wax Orchard Farm tomorrow afternoon and so will Q13 T.V.!  
They would very much like to meet our volunteers, so come, weed and be famous!!!
I will be working 9am to 11:30 or so and then again 2pm to 5pm.  Q13 is expected in the afternoon.  Call if you need directions.

You can also join us at the Sunrise Ridge garden on Wednesday 9 to noon and then back at the farm on Thursday morning, 9am to noon.  If you would like to help, but these times don’t work for you, please call so we can arrange a better time.

Jenn
384-0973

The Beachcomber published their story on the Food Bank Farm last week. I know that the media often steals story ideas from each other… somebody at Q13 must be reading our local rag!

Earlier this spring, I blogged on using www.GrowVeg.com, the online vegetable bed planning software and have been using the software ever since to plan and keep records. They send e-articles monthly, and this month were writing about strawberries. One reader asked about a better way to protect strawberry beds against birds, so I commented about the way I net my raised beds.

Emails from me, from Jeremy Dore, the creator of GrowVeg, and Brenda the Curious Reader criss-crossed the web over the next 24 hours. Upshot is, Jeremy posted a photo I sent of my net-protected raised bed in my kitchen garden, plus the entire description of how this netting system works. It starts “Do you need to protect your garden crops from birds?” and continues on with the “Read More.”

To see the photo and what amounts to a small article (was I EVER brief?), visit GrowVeg’s “wall” by clicking here.

[I blogged this garden and gardener before, on December 7, 2009: for the full entry (which describes the garden's design and creation), click here to see "Garden Club Award Winners." ]

Listening to jazz on this drippy Saturday morning, Jazziness is what comes to mind as a metaphor for  John and Colleen James’ garden on the Burton loop. It’s a syncopation of hot colors and contrasts, of ‘Hot Lips’ and ‘Black-eyed Susans’, with daturas blowing trumpets and bugles swinging low, presided over by a ginger jar pot-bellied and blue.

Colleen has been gardening here since moving from Gig Harbor in 2005, and she started propagating plants in 2008. She used to create jewelry, but when the family strain of macular degeneration set in, she transferred her creative drive to an art with a broader brush. “Have you ever seen the late works of Monet?” she asked me. “He had macular degeneration, yet his last paintings are BEAUTIFUL!” 

So is her garden. Because of her vision’s need, her plant choices provide plenty of visual punch. She adores dark plants—especially purple—using them as a dark foil for golden foliage and yellow flowers.

You can see such contrasts quickly if you hang a right around the corner of the garage. There, shaded from 10am onward, is her shade garden. Here above a dark carpet of purple bugle, the golden Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra)and a golden lavatera light up the somber darks of Ligularia ‘yellow rocket’ and a black snakeroot at the corner—more teal than black here given the dearth of sun.

You might notice a little red-headed flower weaving in and out; this is Sage ‘Hot Lips’, which is all over this garden. As you exit the shade garden, head downhill to the house’s SE corner to see ‘Hot Lips’ full grown, a spectacle in red, white, and green. Next to it is another plant Colleen has much propagated, which she’s dubbed ‘Hot Pink’ after its neighbor. Colleen says ‘Hot Lips’ blooms from spring through frost, in full sun to partial shade, and literally REPELS deer.

This garden is open to deer, so Colleen’s garden design venture specializes in deer-resistant plants “though they can surprise you— this spring they’ve been eating my sedums!” (mine, too!) She’s found that deer don’t eat ligularias, hostas, japanese forest grass, royal fern or painted fern, or sweet box. I suspect one could add to that list her Japanese irises (Iris ensata), which she loves so much she propagated 350 of them last spring. 

 The garden slopes downward to the house, and there you’ll find the labor of Colleen’s winter: a greenhouse and benches with HUNDREDS of propagated plants she’ll offer for sale during tour. 20% of proceeds will go to VAA, the rest to help fund her “plant-aholic addiction.” She described the difficulty of getting Japanese iris to germinate—two striations, then mowing the tiny first leaves down to develop roots under grolites. “I just LOVE getting a seed to germinate.”

As you go back up the steps, try not to tromp on one of Colleen’s favorite fillers “that people don’t notice unless I point it out—the tiny daisy Erigeron, also known as fleabane or Santa Barbara daisy. It fills in so beautifully with little flecks of light, growing all over the place. It’s easy to yank out where I don’t want it, it’s not annoying, spills down through things, blooms all season.”

She also uses  ajuga—also known as purple bugle— as a ground cover. “It’s good growing against a succulent called golden “Angelina”  in the walkway—they’re pushy enough to fight each other.” And it’s so prolific that she’ll give people pieces of it, right out of the ground. So why not ask? And buy a few plants off her to support her “plant-aholic addiction” before the NW Perennial Alliance descends like a swarm later this summer. 

To get tickets to Vashon Allied Arts’ garden tour next weekend, June 26-27, go online to www.vashonalliedarts.org.

In so many ways, Sherene & Rick’s garden is an exercise in “Be Here, Now.”

When you come visit their garden on Indian Head, you’ll be handed a flyer that guides you down the “Meditation Path” they’ve created across their hillside. At its many stations, cued by quotation plaques and art, you can take in the distant view, the Wisdom of the Ages…

…and the inescapable feeling that while your thoughts may be high-flying, your feet are on precarious ground.

The Skillman/Zolno garden is on a high terrace of Indian Head, a forested slope of firs and maples, hemlocks and madrones, of leaf-muck clay and sandy pockets. Because it’s so steep, the soil wants to “Go Down There, Now” (it’s tried, at least three times) and so a garden has been developed to hold the land in place. 

Let’s take it from the top: the Salmon Gate, made by Rick Skillman, Valerie Willson & Penny Grist (artist credits for the many artworks will be on the flyer, so I won’t go on repeating them). The gate opens onto the head of a steep ravine where, in 1998, a large big-leaf maple fell, taking slopes, new paths, and brand-new stairway with it. To hold and restore this ground, Sherene replanted in natives like red-flowering currant, rhodies, nootka rose, and snowberry, which close to the paths is trimmed hedge-fashion.

As you wind down the stairs toward the greenhouse, you’ll come to a style of pipe-n-beam terracing that you’ll see throughout the garden. Three years after they moved here in 1995, their gardener Beth Kellner noticed sand eroding into the garage from the slope above. She recommended Al Bradley, rock and retaining wall specialist; he and crew drove rows of steel pipe 10-14 feet down into hardpan, then stacked 12′x4′ beams of PT behind the pipes (they’re masked by Rick’s wood-box “posts”).

When they noticed erosion around the south side of the house, Al started a new wall that ended up joining Rick’s goat-path to a plum tree he’d discovered east, buried under blackberries (the “Bodhi Tree”). That wall project laid down a path, which required a stairs, which needed a landing, on which Rick built a shelter, that now overhangs the pool that collects the waterfall that cascades down the stairs. One garden project suggested another.

Rick became very skilled at building wooden garden features, such as the Yogananda and St. Francis shelters. A devotee of Yogananda, he built the bench at the foot of the “Bodhi Tree”, their blackberry-rescued plum, and installed statues of Yogananda and the hermit saint Babaji. Beth and Sherene built a rock garden where the Yogananda statue sits today, and when Beth retired, Sherene took over all the gardening duties. She spends about 30% of her time now, gardening. (“70% prepping for tour,” she added.)

And they became art collectors. Down by the Dockton Overlook Deck, search for Rick’s “Sprite” garden of little figurines. 

The latest art, installed two weeks ago, is a railing of painted iron and blown-glass by Tacoma counselor/minister/iron-worker Chris Causey. The railing leads to the original lawn, which is ringed by perennials and two magnolias kept low against the view. Toward the back is an bellflower/astilbe/lily garden.

And there, you’ll find the latest bit of ground to succumb: it’s marked by a vertical field of foxgloves. This ground gave way in January 2009. Again, Al Bradley and Dave Stout battened down the ground, while Sherene and helper Norm replanted in natives, laying 25′ ladders upon the face of the slide for access to the slippery slope. 

Sherene, Rick, and their helpers have turned problems into opportunities. Take in their garden when you’re ready for inspiration and for the many rest-stops along their Meditation Path. And along the way, say a prayer for their garden: that it will “Be Here, Now” for the long run.

Tickets for the VAA Garden Tour, June 26-27, are available at the Blue Heron Art Center or online: www.vashonalliedarts.org.
Visitors should park above the garden on Pillsbury Road and enter the garden through the “Salmon Gate.” There’s limited “drop-off” parking at the bottom of a steep driveway.

Generous—that’s the best way to describe Kay White and her garden.

A lifetime of wonderful projects abound in her Maury Island garden: a pergola, lath house, and gazebo, a rill garden with fountain and fish pond, carpet beds of annuals and a woodland shrubbery. There’s even a tropical conservatory. 

But the real action is in the greenhouses. If you’ve ever bought one of the Garden Club’s tomato starts, 100 fuchsia baskets, or 250 potted-up geraniums, then you’ve taken home a little bit of Kay White’s generosity. She’s been growing these plants, gratis, for the garden club sale for nearly 20 years.

Sally Fox, neighbor and President of the Garden Club, says, “Kay has been a pillar in the Garden Club for thirty years and was president in the early 90s. She continues to give so much to the Club—and to our scholarship fund and school support—by propagating hundreds of plants for our annual plant sale. People come to the sale specifically asking for her geraniums, tomato starts, and fuschia baskets. There is a lot of appreciation in the Garden Club for all that Kay has given over these years, and she has a special place in our hearts.”

“In her quiet way, Kay inspires many of us—and she definitely inspires me. She loves her plants, loves her garden, and is still learning at age 89. There is nothing pretentious about her love of horticulture. She may not know all the botanical names of her plants, but she knows what pleases her and she stays actively engaged in her garden.”

Kay Walks Me Around

I was told to “come around back by the greenhouses: that’s where we’ll be.” I arrive to find Steve, her groundsman, scooping up gravel for a new driveway bed and joking with a co-worker. Suni, a slim Korean woman in gray turtleneck, finds Kay for me, then walks us into the white-fenced vegetable garden. Kay says to me quietly, “She does most of this,” as Suni explains how the broccoli got to be so large by early June (“I planted in February and put this reemay over it.”) and what that spear-headed perennnial is (“That’s red-vein sorrel—and that smaller one is regular lemon sorrel.”)

Their gravel-flecked soil has great tilth: it’s amended every October with okara, autumn leaves, and leftover grape skins from Andrew Will’s winery. “The okara smell goes away if we bury it quickly,” Kay says, “The blueberries love the wine lees!” Wood-shreddings left by road-crews hide black row-cloth covering the pathways —an anti-weed strategy I soon see that they use throughout the garden.” 

Suni heads back to the greenhouses as Kay and dog Silver walk me through the bedding-out garden. Here, dakota-stone raised beds are filled with lithodora, zonal geraniums, pansies or petunias, One bed’s filled with Asiatic lilies just starting to bloom. As we head further past the Lath House, the manmade stone gives over to walls of cobbles. “It pops out of our soil—the quarry’s just down the hill, you know,” Kay explains. 

I enter the Conservatory and gasp—there’s a grass hut in here! As well as a fountain and pool, cobblestone raised beds filled with birds-of-paradise and blue nile flowers (agapanthus), a Sago Palm (cycas revoluta)  that Kay brought from Pasadena when they moved here in 1978, and in the back, the Cactus Corner. “Myrna’s doing this: she likes cactus.” 

In the very back, Kay shows me their drying shed for tulip bulbs, pulled from the raised beds a few weeks ago; they’re sorted by height, “but we can’t keep the colors straight so we don’t even try.” In another few weeks, the died-down foliage will be pulled and the bulbs brushed clean, then sacked for re-planting next fall.

We walk on past the soft-fruit corral, a large, netted enclosure filled with beds of strawberries, blueberries, gooseberries and currants. We pass around a fat cedar and oh MY, there’s the iris bed—a FIELD full of frilly bearded irises with—as I trip over one—a label for each specimen. “Did you go wild with the Cooley’s catalog?” I ask. “No—the Schreiner’s,” she replies, smiling. “It’s a hobby of Myrna’s and mine. We cannot resist that catalog.” 

On to the wetland with its little bridge and the horsetail hedge … up the shrubbery slope to the white-clad gazebo looking (once upon a time) to Mt. Rainier … past the kalmias in bright-red bloom, on through the orchard to take a rest in the “Rill Garden” that hides near the house, where we sit talking and watch a pair of goldfinches drink from the fountain at the rill’s head.

Finally, she walks me up and down the former golf course. “My husband Bill was a golfing enthusiast, and he created five regulation-length fairways with putting greens, holes, and sand-traps.” Its greenswards are bordered by trees they bought from Briggs Nursery in Olympia 30 years ago: deodar cedars and lawson’s golden cypress, crabapples and ginkgos along the driveway, a dawn redwood and an empress tree (pawlownia) that should be in purple bloom come tour. She was particularly proud of what she called a “pinus tortuosa,” a conifer with needles curled as if raking its inner blackboard.

As we come full circle, the white pergola comes back into view. It’s so magnificent, you barely notice the Sunglo greenhouses behind it. “This was my original greenhouse,” Kay invites me inside, “but my husband had to have one three times larger.” That’s the one next door, still holding benches of zonal geraniums left over from the Garden Sale. I notice orderly rows of plastic pots, clean and arranged from tiny to large; “Suni’s daughter does that for us.”

Finally, around back toward Mt. Rainier, she shows me the shed where the petunias have been hardening off. “These are all open-pollinated, and I think our seeds make plants that are VERY vigorous. Anything we take seeds from are healthier than the seeds from the store.” And in so many different colors, even striped: she’s got a right to be proud.

Suni, Steve, and the other co-workers have disappeared, as is the afternoon light. I say goodbye, and she replies, “Come back any time!”

And I plan, during tour, to come late if the day’s sunny: you’ll find Kay’s garden offers a relaxing stroll without the press of your fellow touristos, and the afternoon light pouring down the top of Raecoma hill should make her garden eloquently beautiful.

For tickets to the Vashon Allied Arts Garden Tour on June 26-27, visit www.vashonalliedarts.org/

Joanne says it best in this week’s e-notice from Plum Forest Farm, “EAT A LOT OF SALAD!” 

“Just a reminder that this is THE season of salad, so remember to luxuriate in it.  We have been eating salad as a meal, often twice a day.  We each fill a large plate with our salad mix [available at their farmstand on Tuesday afternoons, eggs daily by 10am] and add sliced radish and/or apple, dried cherries, cashews or almonds, some grated gruyere cheese, smoked salmon, and/or avocado if we have it, and our favorite salad dressing.  Our young daughters prefer the creamy salad dressing varieties, but Rob and I like the vinaigrettes.”

I’m with you, Joanne. Let’s all eat salad, and learn to make a good vinaigrette. 

My salad greens, big enough to rub elbows in my kitchen garden, are delicate both in taste and texture. In fact, without a daily rain or watering, the leaves lose their “starch” and become more the texture of tissue paper  (I suspect my very sandy soil lets the water drain off before the lettuce can absorb it.) Even with a night’s rain, the leaves are juiciest if I harvest them by mid-morning and let them soak til’ lunch in a bowl of tepid water, then finish in a quick cold water bath before spinning.

Vinaigrette Variations Around the Globe

You don’t want to smother such young, tender leaves in a thick sauce: you want to just coat them to let their forms and delicacies express themselves. Here’s several vinaigrettes that anybody can whip up last-minute.

A french-style vinaigrette uses 3 tablespoons olive oil to 1 of wine vinegar or lemon juice with a dab of dijon mustard. The italian style uses 4 tablespoons of oil to vinegar, and I like combine rice and balsamic vinegars in my tablespoon’s worth to give both snap and depth to the sauce. Salt, pepper, season, mix, and toss with the greens. 

Another favorite is a german style of 2 parts vinegar to 1 part vegetable oil, plus enough sugar to take the sting out of the vinegar and a grinding of fennel seed, anise seed, caraway, or dill weed. Go asian with the same proportions of oil and RICE vinegar (perhaps combo’ed with lime juice), plus a teaspoon’s splash of fish sauce and plenty of sugar. 

Variety Adds Spice to a Green Salad

A mixture of greens looks great in the garden and tastes just as wonderful in the salad bowl. Above, you can see my baby bok choy, mustard ‘Red Giant’, and  looseleaf lettuce ‘Black-seeded Simpson” behind, in a bed just outside my kitchen door.

Having the beds close makes easy harvesting at the last minute: I grab my spinner’s inner colander, fill it with 2/3 mixed lettuce leaves, then top with leaves of choi, mustard, broccoli rabe, chard, cress, kale, beets, cilantro, or spinach. If my beds need thinning, I pluck the largest of the baby veg, twist off the tap-root, and toss the whole baby into the lettuce’s bathwater. 

I’ve never grown mustards before: they provide a bitey green tang that juices up my salivary glands. But I get real punch in my bowl from cress. This isn’t the stuff that needs a running stream: my seeds, from Johnny’s, are called ‘Wrinkly Crinkly’ and the little plants aren’t any more demanding of water than your lettuces. I pluck thumb-sized leaves individually; the plant wants to bolt at 6″ high if it escapes the notice of my greedy pincers. I just read that you can grow this stuff on wet paper towels, in the same conditions as needed by your bean sprouting jar, and it’ll be ready within a week.

With the garden still rained on and my lettuces all harvestable now, I’m thinking of replacements. Might be a good idea to plug harvest-holes with replacement transplants or seeds. Might still have time to start a new flat of seedlings, since I KNOW lettuce doesn’t like to germinate in summer’s heat. Heck, the winter garden needs starting in July, and that’s a mere month away.

By then, all this lettuce will want to bolt. Last year I did come up with a week’s worth of fix for bitter lettuce by adding salt to its bath water to draw out the bitter juices. This year, I’m contemplating other, weirder techniques to delay the bolting. If lettuce is sensitive to over-long days, perhaps I should put them to sleep earlier in the day, like one does a parrot, by throwing a cover over their heads? If they’re heat-sensitive, perhaps popsicles of ice water thrust deep into their bed will cool their bolting heels?

Love the Rain, as long as it will stay. And long live our salad days.

It’s still raining, but more lightly, when I take the right-hand fork toward to Jonathan Morse’s cottage. In this wide Cedarhurst ravine, my eyes meet dark shadows, greens of apple and lime, silvery light. Yes, those are the colors of this moist May rainday—but also the colors caught in a strange obstacle I can see through: a gateway wall studded with fifteen windows, stood up with steel, painted in multi-green stripes of wood siding, its top implanted with—is that hair sedge?
      ”Yes, that’s Carex Comans ‘Frosted Curls,” Jonathan tells me. He’s a tall brunette in his 30s, cheeks red from being outdoors in cool weather, hands deep in pockets of a gortex jacket. “I thought about this project for over a year. My granddad—he was a civil engineer—had these steel i-beams laying around, and I wanted to do something with them, to put a barrier here to keep the eye from traveling straight down to the water. Then, when I visited my sister in Chicago, she took me to Frank Lloyd Wright’s house in Oak Park. I was inspired by this stained glass window there called “Forest Canopy” that picked up the way colors play in the forest. So that helped me figure out where to go with this project.”

 There’s certainly a forest canopy frame to this property: the usual firs, cedars, and alders seem even taller than usual.There’s a seasonal creek that runs invisibly along one driveway, completely covered by salmonberry and ferns. 

Against this tall green dominance, Jonathan has spent twelve years building a garden of Color and Contrast, framed by strongly-shaped beds. Foliage seems more important to the design than flowers. There’s a small example in the entrance space, where a tall Oregon grape, Mahonia x media ‘Charity’, towers over a purple persicaria and golden wood millet. Shapes and foliage colors contrast with each other and with the surfaces—gravel, mulch, lawn—that underlay them.

As we walk down to the shoreline, we walk past a line-up of shrubs. Purple smoke-bush rubs shoulders with a fluffy golden Cryptomeria japonica ‘Sekkan-Sugi’ next to a dark ninebark, followed by a “butterfly” magnolia and, finally, a blue-gray alpine eucalyptus. Here, plants stand in contrast to each other in form and color: this is a “Look at THIS!” garden. 

His azara is variegated. His hop-vine is ‘golden.’ His little holly isn’t just prickly: it’s a ” silver hedgehog” holly (Ilex Aquifolium ‘Ferox Argentea’). Uncommon plants are abundant here, planted in uncommon associations: a spiderwort ‘blue and gold’ in a wine barrel with an alpine fir, a shade-loving brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ growing with some sun-loving heathers and an olearia bush in a shoreline bed. 

Jonathan has been working on this landscape for the last twelve years. He really seems to know his plants: turns out he’s a fellow Fairhaven grad with a self-designed degree in “Organic Plant Cultivation.” He’s worked at Island Lumber’s gardening center for the last three years, but he’s gardened since he was a kid. I ask his dad, Bill, if he’s got a role in all this: “I’m only the grunt labor,” he says with a smile.

We wind around his parents’ house (the narrow west alley was his first garden project here) and come to the Alpine Garden. “This used to be a parking lot, but what a waste,” Jonathan says, “it’s the best place on the property for sitting because it’s higher and gets more sun.”  The area’s sandy soil is topped with an inch or two of decomposed granite that mulches alpines, hens-n-chicks and other sedums planted around lowbush blueberries, alpine firs, and weeping Alaskan cedars.  Another wonderful design of his, the Cedar Entry (top photo), is made from logs left from a take-down project of the power company. Note its sedum-filled roof.

Between the Cedar Post Gate and the greenhouse, a path winds downhill upon heavy rock walls. These Jonathan built in 2001 and 2004 to protect this hillside against runoff pouring down the ravine. The terraces originally held vegetables, but now only dahlias and onions remain. His mother Betty presents me with a bag of “walking onion” sets. In the greenhouse, Jonathan is growing his garden’s next generation: I see plenty of tiny hellebores. “When I’m tired of something or it’s exhausted, I like to have new plants on hand to plug in.” 

We move to the “new” vegetable garden and yet another amazing project, just completed: an entrance wall made with wood rounds and “windows” of rusted conduit pipe, all of it mortared together with mud. The dark green, wooden door is grid-punched with 3″ holes, all 240 of them coated lime-green for—of course—color contrast. “I was worried the door was going to be too heavy, so the holes became a way to lighten it up.” 

The vegetable garden started just as individual orchard-tree fences, joined up as a corridor as the trees grew, then Jonathan realized “with just a little more fencing”, he could enclose an entire meadow. So food production moved inside the fence, as did many perennials that deer love. 

 The vegetable garden is circular and divided like a pie (another plant pun?) And in the shady area south, look for the bed completely devoted to purple-leafed ligularia, hopefully sparkling with yellow flowers, the apricot heucheras ‘Tiramisu’, and the darkly splotched podophyllum (May Apple) against the shed.

Folks, take this garden in early, while your eyeballs are still refreshed. It’s more than a feast for the eyes: as we used to say in high school, it’s a “pig-out.”

I’ll be previewing the other gardens of the VAA Garden Tour in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

For tickets to the VAA Garden Tour on June 26-27, visit here: http://vashonalliedarts.org/specialevents/gardentour/gardentour.htm

I was invited to tour a wonderful old garden last week and then sworn to secrecy about its whereabouts or its owner’s name. I can understand, living where they do. Let’s just say that the property is uphill from a large beach, the kind of place where humans have always loved to congregate. Our gardener—let’s call her “G”— not only had her own garden stories to tell, but speculations about her place going back, back, WAY back.

When I arrived, I found G weeding in the flowerbeds fronting a little white bungelow. “Shhhhhh—my daughter’s sleeping in there,” she warns me, then explains that her  own mother moved into this garage/studio at the end of her life. 

Here in the backyard, G has a small vegetable patch that’s fenced and some fruit trees. A young peach tree is loaded with dime-sized fruit. A gnarly ol’ apple tree—she describes it as “an old-fashioned Red Delicious, before they bred it up”—spreads its limbs over the driveway. Twenty years ago its core grew hollow and started to rot, so they filled it with four bags of concrete. “It keeps fruiting and did pretty well last year.”

“There were fruit trees here when we arrived [in 1977], but most have died off. We’ve replaced them.” The ranch-style house is a renovation—”There was another house here before: I think it was a lodge.” A small cabin still stands on the other side of the fence—all that’s left of a once-popular retreat?

As we walk down the driveway, G points out the native rhododendrons grown tall, their purple trusses just filling out. A few steps south, a pink hybrid rhody out-blooms the natives and elbows aside what appears to be a 10-foot kalmia. Another gigantic rhododendron with rose-red flowers looms over this south lawn. “You can see siblings of this rhody all around—see, there’s one across the street. I think somebody brought a truckload of plants here and sold them door-to-door.”

Every shrub is huge, but the presence looming over all is of scent, not sight: a 20-foot deciduous azalea, its golden blossoms at their peak or past it, its sugar-sweet perfume flooding the air. These shrubs were obviously planted long before G arrived.

The place was calved off, long ago, from a summertime estate held by a wealthy Seattle family. This neighborhood dates back to the late 1800s, and certainly these rhodies are as large as those in Portland’s Rhody Test Garden, established in the early 1900s (reviewed last week). Were these tree-sized shrubs planted by a gardener of that family? 


As we go around the corner of the house, she points out a snowball bush. “My husband planted this because his mother had one: he and his siblings used to use the flowers for snowball fights.” G plucked one of the pure white globes and tossed it to me. “Go ahead—throw one at the dog.” And I think “Now THIS is what new parents should plant instead of a commemorative tree— the kids will have so much more fun with their snowballs!”

A few steps away, G stops. “Right here were two huge Sugar Pines—well, they might have been Ponderosa Pines. But they were HUGE—four people together couldn’t reach around them—and the cones and needles were over a foot long.”

“Remember that storm in 1979 that took out the Hood Canal Bridge?” she continues. “I was over in Seattle with my daughter and new grand-baby. We missed the ferry, got on the next—the last one, it turns out—and the dockhands made us gun our engines and get ready to jump onto the loading ramp because it was BOUNCING off the ferry deck.”

“When we got home, we found our neighbors in our drive with tarps and chain-saws, because the tops of the pines had fallen on our roof. One branch punched through the kitchen and, I’m not kidding, turned and went down the hallway. If we’d caught that first ferry, we would have been in the kitchen unloading groceries, and who KNOWS…!” She pauses, takes a breath. “And now, where the trees fell through the roof, I’ve got skylights!” 

As we come full-circle, she points to the ground by a circling hedge and says, “”We used to find bottles back here dated late 1800s—dozens of bottles, it was like a dump. One day my son came inside and said to my husband, ‘Dad, the Blazer’s sinking into a hole!’ One front tire was sunk right to the car frame. We got the Blazer out and found a 6′ wide by 20′ deep hole with clean sides. We think it was an old well. Years before, it had been covered with boards and a few inches of dirt. You know, we had children—they could have fallen in!—so my husband spent the summer poking every inch of our ground, looking for more holes.”

We’re back at my car, but G slips inside the hedge and I follow. “This is my secret garden: I come here because it’s always quiet and green and cool. I mostly planted natives in here, and in the summer we hang Indonesian chimes from these trees.”

She puts a hand on the long-reaching arm of a conifer I don’t recognize—one of two. “Do you recognize what these are? It’s a Pacific Yew—you know, the kind they harvest for Taxol? They’re native to the Olympic Peninsula, and it’s extremely rare for one to show up on this side of the Olympics. I had a tree expert here once, and he thought these were about 200 years old. Apparently Indians used the bark on wounds, so I like to think that a Shaman lived in my secret garden and planted these trees here.”

More rain is threatening, so I get in my car next to the former Hole-that-Ate-the-Blazer, under the shade of the Apple-Tree-Filled-With-Concrete. I think of the treasures found in my own former digs: the pickaxe head my husband’s mower ran into, the top of a painter’s kit found in a flowerbed. We can’t always know for sure what the facts are behind our garden discoveries, but it’s pleasant to speculate, isn’t it? And even better to have a good Show-n-Tell for a pair of ears wide open.

(Thanks to G for the opening photo of the rhody-drive and of the close-up of the rose-colored rhody truss. The other images are mine.)

Coming up: Talking with the Gardeners on this year’s VAA Garden Tour

 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…)

(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!

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.

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.

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.

My "Mrs. Moon" rose

Can’t argue anymore: when croci and daffs are up, cherry trees bloom, cover crop grows, and a squeezed dirt clod breaks up when thumbed, it may be winter by the calendar but it’s spring in ground and air.

The yellow bloom of forsythia is the traditional signal that’s it’s time to prune your roses. (As if their canes breaking out in leaves weren’t signal enough.) Grab a bucket and your felco hand loppers: the bypass kind will make kinder cuts than the anvil style, where one blade smashes against a flat-edged blade. 

Then go appraise your first target bush. Mine—which we’ll call ‘Mrs. Moon’ as once labeled though none of my rose books nor the Internet can find a rose by that name—grows in habit like a floribuna tea or an English/David Austen rose. That is, it’s shrubby, taller than wide, with 3-6′ canes growing from a graft just above ground level. And as you can see from the photo above, it throws plenty of flowers per branch.

Over the summer, it threw several 6′ canes, which you can see in the “Before Pruning” image. The December freeze also left its legacy of dead wood, usually those stumps above prior year’s pruning cuts or new spurs too skinny to keep from freezing through. In fact, as I went through my roses I saw a lot of winter-kill even of the thickest, oldest branches.

All that winter-killed, dead wood has got to be pruned away. Take it down to the base of the brown, even if you have to cut right above the graft, near ground level (you might need mightier loppers for this. Try to make a cut at an angle so that rain will drain off the cut. Also cut out any crossing branches.

After that’s done, start pruning back the new, thin wood at the top of the green branches. You want to prune back to pencil-thick green limbs, down 1/3-1/2 the length of the total branch (see red lines in the “Before Pruning” photo).

Sadly, at least on this bush, that means snipping away a lot of branches that are sprouting leaves. But I am consoled, because I can “read” from prior year’s cuts that from those cuts the bush will grow new and thicker stems instead of these spindlies. All the better to support those heavy sprays of flowers to come.

Where to cut? Look carefully on the pencil-thick stem for a dark ring, not much thicker than a pen line, that goes around the whole stem. You’ll find them every 4-6″ or so. A good one will have a tiny bud knob on it. Make an angled cut 1/4″ above the ring, with the top of your cut arcing above the bud. The plant’s energy rising up that stem will push the new growth right out that bud.

Once the spindlies and deadwood are off, then you can get artistic. Now, it’s about shaping, about aiming the new growth to reach into the open spaces between limbs. For that, you find buds pointing toward those open spaces, and cut there.

When you’re done, your rose bush will look quite ungainly, all knees and knobs and knitting needles bristling with thorns as in the “After Pruning” photo above.

Dump your bucket of prunings into your brush-pile (not into compost) or burn them. Then feed your rose with aged compost, manure, or rose food, well scratched into the earth. Roses, like prima donnas of the ol’ Italian opera, are heavy feeders. Carol Arnold once told me that a scoop of epson salts helps them take up nitrogen. And David Austen, the famous breeder of those English roses, says they also love a fertilizer heavy in potash.

As for climbing roses, the only pruning you need do is prune out old dead canes and any deadwood you can reach. Feed them now, too. Rugosa roses just need to be shaped and their wizened rose hips cut off.

You can prune and shape other summer-blooming shrubs and perennials now, too, such as lavender, santolina, asters, daisies, and potentilla.

By April your roses will have leafed out and, by June, will be blooming like mad. And I’ll be sniffing them and decorating them with snippets of my True Love’s Hair to keep Bambi from loving them to death. Everything needs pruning sometime…

Friends, this long-time anchor of our gardening Island NEEDS OUR SUPPORT—AND PRONTO.

From Sally Fox, 2/20/2010:

“I am writing to friends, Garden Club members and island gardeners who may shop at Kathy’s Corner or know Kathy Wheaton (THE “Kathy”).  I spoke with her this morning while I was doing research for a Beachcomber article on our island nurseries.  I know that the recession has been hard on all of our nurseries—and I care about them all—but what I heard  from Kathy had me in tears.

I had to do something.  I am writing because I know some of you may want to help or can spread the word.

Last year was a very tough year for the nursery business.  The recession has been hard and margins are very slim. Kathy was just hanging on.  Then, this past  December during the cold snap, Kathy and her husband suffered some disasters: one  greenhouse came apart (killing most of Lloyd’s prize jade plants), a furnace failed in another greenhouse (killing the new starts), and one of her trucks died.  All of that was very very difficult and they weren’t sure how they would make it.

Then it got worse.  Two weeks later Kathy fell, shattering her arm (a complicated break at the shoulder).  The doctors have said it may be months before she is operational and she may never recover full use of her arm.  On top of needing cash to keep her business alive, Kathy will have huge medical bills, (fortunately she has insurance, but  she will still be responsible for 20%).  

Kathy isn’t asking for help—but she needs it. I want to make sure that she can stay in business. She has to find a way to get cash in these next VERY critical weeks. 

I wanted to do something.  So I took out my checkbook and decided I could gift her some money, buy a gift certificate, and tell my friends.  

And I was hoping that some of you would want to do the same.  Please spread the word.  On Monday, I am hoping to set up a bank account for donations, but you can always drop a check off at the nursery. [This "beneficial account for Kathy Wheaton" is being set up at Washington Mutual—now Chase Bank— and will be ready for donations on Wednesday, Feb 24.]

When I asked her how she keeps going when it is so difficult, she said: “Vashon people are amazing.  The customers are amazing.  Their desire to keep us here is what keeps me working.  It is what keeps me going.”

Creeping rosemary seemed planted in every container, parking strip, and drainage-pond verge. I’ve never thought of it as a landscaping plant en masse, but it looked great in long swaths on a bank, blooming its ghostly blue in the late winter sun. Unlike the pencil-thin junipers and Russian Olive trees planted everywhere to evoke Tuscany and the Mediterranean, creeping rosemary does just fine in the Puget Sound, provided it has excellent drainage. I once grew it in a sand-filled trench.

Speaking of things Tuscany, the truly fun discovery of the trip were the proliferation of Olive Oil stores—at least three just in the “town centre” I was hoteling in. Sis and I were snagged in a “WeOlive” boutique, where the fat, affable proprietor thrust thimble after thimble of oils and vinegars at us. Who knew black cherries could make such a sweet balsamico? Apparently the olive growers of California have joined cooperatively and created oil boutiques modeled after wine tasting cellars. Their price of $1/ounce for their bulk oils or vinegars may SEEM cheap  (who can’t afford $1 per?), but I saw later at our local grocery that a good balsamic vinegar can be had for .50¢/ounce. But the experience of standing there guzzling and comparing the good stuff? Priceless.

Speaking of Cost Comparisons: Catalog vs. Store Rack

I was pulled yet again toward the seed racks in True Value today: the Ed Hume racks seem particularly well-stocked with new varieties, as if they hope for a repeat of last year’s run on vegie seeds. I’ve been curious to see whether the price is better from the seed catalog, or if stores mark up the prices on the seed racks. Apparently not, at least for Territorial Seed Company: prices are the same whether you buy straight from the catalog or off the seed rack. Your selection is about 100% larger in the catalog, though, and it comes with more information. So if you DO buy off the rack, do pick up a catalog if for the growing information alone.

In the Perennial Garden: Clean Up, Transplant, and Divide

Since we seem to be further along toward spring than the calendar suggests, this is a good time to clean up the garden and to divide or transplant perennials. You can trim the winter-kill of perennials back to their crowns, and with a sharp snips you can “de-dead-leaf” plants that look tatty, like lady’s mantle or bergenia. The grasses—all except the razor-sharp ones—you can comb with your fingers to pull out dead blades and bent stalks. 

I usually move shasta daisies in March, but as long as your soil is not water-logged, moving them now assures them enough spring rain to establish new roots. Other plants to divide and/or transplant include the summer bloomers like rudbeckia, echinacea, dierama (‘angel’s fishing rod’), epimedium, daylilies, catmint, sedums, agastache, alchemilla (‘lady’s mantle’), and asters. When opening the earth for these, loosen the soil with a handful of compost or aged leaf mould: this will feed the plant, as well as provide good drainage should our early spring do an about-face.

Less than a week after I placed my order, the seeds from Nichols Garden Nursery in Albany, Oregon have arrived. So many dreams in such a little package!

Not an Octopus, but a Pea

Last week, I wrote about starting a seed germination test. Some of last year’s seeds didn’t seem to sprout so readily, so I wanted to test them for viability before finalizing this year’s seed order.

I tested pac choi, two kinds of peas, carrots, beets, mesclun, and two varieties of lettuce, ‘red romaine’ and ‘prizehead.’ It’s not difficult: you sandwich 10-12 seeds between damp layers of paper towels, press together lightly to make good contact with the seed, then seal the towels in a plastic bag and park the packet in a warm, dark place. Check every couple of days until they sprout: toss the seed packet if you get less than 75% germination.

The closet with the water heater worked well: within 24 hours, the dry, wrinkled pea seeds had plumped up and within 48 hours, that long tap-root on the left had erupted out one end. One week later, you can see that the pea has developed multiple roots, plus a stem so delicate that when I opened up the paper towel sandwich, it broke.

Most of the seeds had 90% germination, with the exception of the ‘prizehead’ at 21 of 29 test seeds, and ‘red romaine’ with 12 of 16 test seeds. If I grow these at all, it will be in 2″ cells that I’ll grow as transplants so that I don’t end up planting “duds.”

A Seed Exchange at the Food Summit

In hopes of encouraging further diversity in our gardens, I’ll be handling the Seed Exchange at the Food Summit March 5-7. You may have seen this box before at the Saturday Markets: Cathy Fulton of Mariposa Gardens has charge of it during the year. Bring some seed, take some seed.

Some of the seed in the box is getting old, so I’ll test it for viability before the Food Summit. (Note that, while many seeds can last a few years if stored in a cool, dark, dry place, allium seeds are usually good for only one year.)

When you bring seed to share, the box has envelopes on which you can write the seed variety, year issued, and any notes you’d like to add—even your name & phone number if you’re open to being consulted. 

Sounds like the kids from school are also going to bring new seed they bought in bulk and divided as part of a class project. So there should be some Good Stuff to make your garden even more interesting this year.

A Classic Sign of Late Winter

Lastly, some late winter classics: these snowdrops blooming across the street from the Burton Post Office. 

• Cathy Fulton will be talking about the Food Summit at this week’s meeting of the Sustainable Practices Committee, Thursday, 7pm at the Land Trust building.

• Ivan Weiss wants you to know he has farm-fresh eggs available for “the going rate” ($6/dozen) at his farm in upper Burton. Call ahead: 463-HOGS.

• Seattle’s Flower & Garden Show starts Wednesday and runs through this weekend. DIG will be there in the Vendor’s section, and local garden girl Patty Campbell will give a seminar on “Flower Pot Produce” at 5pm Sunday in the Mt. Hood room.

The Sap’s Rising, making Saps of us all

Have you noticed? The weather, the croaking frogs, and the American Capitalist System are conspiring to convince us it’s spring. 

This has been the warmest January on record: 48° on average, a full seven degrees warmer than the usual low 40s. With the jet stream sending foul weather to north and south of us, our plants think they’re getting mild spring weather. My wallflowers are trying to bloom: they normally blossom in March, with tulips. Just south of town, the forsythia hedge in front of the “Holiday House” is dotting itself yellow. And near the Athletic club, a couple of cherries have sent up a soft-pink cloud of bloom.

These so-called “autumn-flowering” cherries are meant to bloom in late winter. THEY’RE on schedule, but the rest of us, humans and plants, are being led down the primrose path. Our area almost ALWAYS has what I call a “January Thaw” when the oddly-warm air fools humans and flowers alike to think we’re getting an early spring. Our sap is rising, we’re ready to open the wallets and flush out some green. And the shops are ready for us…

Seedy Temptation

As you enter Thriftway through their primrose-lined entrance, you’ll find the seed-packet racks blooming with new arrivals. 2010 Seed packets from Ed Hume, Botanical Interests, and Territorial Seed Company can be found at True Value, Thriftway, Island Lumber, and Country Store (they also carryseeds from  Abundant Life, a company supplying organic and biodynamic seeds that was bought by Territorial seven years ago.) 

Country Store told me they’ve been fielding questions about seeds from eager customers for weeks now, and they are already selling seeds to folks who say they’re planting soon.

But for hobby gardeners, it’s still too early to sow. We may have the warmth, the seed-rotting rains may be averted (for now), but what we don’t have is solar power. Stray sunbeams may have played upon my greenhouse enough to warm it to 60°, but only from 10:30 to 2:30—about two hours shy of the bare minimum for healthily growing plants.

I suspect only the most favored sites—  top-of-the-island farms with open southern exposures like Plum Forest and Island Meadow—will start seedlings this early and only in their greenhouses. As Leda Langley told me last year, “most gardeners get stuck starting way too early, then end up nursing their transplants along for way too long.” Most seedlings only want to be in their little pots for about 4 weeks, yet our earliest frost-free day, according to Ed Hume, is March 24. 

It IS a good time to plan your seed order

In any year, late January through February is THE time to order seeds. If you order now, you’ll receive your seeds by late February, which will be a safer time to sow.

I spent last Saturday buried under one laptop, two gardening books, and five seed catalogs, typing my “Seed Spreadsheet” into google-docs as fast as my eyeballs could pull info from pages. Into this spreadsheet I’ve listed the plants I want to grow, noting varieties recommended by Steve Solomon (“Gardening West of the Cascades”) and Sylvia Thompson (“The Kitchen Garden”). With that list in hand, I can quickly scan the catalogs for those varieties and enter their prices/weight for a quick cost comparison when I’m ready to order.

I hope to diversify my plantings even more by trading for other’s extra seeds through the Seed Exchange at the Food Summit, March 5-7. (More on that in a later blog.)

While you’re at it, test your old seed

Before you order, you could test your old seeds—even last year’s packets—to see whether the seed is still viable or whether you’ll need to buy replacements. Here’s how to do a germination test:

• find a dark, warm place: the closet where the water heater lives, on top of an appliance with a pilot light, near the woodstove.

• Take two sheets of paper towel, lay on over the other, and moisten the upper half on your counter or a cooky sheet. A misting bottle works great.

• Take ten seeds or so from an older packet of seed you want to test. Spread those across the moistened sheet. Fold the bottom of the towels over this layer of seed, and moisten again so the sheets are damp but not dripping.

• Place this folded sheet into a ziploc bag. Seal and place in the dark, warm spot. To keep track of what’s in the bag (in case you’re loading it with several trials), take notes on the bag’s exterior or on a separate sheet of paper, not on the towel itself—wet ink RUNS, remember.

• Open and check seeds daily for sprouting. Within the week if they’re good, they’ll begin to sprout. Your packet may show the expected minimum germination rate (Johnny’s and Territorial for sure). If you get germination much less than that—or under 75%—either sow them as transplants so you won’t plant dudes, or replace the packet.

This idea comes courtesy of today’s Thriftway temptation: a special issue magazine from Taunton Press called “Starting From Seed.”

 Hey, I’m not immune! I may not buy THAT it’s spring, but can I resist buying INTO spring? Not a chance…

So what’s making the difference? Vegetables, of course: we have to buy them now that the December freeze turned my winter garden to mush. Still, “twice what it was” doesn’t tell you much about what you saved by growing your own.

But Nancy Lewis-Williams, Master Gardener and teacher of last year’s popular vegetable-growing class, HAS kept a running tally of what her harvest has been worth to her pocketbook. From June through December first, she weighed all the produce she’d harvested and kept a running tally, in pounds, of 33 different crops, from apples to zucchini. 

“Well, maybe 75% of it—I didn’t count the stuff we ate right off the vine,” she hedged. “And it also doesn’t include all the greens we grew in early spring, before I started this count.”

Her computer went on the fritz the same week I asked for her end-of-harvest totals, so I stepped in and looked up current prices at Thriftway. So here’s another hedge: we didn’t use height-of-season prices (except for the raspberries, which I had recorded for myself in Quicken when I bought a half-flat this summer).

Given all these qualifiers, what did we find? That Nancy had harvested nearly $500′ worth 0f organic vegetables per MONTH from her 2000 s.f. garden. 

The harvest total was worth $1810, using winter Thriftway prices for non-organic produce. If compared to organic prices, the harvest would be worth $2952.

“And I’ve still got a month’s worth out there in leeks, kale, carrots, chard, turnips, rutabagas and spinach,” she said.

The Big Pay-offs

The big pay-off, both in weight and in dollars grown, was from POTATOES. With a pound of seed potatoes for “Rose Finn Apple Fingerlings” from Ronnigers in Colorado (www.ronnigers.com), her return was hundredfold: 110 pounds worth $440 smackaroos. She also planted around 10 lbs of seed potatoes for regular spuds and got 250 lbs in return, worth $250 or $500 at organic prices. 

Leda Langley told me last spring that you get the biggest bang in calories and productivity/acre with potatoes, and here Nancy’s proved her point.

Other seeds with a large return, literally, were: TOMATOES at 109 lbs, worth at least $218 and probably well over $300 organic; 95 pounds of WINTER SQUASH (delicate and butternut) worth $1 per pound; 36 pounds of CUCUMBERS worth $72 or twice that if organic; LEAFY FRY GREENS like kale, chard, and spinach that come bagged at premium prices anywhere from $4-6 per pound. “I didn’t count all the corn: I must have pared kernels off of hundreds of ears.” 

If you’re a fruit-fancier willing to pay for fresh off-season berries, you might want to invest in a few bushes and a freezer. Nancy’s 28 pints of RASPBERRIES were worth at least $65 compared to in-season local berries, or $448 compared to last week’s Chilean winter imports at a Buck an Ounce. 

Other results: HERBS: 13 handfuls worth $65; 15 lbs of LEEKS worth $45; 32 pounds of BEETS worth anywhere from $1.50/lb to $5/lb for organic; 29 pounds of CARROTS worth from $22-30; 15 lbs of CABBAGE worth 50¢ a pound but four times that organically. 

The Investment

My husband, always the skeptic, pointed out that there’s costs involved: water, fertilizer, seed trays, seed. 

“And you HAVE to have a deer-fence,” Nancy added when I asked about her costs. Deer-fencing runs about a dollar a running foot; you could fence a garden her size (2000 sf, equal to a 40′x50′) for  $100 plus the poles and gate materials.

Looking at her records, she estimated she spent $100 on seeds, $30/month on water, and $100 on organic fertilizer and amendments. Given that one doesn’t water in three of the months of her trial, that’s approximately $300 a year to install a 2000 s.f. vegie patch producing $3000 worth of food. That’s a tenfold return for your money.

Now Nancy’s put in a greenhouse last year; with such a large expense, you’re looking at costs close to what the author of “The $64 Tomato” ran up. But you don’t have to spend a lot on gear, as Steve Solomon points out in his latest book, “Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times”: you can direct seed instead of growing or buying transplants, you can start warm-season fruiting plants in a sunny window, you can blend your own fertilizer, and you can restrict your tools to a hoe, a bow rake, a good shovel, a sharp knife, and a hose. 

You may not be able to grow as large a bounty as Nancy did, but most folks DO realize some savings. In a poll done last year by the National Gardening Association, they found that “a well-maintained food garden yields a $500 average return per garden.”  

So save yourself a few or a LOT of bucks: Grow Your Own.

Stories I’m working on:

• A Seed Swap at the Food Summit Meeting: bring some, take some.

• Gates for deer-fencing

If you have ideas for stories or inputs on the above ideas, comment here or write me at karendale@centurytel.net.

Nothing like a warm winter sun-break and a bit of chain-sawing to warm a girl up. Sunday night’s wind brought down a small hemlock, already bone-dry and perfectly placed: right next to a road, its butt end still hinged to its stump, the trunk held three feet off the ground all its length. With the sunshine and a newly-sharpened chain,  it was a pleasure to work. Hope you got a chance at the sunshine, too.

The News:

I got this notice from Cathy Fulton today: she’s planning a Vashon Food Summit ”for People Who Eat” this March 5-7. Meetings for volunteers will be held later this week at the Vashon Library (see details below).

Cathy’s web site on the event (link below) says the event is “for Islanders to meet and share information and experience on most any topic regarding food and its impact on Vashon Island. Broad topics include Raising Food, Acquiring & Preparing Food, and The Food Economy.

The purpose is to encourage Islanders to become more aware of the food we eat, to eat more food closer to its source, and learn how to prepare good food more economically. Raising food and food prep will be key areas. We’ll also explore how the way we eat is ultimately a political act. There will be lectures, workshops, panels, organization tables, a “Stone Soup” dinner, and a “Food Celebration.”

The only volunteer meetings for those who would like to help with the Vashon Island Food Summit ( http://vashonfoodsummit.org/) are being held this week at the Vashon Library. The meetings will be Wednesday, January 20, 7:00 pm and Friday, January 22, 11:00 am. You only need to attend one meeting–they will be identical in subject matter.  If you cannot attend either meeting, but would like to like to be involved, let Cathy Fulton know by email or phone: cathy@MariposaGardens.org, 463-5652. 

 A preliminary list of volunteer opportunities can be found on her website at: http://vashonfoodsummit.org/index_files/Page363.htm

And also: mark your calendars for a return of last year’s popular Vegetable Growing Classes: two weekends later, on March 20 and 27, taught again Cathy Fulton and Nancy Lewis-Williams. Nancy and I are developing an article on “The Dollars You Can Save By Growing Your Own.”

Bob Dale’s Hot & Sour Noodle Soup
When the rains return, here’s a very peppy, winter soup that will cheer your bones.

Take a quart of chicken or turkey soup stock, put in kettle and on medium-high heat.

Into the pot add:
1 cup white cabbage, shredded into 1/4″ ribbons
1/3 cup shredded carrot (about 1/3 a carrot)
1 green onion, sliced thin on diagonal
1 celery rib, diced to 1/4″ pieces
Season with:
1 tbls “Sriracha” chili garlic paste (less if you like it less hot)
1 teas. soy sauce
1 teas. rice vinegar
1 teas. rice wine
Once soup comes to a boil, add a handful of wheat noodles (we like straight “Marco Polo” noodles: a hand-grab around a quarter-coin’s thickness is enough for two people).
Stir so noodles don’t clump, then reduce heat to simmer and cook for about 10 minutes, until noodles are al dente.
Thicken broth to a silky texture with 1 teas. cornstarch dissolved in 2 tbls. cold water. SERVE.

With rain predicted through the end of this week (and with credits at both Island bookstores), I decided to ask some of the Island’s best gardeners & farmers for a list of their favorite garden books. And I checked on availability of many of these through the King County Library System (more on that below).

(PS: As the rain just WON’T quit, I also got online and ordered seed catalogs. Most catalogs are bulk-mailed this month, so get on their lists now. For me, some Must-Haves are Territorial Seed Company* (which bought Abundant Life Seed Foundation of Port Townsend, another good one), Johnny’s Seed Co., and The Cook’s Garden* (*Local stores will offer their seeds in carousel racks later this winter.)

Thanks to Joanne Jewell of Plum Forest Farm, Chandler Briggs of Island Meadow, Chris Greenlee, Mark Musick, Nancy Lewis-Williams, Cathy Fulton, March Twisdale, Julia Lakey, Michelle Crawford, Colleen James, and Anita Halstead for sharing your favorites!

Favs of the Farmers

These first two are touchstones of my own library. The last book, I’ve checked out at least twice when I’ve had a good growing summer (which is about two months too late, as you’ll see).

Steve Solomon’s “Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades” and “Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times.”  Do ALL our local farmers have this book? It’s now in its sixth edition (2007); Chris Greenlee says “Much of what Steve wrote about earlier, he’s refuted in his later versions.” Hummm… might be time to retire my 1989 copy.

“The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide” by Seattle Tilth. This year-round guide to growing organically in the Seattle climate delivers a ton of information within helpful month-to-month “To-Do” chapters. Islanders Rob Peterson, Joanne Jewell, and Kathryn True all worked on the 1998 edition, and Joanne reports that a new edition is in the works. 

Binda Colebrook’s “Winter Gardening in the Pacific Northwest.” Lots of personal observations on vegetables and techniques that work for the winter garden. TIP: if there’s the chance you might want to extend your growing season, get this NOW and read by July.

More on Growing:

I was thrilled to find at Granny’s last week John Jeavons’ classic on bio-intensive gardening “How to Grow more Vegetables.” Some of my correspondents liked:

“Better Vegetables Gardens, the Chinese Way” by Peter Chan. Chris Greenlee says “I love the simplicity.”

John Seymour’s “The (New) Self-Sufficient Gardener.” Joanne Jewell: “It’s so beautiful, and it’s good for home gardeners.” Amply illustrated, like all DK publications.

“Gaia’s Garden” by Toby Hebenway. Cathy Fulton (Mariposa Gardens, the Compost Fest) says “This is a very accessible book about permaculture. I checked it out of the library three times, then gave up and bought it.”

Anything by Eliot Coleman, says Chandler Briggs: “The New Organic Grower” and “Four-Season Harvest.”  Fascinating tools and techniques of an extremely successful organic grower in New England.

Nancy Bubel’s “Seed-Starting” and “Root-Cellaring” are essential handbooks for Nancy Lewis-Williams, who will rerun her popular vegetable growing classes this March.

Michelle Crawford, tomato diva of Pacific Potager, recommends “The Art of French Vegetable Gardening” by Louisa Jones.  Beautiful photos of all seasons of the ornamental kitchen garden, with great text; I first saw this awesome book at Michelle’s “Kitchen Potager Salon” last February. She also likes “Organic Farming” by Nicolas Lampkin… an English book, but similar to our climate. ” I must have read it 7 times.  Very good explanation of soil chemistry, how nutrients are released, etc. “ 

Links to our Land

As I’ve said before, Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” pushed me to grow more of my own food, rather than depend on “industrial food.” And as one season bends toward another, I felt kinship with Carol Williams as she gardens and writes up a year in her bio-dynamically influenced backyard, in “Bringing the Garden to Life.”

For his winter inspiration, Chandler Briggs is reading Wendell Berry’s “The Unsettling of America” and Wes Jackson’s “Becoming Native to This Place.” 

Speaking of being in place, Anita Halstead loves “The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating a Sense of Place” by Claire Sawyers: a book about seeking design inspiration not in Europe or Asia, but in the environs we live in.

Lewis-Williams is savoring “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate” by Wendy Johnson, a Zen Buddhist who is Head Gardener at San Francisco’s Green Culch Farm Center. “It’s one of those books you read a few pages at a time to make it last.”

Eye-Candy: Ornamentals

Les this list become dominated by vegetables, I asked Master Gardener Colleen James, whose Burton perennial garden was profiled here a few weeks ago, to contribute a few. 

One of them, I had just read: “Perennials: the Gardener’s Resource” by Susan Carter, Bob Lily and Carrie Becker. “This has replaced the Sunset book as far as perennials go,” Colleen opined. This coffee-table reference is written by three local experts, covering 2700 species and cultivars, their demands, upkeep, and performance, with commentary.

“Anything by Beth Chatto: her “Drought-Resistant Planting Through the Year” on gravel gardening is what really got me going,” said Colleen. “She turned a parking lot into this big drought-tolerant planting of all these flowering, gorgeous ornamentals—and she never waters.”

James also turns to Jane Taylor’s “Plants for Dry Gardens: Beating the Drought”  (“we’re only going to see more drought in the future”), “Covering Ground” about ground covers by Barbara W. Ellis, and “Seedheads in the Garden” by Noel Kingsbury.

Another from Nancy Lewis-Williams is “Passionate Gardening” by Lauren Springer and Rob Proctor. It too “emphasizes perennials for low water and extreme climates. And it’s got great photos to drool over.”

Garden Design

When I need to design a large area, I often have a stroll through “The Book of Garden Design” by English designer John Brookes. And like Anita Halstead, I find local writers Ann Lovejoy’s “Organic Garden Design School” and Valerie Easton’s “A Pattern Garden” both full of eye-candy—much of it from around Seattle—and practical hort advice.

Postscript

I checked on many of these books in the King County Library System and found high demand for a few—Colebrooks’s on Winter Gardening and “Root Cellaring”—and Seattle Tilth’s book has 19 holds on its few copies, so you might as well buy it.

Finally, I want to thank Julia Lakey, she GAVE me one of her favorite books: “Let It Rot” by Stu Campbell. I find reading about compost wonderfully soothing: its litany “1 part browns to 1 parts greens” so comforting and familiar, I suspect this book will lull me right into that other guilty pleasure of January, a long winter’s nap.

Happy, Fruitful Reading!

.”

At times like these, I envy those whose land is open to the sunlight of winter. You get better color in those plants with winter color or berries, such as bergenia, cotoneasters, or snowberries—probably healthier, too—and you get the play of light we shaded ones long for. Above’s a prime example: place plumed or felted plants in the path of the low sun and, at the right time and angle, your frizzy garden will glow in rim-light  (helps to have a dark backdrop in the distance). 

Winter Color in Spring’s Garden

I visited Jaralene Spring’s garden before Christmas and was reminded of the value of good color in bleak weather. Here on drippy afternoon of pure gloom, she toured me down the three paths of her mixed border, where we found plenty of colorful plants almost glowing in the low light.

Jaralene’s house is a nouveau-Victorian built in the early 90s on the slope above Shawnee Beach The site slopes downward to the east, so a sunny day hits it early and hard. She told me that the central tower—home to a hot-tub—gets so hot and humid that she thinks it’s better used as a greenhouse. “I start all my seedlings up there now.”

Looking uphill from the Mixed Border

Looking downhill from the house at the mixed border and the renovated "Coop" that houses Jaralene's art & garden projects

The land below the house had to be carefully terraced and drained, as there is an active spring up behind the house that soaks the ground all the way downslope. On riprap terraces, Jaralene grows some vegetables and about 16′ worth of strawberries in raised-bed cages to hold off the raccoons. The water-lines direct moisture to the lawn below, which is edged with blueberry bushes, their bare branches now cherry-red against the green lawn.

You enter the garden under a homemade willow gate that Jaralene created. The low bank along this flagstone path is planted with carex buchananii and calluna “firefly”, its raspberry foliage studding the path at eight-foot intervals. 

Calluna "firefly" against creeping sedum

Other color elements include (in the photos):

• bugle mixing it up with creeping sedum

• what I believe is a snowberry in its smaller, pink-berried form

• A heather, probably “Springwood White”

• Iris foetidissima, an evergreen iris that doesn’t have much of a flower, but instead sports these bright-orange, multi-berry dangles most of the winter.

One thing Jaralene does well is play one color or texture off another. In one spot, an old chair is placed where its faded paint matches the yellow of black-eyed susans.

In the right photo, that’s a ‘Rose Glow’ barberry wearing nothing but its red berries.

One of my favorite moments of color resonance was this native snowberry, its white berries staccato against that emphatic bleached grass (calamagrostis again?) Note how these plants pick up many of the colors of the renovated “Coop.” 

Jaralene works her artistry in the garden and FROM the garden. Here she is with a Christmas wreath she made of rose hips from a rosa glauca that’s taking over the south fence. Jaralene paints with a brush loaded with plants!

All so cozy … comfy … rational … and I’ll get to it once I drag myself out of the cold.

I spent the better part of this afternoon’s meagre daylight trying to weave wire in and out of bird-netting. My fingers were frozen—de-gloved because bird-netting tends to bind on thick fingers—and my deeply-squatted position was letting plenty of body-heat escape, shall we say, out the backdoor?

But winter’s the time to work on hardscapes, and this particularly project—four raised beds in a big square, criss-crossed by two paths to make four triangular beds—has been hanging around unfinished since fall.

The four beds are planted experiments in soil prep: one’s had its sod flipped and tilled; one is double-dug, amended, and tilled; the one on the right is a lasagna bed over newspaper-covered sod; and the last (near you, with newspaper peeking out from under newspaper) will be filled with “Mel’s Mix”—that combo of compost, coir, and vermiculite advocated by Mel Bartholomew of “Square Foot Gardening” fame. All were sown in a cover crop last September, which is now about 4-6″ high.

As soon as I planted this rich mixture of seeds, the Midnight Raider came a-sampling, and the morning after, my lasagna bed looked rather more like tossed salad. I know we’ve got raccoons: they sometimes stare at my husband from the office windowsill where Bob’s trying (in vain) to keep his bird-feeder full. So back in October, I resolved to cover the beds to keep out the furry, feathered thieves. 

Over my rectangular beds,  I had devised a quonset-style cover using bamboo, steel hoops, and netting (you can see it over my cabbage bed, foreground upper photograph). This system allows the gardener to lift the long sides up for access. I wanted the same kind of lift-up access with the triangle beds. 

In the garage, I found some old shelf-bracket columns that would stand in for hoops. Once I stuck the hoops in the ground and draped it with bird-netting, instance cover—or so I thought at first.

However, it’s not easy to cover a triangle and leave air-space underneath for plants to grow. My green manure—its most ambitious member a legume—took to the netting as its own trellis and grew up into a green snarl—an early warning system of how cramped my spring vegetables will be unless I devised a better system.

Bob (an 18-century man) suggested I make a test-model. So rational. I carved an old pizza box across its middle for the raised bed, brought together wire and netting, screw-eyes and wine corks. Came up with an idea that looked like two cornucopias meeting at the mouth, with outside corners lifting from hinges at the center, wine corks as T- joints to hold the meeting of many wires.

It looked a bit ramshackle and flimsy, but I couldn’t come up with any better ideas. Scaled up yesterday on site, the cover system looked even worse. It would have been 18-century rational to drill pilot-holes in the corks, to measure lengths, to pre-cut the wire. But I’m 20-century, trained to act on impulse and on the spot. So I tried to drive the wire through the corks with white-knuckled force.

The wire, naturally, did not run as through butter through the cold corks—instead, it writhed and bent under pressure, developed kinks, whipped about, got tangled in the netting. I clipped the wire-ends to a point so it would go through the cork easier. That worked: a quick through-and-through, right into the meat of my hand (Awwwh!!!).

Finally finished, I unbent my cramped knees and looked over my net-cover. It looked made of mangled coat-hangers. My own Homer Simpson spice-rack.

Still, the nets did cover the soil a good 16-24 inches high. My cover was no beauty-prize, but would it work?

I lifted the far corner and balanced the cover against the central spine. It leaned: it was definitely leaning. Then slowly, with kind of a roll, it listed to one side and fell to earth, the point protruding over the path like a buck tooth.

Hummm… where’s that couch-blanket when you need to hide?  Time to throw it over my head, consider the mess I’m going to make of the recycled-glass greenhouse I next have in mind.

  Mike McKelvey and Bea Johnson know this in spades.

If you went on last year’s VAA Garden Tour, you too probably visited this hillside garden on a southeast slope of Maury Island. It starts off conventionally enough: you enter the west front lawn through an elegant metal fence and walk along a paver path next to a mixed planting. Ahead is the rose garden, inside its own fence since it was created earlier. There’s a charming guest-house that beckons past the rose garden to the southeast corner.

And then, for a moment, the garden disappears. You have to step forward and crane out your neck out to see “Oh, it’s down THERE!”, then decide whether your tour-addled limbs are up to the return climb.

McKelvey & Johnson’s back garden is on a 40% slope. And, the property is near a “critical area” known for slides—Mike told me, “In the 90s, I remember driving out and the road on 47th below us was completely washed out.”

So in 2004 before they could build on their property, McKelvey had to fulfill some King County mandates: build a cistern to collect ALL run-off from roof and driveway. And build a second water- collection system across the entire bottom of the property. You’d think that would take much of the water-burden off their 40% slope.

Apparently not.

DIG put in the initial rockeries to create a flat place for the rose garden. Mike said, “We were going to stop there, let the rest be natural: rocks, grass, scotch broom. Then one day I came home and Bea had started weeding the hillside below the east deck. So I got the idea of buying those big pre-fab aggregate blocks to build stone walls, and I started building the stairs.” Bea then decided this stairs needed the rose arbor touch.

“There had been a lot of rain that autumn. And as I built from bottom to top, that’s when I noticed the big bulge in the slope, just to the south. And I thought, ‘This is not good!’ because the septic system was right above where the land was moving. So we decided to put in more rockeries to stabilize the slope.”

Mike did all the hauling and placement of the blocks himself. He worked out from the Archway stairs to left and right, finishing one then deciding “that’s not enough!” There are at least four terraces, from 7′ to 3′ high, traversing and containing the entire slope.

Bea came behind, creating the paths and adding plants. It’s in these paths that the McKelvey/Johnson garden reaches past its High Function and goes for Magic. Cobbles were sorted for size and color, then laid in complex mosaics, in patterns very reminiscent of the patios in the Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon. The blue cobbles come from a place in the University District called “Mexican Pebbles”; the earth-toned stones are “good ol’ Maury Island natives.”

Mike said his wife tamped the stones into the soil: “she has the patience to do that with her wooden hammer.” Laying them into the soil allows mosses and creepers to grow amidst these stones—but how does Bea keep out the weeds? I hope Bea has a Dragon Torch weeder—or is getting one for Christmas!

Besides the artful mosaics on the paths, the garden also sports several birdhouses, planted pots, and pieces of artwork. The Guesthouse, a gift from Bea’s mom, they use as a reading room because a couch they couldn’t fit into the house found its home there. “A guy here on the Island had a model sitting near Vashon Electric: they come in a kit form from Russia and it’s all metric. The guy built the house for us. 2×6′ tongue-and-groove white pine with a metal roof and completely insulated.”

One of the most delightful sections is in an unlikely space that most gardeners have trouble with: under the deck. Here, Bea created a tiny garden room for shade plants. The yellow spike flower is Eucomis autumnalis, commonly called  pineapple lily. Coleus mingles with begonia and small ferns. A metal-work screen makes the sharp slope, only inches away, disappear.

This garden just has to demand a ton of attention. “Put a lot of time into gardening?” I ask. He laughs, “That’s what we do. 

“We’ve changed so many things even since the garden tour. We like nothing better than spending all day at Molbak’s.”

photo credit: Rebecca Teagarden

There’s a theme of appropriateness running through the garden of Nancy & Len Wolff on the north end.

By the street, a lush perennial border is studded with arbors, pots, tall plants to block out distractions from the road. Near the house, plantings in the cottage style match the old/new style of the house. And out front with the view, a design meant not to interfere: low natives and trimmed-up trees elegantly frame a panoramic view of the Southworth Ferry Terminal.

photo: Len Wolff

Even the grandest of perennial borders would be dwarfed in front of this Big View. So Nancy’s garden border is out front—or as Wolffs say, out “back.”

The perennial border begins at what the Wolffs think of as their back door, which faces east toward Palisades Road. The plantings start at the foot of the steps, wrapping both tightly around the house and in a wide loop out the walkway, along the road, and back along the southern border of the lawn. 

photo: Len Wolff

“In starting, I really didn’t have any grand plan,” other than wanting a garden style in keeping with the house’s architecture, she told me.  ”I love cottage gardens, and I thought a cottage garden would look good with the house’s casual style.”

“I’m a novice at gardening, and it was an intimidating lot because it’s very big. So I talked to a LOT of friends, looked at other gardens, and the most valuable advice I got was ‘just start.’”

She began with a very narrow bed along the side, “then a wonderful woman came by and said ‘I want to tell you about composting’. So I ordered ten yards of compost from Vashon Bark & Soil, gathered every box I could find, and expanded the narrow beds by layering out with cardboard and compost layers up to 10″ thick.”

It’s interesting that both Nancy Wolff and Colleen James, the garden winner covered in my last blog entry, used the lasagna-layering technique over the course of a winter to create a good soil base for spring plantings. “I didn’t dig up the soil: the native grasses under the cardboard died over the winter.” 

The garden, now four years old, is at its height from April through mid-June and has an incredible variety of perennials: dayliles, delphiniums, lupine, crocosmia, mallows, poppies, lilies, agastache, to name only a few—and so many poppies, her neighbor joked he’d seen a DEA agent eyeing the garden. Sub-shrubs include box, lavender, the bush form of St. John’s Wort, phormium, hydrangeas, and an airy blue aster she got from a friend.

In the SE corner, cool colors dominate: hostas, “Tasmanian Tiger” spurge, and a white “Limelight” hydrangea grows next to a shrubby aster with tiny blue flowers, backed by an 8′-tall himalyan honeysuckle (Leycesteria formosa) with blood-red pendant flowers.

photos Len Wolff

Later in summer, coneflowers, cannas, lilies, white echinacea, dahlias, and rudbeckias complement tall ornamental grasses—inspired, she said, by the planting at Courthouse Square.

Son Christopher Koering helped Len build a stout cedar pergola as an entrance off the street; a cedar gateway with a metal crow perched on top leads visitors from the steps into the garden area. A lovely stone wall built by Per-Lars Blomgren terraces the slight slope and helps mark the separate zones of sunny east/shady west.

Nancy is an occupational therapist by day, so she doesn’t have a lot of time. She does have plenty of ideas, though: she wants to create a low box hedge along the walkway, a vegetable garden somewhere, “more and deeper” beds. “The idea was I wanted people to walk around, see what’s on the next side,” she told me.

One suspects there will be plenty of “next sides” for Nancy’s visitors to explore in the future.

Julia Lakey, who’s involved with the Sustainability Committee’s work and who I know through yoga, organized a ringing of Island church bells at noon on Saturday, Dec. 12. Such markings of 350 are apparently happening all over the globe, in parallel with the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

How far back do we have to wind the CO2 clock to reach 350? Well, according to www.CO2.org, our atmosphere was at 350 ppm back in 1987. It was at 315 in 1959—things have changed quickly, haven’t they? 

It didn’t take long for we five bell-ringers to reach 350 strikes of the church bell—all of about 15 minutes. The Presby and Methodist Churches chimed in as well.

Nor did it take long for our atmosphere to reach and overreach 350ppm: only 22 years. That’s a gnat on a nano-second in the timeline of human evolution. And there’s nearly 6 billion of us homo saps adding CO2 all the time.

If you want more info, visit www.350.org or www.CO2.org.

from left: Julia Lakey, Weslie Rodgers, Rosellen Albers, Karen Dale, and Wally Fletcher under the bell at the Episcopal Church.

2009 Garden Club Award Winners

Len & Nancy Wolff , Mike McKelvey & Bea Johnson, and  John & Colleen James, whose garden is featured below. I’ll interview the other gardeners in the weeks ahead.    

The James Garden

This garden is on the Burton Loop; the property slopes down to the front of the yellow Victorian house, which faces south.  John & Colleen James moved here from Gig Harbor in September, 2005. “It was a blank canvas, kinda nice because it was just grass, mostly dead by then.”

They stripped away all of the grass on the slope leading down to the house and smothered what remained over the following winter with layers of cardboard and compost mulch. Later, they brought in several truckloads of compost plus more loads of 3-way Mix (compost, sand, and manure) to add to their sandy soil. 

What’s really impressive here is the depth of the beds—but that’s what you’ll get when you replace a lawn with perennials. Here’s a view across the house front, looking from east to west.

 Standing tall above the perennials is a grafted salix integra (dappled willow), which she said “isn’t too happy: it wants more moisture.” Calendula have scattered themselves throughout the garden; she makes a medicinal salve from it and sells it at the Farmer’s Market.

Here’s the view from the opposite side, looking back east: note that dappled willow and flax in the upper-left corner, and the plentitude of plantings: calendula, hardy geranium, lilies, poppies, dahlias, mexican hair grass, lavender, echinacea—even, I believe, a eucalyptus in the background.

 Surprisingly, despite the slope’s 10-15 foot drop from the road, the only terracing is at the bottom, where a 2′ cobblestone wall holds the toe of hill up off a front patio.

Because this slope leans toward the north, larger plants overshadow smaller ones. So, Colleen has come to specialize in shade plants for her market offerings. One of her favorite plantings is this shade-happy arrangement of erigeron, pulmonaria, spurge, and royal fern in the dappled sunlight. Beautiful!

She also knows a lot about deerproof plants, recommending “ligularias, hostas, japanese forest grass, some really wonderful ferns like Royal Fern and Japanese painted fern, also sweet box (sarcococca). Below is such a pairing in a pot, demonstrating her penchant for high-contrast plantings: a towering, deep-burgundy ligularia underplanted with japanese forest grass. They’re happy together because both like moisture and shade.

And here’s more color play, this time with black-eyed susans against blues and silvers, the purple of smoke tree and the silver architecture of a cardoon.

Colleen uses pots frequently; here a massive, robin’s egg blue pot studs the flowery haze with something sold, substantial.

The foreground alliums are actually garlics: “I bought them at the grocery, plugged them in during fall, and they are wonderful. They last longer than allium globemasters: it’s December and they’re still standing.” Butter-yellow Cape Fuchsia glows on the right.

She accesses her deep beds with meanders of stepping-stone paths surrounded by ajuga (bugle) seen here in the foreground below the calendula. She cuts the bugle back in high summer to keep the stones in view. 

Colleen James spends a lot of time in her garden. And she’s become a Master Gardener, a plant vendor on Saturdays, and does some garden design consultant “to help people create something wonderful.” 

Here’s her front entrance pergola, which directs visitors toward the “real” front door (there was some confusion!) and provide some privacy when she wants it. John James laid the flagstone walkway and stairs.

And finally, a last look across the front yard of this talented plantswoman, Colleen James.

Marj Watkins and Suzanna Leigh invite the public to “A Christmas Feast Fit for a King,” an event to benefit Vashon Food Bank. They will present food samples from a menu appropriate to the court of King Charlesmagne, below, plus give out a free booklet of approximately twenty Medieval recipes, updated for a modern kitchen and our smaller households. Attendees are asked to chip in $10 for the Food Bank.

Copies of all their books still in print—Suzanna’s “Atom’s Monster” and Marj’s two historical novels set in Charlemagne’s 8th-century Francia, plus an amusing small curry cookbook, “Shereluck Ohmes and the Case of the Curried Cookbook”—will be available for purchase. These make great gifts for girls, women, and the cooks on your Christmas list. Profits on book sales also go to the Food Bank. 

An 8^th Century Menu, Updated for the 21st Century Kitchen

Starter Course

Main Course

Dessert Course

Fruit & Cheese Course

* Recipe Included, in free booklet in the order listed here

With a promise of clear, dry days this week, I am back to gathering and processing leaves. But it’s getting a little OLD, frankly: my leaf-bins keep settling lower and lower, no matter how often I top them up. Curious, I went back in my calendar and counted up the bags: OMG, is it REALLY 39? Are my leaf-bins EATING these shreddings? And have I just gone completely loony-bins?

I dug a bit in the middle of the most shredded one and found decomposition already in process: the leaves dark as chocolate and smelling of mould. Results already: how gratifying. Or self-rationalizing, anyway.

As I was raking the winter hazel leaves out from under, I got to thinking about how garden writers talk about winter revealing the “bones” of a garden. In this garden, today, it was my rake revealing things: the brick edgers, skeletonized blossom of a “globemaster” allium, the creeping charlie I once thought was so cute before realizing what an invader it was.

It’s good to clear the garden down to the ground, to remind myself of what I’ve planted, of what needs to be moved, yanked, pruned, protected. It’s a way of seeing what I originally intended, before the garden itself laid its own exuberant growth and fallen detritus over all.

The look back in my calendar revealed that, exactly this time last year, I was yanking the quack-grass and creeping charlie from under this very winter hazel. The weather was clear, cold, and fair, and I was rushing to clear and to cover, knowing that a killer freeze was on its way from the north. And we all know what happened then… (3 weeks of snow-cover, in case you don’t).

So I’ll clear now, have a look at my garden’s bones, then re-cover with a mulch of these shredded leaves. I put the reemay cloth over the cole and salad beds, after mulching around the remaining beets, cabbage, and next February’s broccoli raab. Maybe on Thursday, I’ll drain the hose and coil it into its box for the winter. I sure hope this clear, cold weather doesn’t set us up for a repeat of last winter’s snow, but if it does… I’ve got my 39 bags of mulch all ready to go!

Here’s Jasper Forrester of GreenMan Farm, one of our most talented Island farmers, sporting the Squash that Won the Pumpkin Pie Prize of 2008. What a gorgeous color! She’s still got a few minutes here to wear the Pie-Winner’s Apron from last year’s Pumpkin Pie Taste-off, where her “ricotta pumpkin pie with a ginger-snap/pecan crust” won top honors.

This winter squash is a Musque de Provence, a “cheese-wheel” type (according to Sunrise Seeds squash page) that’s unmatched for eating and long keeping. Jasper is selling it “cheese-wheel-style” in sections large enough for her pumpkin pie recipe (link to the story and recipe above: scroll down that story to find the recipe.)

Jasper promised me a couple more “homegrown” recipes, using produce she’s raised at her GreenMan Farm. Their farmstand will remain open through winter; they’re on the Dilworth Loop. And here’s another link to a map of all the Island’s still-open farmstands, in a format you can print out. Enjoy your Thanksgiving!

Winter Squash Bisque

Poke several holes in squash with a fork and bake at 325 degrees until it pierces easily with a fork, about 45 minutes.  Cut in half, remove and discard seeds, scoop out pulp and reserve.  Melt butter in saucepan, add leeks and saute them over low heat 20 minutes.  Please in blender or food processor with squash pulp, stock, thyme, salt and pepper; whirl until smooth.  Return to saucepan; simmer over low heat 20 minutes.  Stir in cream and heat through just before serving. Adjust salt and pepper to taste.  Serves 4.

Brussels Sprouts with Walnuts

Cut the sprouts in half and steam until tender.  Meanwhile, saute the walnuts in the butter until golden.  Pour over the sprouts in a serving dish.  Sprinkle on nutmeg.  Season to taste with salt and pepper.

VIGA held its Pumpkin Pie Taste-off this morning at the market, and a cold but salivating crowd gathered around before noon to snap up $1 half-slices of the many entrants.

I’m guessing there were 15± pies entered in either the “Trad” category or the “Pumpkin Dessert/non-traditional” category. All the recipes asked cooks to highlight the local ingredients used in the baking, and I was impressed to see not only pumpkin had been used.

For instance: I talked to Zilla Copper, who made that scumptious “Trad” entry (photo above) with the chrysanthemum cluster in the center. She got eggs from a neighbor, dairy and pumpkin from GreenMan Farm, and actually made creme fraiche and BUTTER from Hazel the Jersey Cow’s cream.

“It wasn’t too hard, actually,” she told me. “I made the butter in a blender. You whip the cream until it gets thick, then you add ice water and keep blending, oh, about 10 minutes, until the butter rises in lumps to the top. Then you have to press the butter to get the water out and to form it. I found the recipe in my old ‘Joy of Cooking.’”

By quarter to noon, there was quite a crowd of cold-looking folk standing around, waiting for the winners to be announced so they could pounce on the dollar half-slices. Proceeds will go to the PTSA’s “Local Food” program for Chautaugua Elementary’s cafeteria.

Lindsay Hart eyes the "Pumpkin Dessert" line-up; Nancy Foster-Moss wins for her "Pumpkin Bourbon Cheesecake"

The Winners?  Nancy Foster-Moss won the “Pumpkin Dessert/non-Traditional” category for her “Pumpkin Bourbon Cheesecake,” which I can tell you MYSELF was gooey-piggy-creamy-lush-scrumptious.

Shannon Seath Meyer holds her winning "trad" pumpkin pie and sports the Winner's Apron.

And the winner for a “Traditional Pumpkin Pie’ was Shannon Seath Meyer, who used her own homegrown “Sugar Pie” pumpkin in her recipe (given below the photos). Jasper Forrester, last year’s winner for her “Ricotta Pumpkin Pie,” presented the honorary Pie Winners’ Apron, autographed by each winner of years before. (For Jasper’s winning recipe, click here: )

Congrats to all, and good work, Lindsay Hart and Merrilee Runyan.

Recipe for Shannon’s Traditional Pumpkin Pie

To get Puree:  Cut a 6″ “Sugar Pie” pumpkin in half, scoop out seeds, put in a brownie pan with 1″ of water and roast in 400° oven for 40 minutes until pumpkin flesh is soft. Let cool, scoop out, blenderize to puree.

Combine all ingredients and cook on medium, stirring often to cook off some of the water and to concentrate flavors. Takes about 10 minutes. Then let cool while you—

Then add to the pumpkin mixture:

Pour into pre-baked shell and bake at 300° for 45 minutes+, until sides are set and you still have a wiggly puddle in the middle.

I started with the inspiration to find islanders that plan to make their Thanksgiving Day feast purely from Island-grown ingredients—a “Locavore’s Thanksgiving.”  

I thought the hard part would be finding somebody who was growing their own turkey for the table. And the email grapevine (thank you K. Gilligan) DID tip me off to somebody: Gary Headley of VI Horse Supply.

I called him right away. Gary has a little family of wild turkeys that he has raised and yes, he’s going to have one for Turkey Day—the one that’s “cranky”, he said.

And yes, he’s going to have an all-Island Thanksgiving: he’s got people who barter for things with him, so he’s got greens coming, a lady who trades with Yellow Finn potatoes, another lady who’s bringing him a pumpkin pie.

     “What about cranberries?” I asked.

    ”I don’t LIKE cranberries,” he said. And then he invited me to come meet Ichiro, his pet tom turkey who can play “catch.”

________________

Final Farmer’s Market is this Saturday morning, 11/18

I’m looking forward to meeting Ichiro, someday… and I’m looking forward to hearing from some VIGA folk who might share with us their Thanksgiving recipes. This weekend, after all, IS the final Farmer’s Market, on Saturday morning, Nov 21. 

After Saturday, if you want to get Island-grown produce, see today’s article (11/18) by Kathryn True in the Beachcomber that tells which Farm Stands are committing to remaining open this winter, as long as they can. The link under “today’s article” will get you to the article: there’s another link within it (“showing the art of the land”) that takes you to a map of farmstand locations.

______________________

Meanwhile, while I await others’ recipes for the Turkey Day Feast, I’ll share with you a couple dishes I’m considering serving, full of things I grew or gathered myself.

So: let’s start with what’s still out in my vegie patch: plenty of cabbage.

A Scandinavian red cabbage dish

This side dish is sweet, delicious, and screaming magenta (Turkey dinner needs as much color as it can get!). And it uses up a LOT of red cabbage—yet another reason to be THANKFUL.

You’ll need a big skillet or iron pot that can go in the oven, including its lid, and a box grater or mandoline. And start 2.5 hours earlier than you want to eat it! (but it’ll hold very well)

My Maple Waldorf Salad

It’s gold! Lying along the roadways! Littering our yards and gardens! Right on the ground, free for the taking!

I am, of course, talking about leaves.

The more I learn about using leaves in the garden, the more I want. When added to garden beds, leaf mould can double soil’s ability to hold water while cutting in half its need for fertilizer. You can grow seeds in it: you can feed your compost with it. If you mow leaves on your lawn, you will feed the soil, encourage microbial activity, build up a water reserve in the soil and thus help your lawn stay greener next summer.

More reasons for collecting and processing leaves:

• Shredded leaves make a good-looking mulch to protect your plantings over the winter.

• You’ll get the windfall of leaves OFF your plantings so they won’t be smothered.

• When you’re weeding in spring and have bucketfuls of compostable “greens”, you’ll already have a stockpile of “browns” at hand to make up a new compost pile.

So grab your rakes, your mower, and the biggest bags you can find. Let’s go harvest.

How considerate! Somebody at PSE had already windrowed these oak leaves: a few minutes of hand-scooping yielded 1 garbage bag and 3 grocery bags full, and that hardly made a dent in this row.

Processing leaves on a flat lawn or patio

First, find a motherlode. My neighbor was surprised but delighted when I knocked on her door and announced “I want to mow your lawn!” I told her what I really wanted were the leaves under her big maple tree standing solo in the grass.

“Go right ahead,” she said: “We can’t seem to get anybody to do it for pay anyway.” (Moral: they’ll never say No to somebody who wants to be paid in leaves…)

Leaves convey their benefits much faster if you shred them. Mostly made of carbon—as much carbon as cornstalks—they won’t decay quickly on their own. They need contact with soil and a little pre-chewing to work on your lawn, in your beds, and in your compost pile. And of all the tools that chew, a mower works great and I’m guessing you’ve got one.

When there’s nothing but leaves under a tree, the job is sooooo easy: I just rev’d up the mower and ran it over the carpet of leaves. You can pre-rake into windrows to concentrate the leaves before your mower, but don’t make them too high: I found that piles higher than 6″ made my engine sputter. 

The leaves reduce so low you’ll worry there’s nothing left, but a plastic rake with wide tines will coax most of this out of the grass and into those bags or boxes you brought along. I got seven garbage bags full of shredded leaves within 90 minutes: enough to cover a new 100′ perennial bed AND fill a 4′ square wire bin.

Should you decide to bag and bring those leaves home, another good site to run your mower over leaves is a smooth driveway or patio. The shreddings do blow sideways, but it’s easy to broom them up with a dust-pan—quite tidy!

Processing along the road: Be cautious

For mowing through leaves on rough grass—such as the roadside verge I worked this afternoon during a sunbreak in our week’s rain—it’s helpful to have a metal rake with thin tines that can “comb” the shreddings out of the grass. And I did pre-rake leaves off the slope down into windrows my mower could access.

Left: I've started to windrow the roadside maple leaves; Right, after mowing and raking for 90 minutes, eight bags full and one dead truck!

When working along the road, be cautious. First, alert oncoming drivers to your presence. If you can find an orange safety cone, put it on the road’s shoulder between oncoming traffic and you. Make eye-contact with drivers, or pause and stand as they come close. They might not see you anyway: with the sun so low these November afternoons, they might be squinting into the sun and not see you at all.

And use your EARS—that means, leave your noisy leaf-blower at home. Some poor Parks employee working a leaf-blower was hit by a car in Bellevue this week: probably couldn’t hear the approaching car for all the racket his tool was making.

Also, before mowing, sift through the leaves with your feet or your rake’s handle to find any bottles or breakables hiding under the leaves. 

And finally, one would THINK that turning on the emergency flashers would make a good alert system, but with the lights on for 90 minutes, my battery ran dead!  I was only saved from a LOONNNG walk home to hubbie and car #2 by a passing neighbor with jumper cables and the ability to read my “Please stop! Please stop!” mind.

Now you’ve got it, let’s make leaf compost

Rich in carbon, leaves are one of the classic “browns” of composting. Shredding will make them decay faster. Last year when I made my first leaf bin, my intention was to let the leaves sit and moulder for a year or two. But as it sat right next to my always-in-development compost piles, it was toooo easy to dip into the leaves for any “browns” my compost needed. This year, I’m making a second leaf bin just for the hungry compost.

Because they are so dry and carbon-rugged on their own, a pile of leaves needs a year or two to fully decompose. I saw this in my own bin: after the first year, the center had mouldered to a sweet brown duff with no distinquishable leaves, while the outside still showed layers of recognizable leaves. 

Apparently, wintered-over leaves are excellent for tomatoes if you till one-inch-worth into their soil next spring before planting out. A study by Dr. Abigail Maynard at the Connecticut Ag Research Station found that yields increased 25% using either winter-stockpiled leaves that were spring-tilled into the bed, or 2-year-old leaf compost. (Dr. Maynard did numerous studies on growing vegetables with leaf composts: the link is below and it’s fascinating reading if you’re into composting.*)

You can speed up decay by wetting the pile and by sprinkling on nitrogen-rich sources like urea or ammonium nitrate—or okara, that smelly tofu by-product if you dare! Enclose that mixture in a garbage bag and leave it for six months—a few holes poked in for air and drainage—and reports say you’ll have sweet, friable leaf mould by spring.

Why Bother? the Many Benefits of Leaf Mould

Here’s the hearsay: At my mother’s house last fall, I amended her tomato beds by jamming vine maple leaves and old compost into the stiff clay with a shovel. By summer, the soil was open and “wonderful to work.”

Now here’s the science: the university studies I found on the web that tell me how useful leaf compost can be. If you want to read these (they vary from 2-14 pages in pdf form), follow the links. The results of these studies found that: 

• additions of leaf mould can increase your soil’s ability to retain water by 50-250%. (depends on soil type, and also who you read…)*

• Yearly additions of leaf mould can, over specific times for specific crops, provide all the fertilizer your vegetables and flowers need. Increased yields up to 25% can be had by adding a 5-5-5 fertilizer. (Greens will probably need a little nitrogen boost from legume cover crops or blood meal).*

• Additions of leaf mould can double the organic content of your soil over the years.*

• A study at Purdue reassured Grounds-keeper Online readers that mowing even a thick 6″ carpet of leaves over grass would enhance, not deplete, the fertility of their lawns—even increasing soil microbial activity and helping retain water, all while costing 80% less than bagging and hauling away.**

*(Connecticut Ag Research Station, “Compost” study by Abigail Maynard)

** Mulching Tree Leaves: An Alternative to Disposal” from GroundsMaintenance online

So for a little time and exercise (and you want exercise, right?), you’ll provide tons of benefits to your plants, soil, and lawn. Free Gold. There for the taking. Islanders, to your Rakes!