After I put out the call for storm damage reports, Kathy Wheaton wrote that they’d had another deflation of one of their greenhouses. These greenhouses are walled with two plys of plastic separated by a foot of pressurized air blown in by a fan. One fitting got loose and was rubbing on the plastic, “causing a bigger hole, less air, flattened roof, heavy wet snow, and Oh My…! But the house is now repaired, we once against learned a lot, and are back to planting tomatoes, fuchsia baskets, and other fun things.”

“We have a fair number of customers with downed trees and limbs, lots of clean-up. But I have not seen much cold damage to the plants. The snow truly was a plant life-saver.”

Saving the Tire-Swing Apple Tree

However, Joe Curiel & Tony Raugust at Monument Farm lost a landmark—their “King” apple tree with the tire swing. According to Gene Sherman, 90-year-old grandson of the original owner of that land, that tire swing has probably been there since the 1950s. A Barnett family lived there then with a young boy and girl, and no family with children has lived there since.

Joe said the tree may have been there since the 1880s, and that’s possible: Gene’s great-grandfather Christopher Sherman came out from New York after 1877 and spent a couple years improving that land. In those days, “improving” meant planting fruit trees, digging a well, putting up buildings; once you’d done that, you could run to the local land office and “pre-empt” your property for 12.5 cents an acre, rather than waiting out the 5-year Homesteading requirement to get your land for free. Once it was his, Christopher passed the land to his son Salmon (the Island’s original settler) before heading back to New York and dying in 1889. The cherry trees along the driveway were probably planted by Christopher, said Gene, so it’s possible the old apple trees further downslope were as well.

 Anyway, thanks to great care and judicious pruning by the guys (Tony has a degree in horticulture), this old apple tree is still quite productive. So they were pretty worried when the ice storm did this to their orchard—

And quite bothered to find this on Monday the 23rd—

But they had a fix that they’ve tried before. They called Stew Nelson of Stew’s General Contracting (253-318-1719), who had dug their big marsh pond at the bottom of their land. Stew has heavy equipment, which he keeps in the yard behind Kevin Bergin’s yard next to Kathy’s Corner; though he lives in Gig Harbor, most of his work is on Vashon. But this assignment was unusual for him.

Joe & Tony wanted Stew to pull the tree back up.

And that’s what, after five hours, Stew and daughter Alex and their heavy equipment managed to do.

First they pruned off some of the top growth to lighten the tree, balance what must have been heavy root-loss.  Then they re-dug up the root-hole so the tree would have somewhere to land. Then they wrapped the center of long cables through cut pieces of garden hose around the tree, and secured the opposite free ends to his excavator and to his back-hoe, set wide apart at opposite corners of a triangle, the tree at the apex. Now HEAVE—and this triangle of tree and cables slowly tilted upright.

They pounded three eight-foot fence posts from LS Cedar at least 6 feet deep into the ground and wrapped the cables to them. Today (January 25) this is how the old King Apple tree stands—

Now the guys dropped a few bucks on THIS project. We’re talking two heavy pieces of machinery and two people for five hours. Still…here are the pickings of October 12th off that tree. At $1-2 a pound, a 200 lbs harvest, tell me—will saving this tree be worth it?

Territorial Seed Company has partnered with GrowVeg! TSC has put the GrowVeg planner on its website for TSC customers to use. Better yet, this planner is “stocked” with all of TSC’s offerings: when you pull a vegetable out of the toolbar, you can then select any of Territorial’s many varieties. It’s great to be able to visualize you want “Stupice Tomatoes” in this bed and “Siletz Tomatoes” in that bed.

After a 30-day free trial, there is a $25/year subscription fee—and if you created and saved a garden plan, you won’t be able to get to it until you subscribe. But it’s worth the price. For one thing, in Year Two you can wipe your garden clean of all plants without wiping away your bed layout. And to help with rotation—say, planting cabbage where you planted coles in earlier years—GrowVeg will redden any spots where cabbage has been planted in the past so you can avoid those areas that might harbor last year’s cole diseases.

Try it: go visit the Territorial Seed site, then click on the Vegetable Planner windoid.

Your winter garden planning just got a whole lot more interesting!

I have been meaning to post for weeks, but none of the topics I have had in mind have risen to the level of my usual verbosity. But I’m about to go into winter hiberation (actually, into a pre-Christmas rush of gift-making), so I thought I’d bid you adieu for 2011 with these few odds-n-ends appropriate to the season.

The “LIVING” PUMPKIN PIE

If you’re of a mind to have a “Living Tree,” perhaps you’d like this recipe for Weslie Rogers’ “Living Pumpkin Pie.” It easily won last month’s VIGA contest for best pumpkin pie recipe, with a “Jump in the Mouth” taste that surprised THIS judge, given it was made from “raw” ingredients. And have no fear: there are no eggs in this recipe. It’s that pretty pie on the left adorned with raspberries and holly, so very tempting to (from left) Madeline, Adri, and Ella Yarkin, who kept close enough to be first in line when the Selling of the Pies commenced.

Leslie sent me the recipe. She said she used a Sugar Pumpkin, rind and all. “Many squashes have an eatable rind, including the Delicata whose rind is quite delectable.”

The * LIVING * PUMPKIN PIE

First process the almonds to a meal, then add dates and process to get a sticky crust.  Sprinkle the pie plate with dried coconut so the sticky crust doesn’t stick!   Press the crust mixture in.  Juice the pumpkin (rind and all!..a small pumpkin will give 1 cup of juice.  If you don’t have a juicer, blend the pumpkin and strain, maybe adding a bit of water.)  

Combine all filling ingredients in a food processor, blend thoroughly, aiming for as smooth as possible.

Pour into crust and refrigerate for a few hours.  Voila!

CHESTNUTS

Across the street from the Vashon Athletic Club’s back parking lot, there’s a cluster of trees led by a Chestnut Tree. It was dropping its nut-containing burrs around my car in November, and finally I decided to take a couple dozen, roast them, see what the French Fuss about roasted chestnuts is all about.

Turns out, Dan Carlson sells chestnuts at the Farmers’ Market; they are also available at Thriftway. Dan tells me that most American Chestnuts in the USA succumbed to a blight decades ago; what chestnuts are here are mostly Chinese Chestnuts. However, that blight didn’t reach the West Coast, so we still have native Chestnuts in Washington. On Vashon, we have the state’s largest Spanish Chestnut, measured by Mike Lee for the state’s Champion Tree project back in the early 90s; this tree (at least then) was more than 21″ around and 77′ high. It stands at 17205 99th St. SW.

Dan says you can roast chestnuts in the oven after cutting an “X” into the flat area so the chestnut doesn’t burst. You can also boil them until the innards are soft, about 15-25 minutes. Then you marinate them in a sugar syrup laced with vanilla. Frankly, when I tried it, the vanilla overran all other tastes, so I haven’t yet learned what chestnuts taste like. But this syrup, I can tell you, is delicious on vanilla ice cream or as a glaze for a pear tart.

TRUFFLES

I could not believe it when I spotted these in the shelf above the Holiday Grape bundles. But there they were—actual truffles, in little clam-shells marked at $2, $4, $6 and $8 each. You may only get a knuckle’s worth, but you only need enough to shave paper-thin slices onto risotto or pasta or fondue. Do this in front of guests, and then after they’ve eaten it, announce that you’ve just serve them a $198 per pound serving! They’ll be IMPRESSED!

HOES FOR A GARDENER

If you’ve got a gardener to buy a gift for—particularly one with aging knees—let me recommend a Winged Weeder. It’s a hoe with a V-head that you scuffle along the ground. The head works on both the push & pull: push to slice roots of weeds just below the surface, or pull back to hook weeds and yank them out. The motion is kinda like vacumning, and with a long-enough handle, you barely have to bend to slide the head for- and back across the soil.

Island Lumber has them, but DO check to make sure it comes with beveled edges all around, both on the top and bottom surfaces of the “V.” You want a bevel like that of a pencil tip. If it’s not sharp, ask if somebody on staff will sharpen the edges on a grinder for you. True Value will also provide this service, so just ask. 

Colinear Hoes are also wonderful. Eliot Coleman, famous Vermont small farmer, has made them famous with his “razor on a stick” endorsement. It’s what I’ve used at the Food Bank Farm to get in tight around plant stems without bending over. However, no local stores carry these hoes, so try online.

HIBERNATION FOR YOUR BLOGGER

While winter rules, I’ll either be in my studio quilting or underneath my laptop writing my garden book, “Garden On, Vashon!” I’ve recently finished the chapter on growing wine-grapes and making wine on VMI, and I’ve pressed on to my “Falling Leaves, Falling Rain” chapter. I hope to take this book to press by the time a Christmas rules around (wish me BIG LUCK to make that NEXT Christmas!). Meanwhile, until the seed-starting season begins in March, dont’ expect to hear from your garden blogger very much.

So have a wonderful holiday season and satisfying winter hibernation. Catch you during the January thaw!

So you go clip, then stand there with a handful of healthy plant feeling guilty about throwing half the plant away.

Feel guilty no more. Use those cuttings to propagate even more of that same shrub. Twelves lives from one! Who feels badly now?

That’s now Colleen James feels about it. “I just love watching all these little plants come to life. And I just hated pruning back my plants so hard, but once I figured out I could turn all these sticks into new plants, I felt so much better.”

I’ve joined her on a sunny, but cool October afternoon. She’s in full propagation mode, building up an inventory of hundreds for next spring’s Arboretum sale in Seattle. In her kitchen, stems with seedheads lay across shallow bowls that catch the dropping seeds. Her greenhouse is full of young, frost-tender plants, and her porch is her potting shed, lined with the gear needed for new plants—flats, bags of potting soil, trays for potting up.

She thrust a knife into a big bag of potting soil—the vanilla type, no fertilizer, manures, or hydro-gels added. “If you put a cutting into soil with fertilizer, it won’t root,” she said. She upended part of the bag into a big, high-backed tray, put an empty cell-flat on the soil and with both hands scooped soil across its surface. The individual cells, each the size of a bathroom dixie cup, filled instantly. “Much smaller than 1.5″ across isn’t enough room for the roots.”

“It’s important that your cuttings go into a clean environment—new soil, clean trays. I wash my used cell-trays in my big sink or the kiddie pool, adding about a half-cup of bleach to the water to sanitize. Underneath these cell-trays, which are pretty flimsy, I put these liners—” she waggled an open-bottomed tray at me—”that will stiffen the trays but let water drain out. Then, once you’ve got the cells loaded with soil, press it down a little with your fingers so it’s not so fluffy, then top off.”

Once we had three flats loaded with soil, we went around back to her lavenders. “See how much growth is on this ‘Fred Boutin’?” she ruffled its branches, each about 18′ long. “We’ll cut these branches back to just above the bare wood.”

Once Fred had his haircut, we proceeded to a nearly-white spanish lavender. The flowers, pale rose-violet at this point, were unlike the deep purples I associate with spanish lavender. Here, clearly, was something different. “I wish I knew what this variety is,” she admitted.”Isn’t it beautiful?” The foliage was so ghostly pale, it reminded me of dusty millers when they first broke on the gardening world 20 years ago. 

Back at the porch, Colleen’s instructions continued. “The best cuttings are from wood that’s not dead bare, but not young green either—it’s from wood that’s in-between, just starting to stiffen. So go up the stem just past where it’s bare, clip there and throw away that dead wood.”

She then took a single stem, yanked off the foliage from the first inch or so. “The roots will emerge from these nodes—these bumpy rings around the stem—and you want to peel away the bark a bit by ripping off foliage. There’s a hormone inside the plant that, once it feels soil contact, it goes into survival mode and puts out roots so the plant can survive. So we want to encourage that by ripping away the bark.”

She demonstrated how, with a multi-stemmed branch, you could peel off a branch and it would release with a cuticle of bark off the end. “That’s a heel cutting, and it will root well because there’s lots of inner plant exposed to contact the soil.”

Above the bared stem (or heel cutting), she left two inches worth—or two nodes’ worth—of foliage. If the cutting was already multi-stemmed, she trimmed all the little stems back, sometimes giving the leaf-tips a little trim. Every cutting, whether single or multi-stemmed, ended up about 4-5″ long. 

And into single cells she plunged each cutting until it touched bottom. Then she firmed the soil around it with her fingers. “You don’t want the stems TOO long especially if the flat will be outside, because the wind could move them around and open up air-holes around the new roots, which will kill them. This firming-down helps prevent that, and it gives good contact of soil against the cutting.”

We filled about six flats with the two lavenders. She figures she’ll lose about 30%. “I don’t use rotetone. Mostly, it’s a fungicide, and if you start with clean soil and pots, you really don’t need it. I haven’t seen that it helps a lot, anyway.”

Cuttings, even without roots, can be killed by excess water. “Give the plants a little water now to settle the soil. Through the winter, I only water when they are really dry, and I make sure the flats can drain. No standing water.”

When I told her I had really leggy lavenders, she suggested that I could layer the plant by drawing down the branches and pinning—or laying a big rock on—each branch down on the soil. “Eventually, those branches will root at the point of contact, though it might takes months. But then, you will have many plants, and you can pull the old leggy plant out and not have a hole in your garden.”

I told her I’d long had a copy of the Arboretum’s book, Cuttings Through The Year. “That’s the best book. And if you look under the section for October, you’ll see it has a really long list of plants that can be propagated now. It’s a good time anyway—who has time in spring? But things are slowing down now, and I have the time. And if I lose plants to winter, I’ll have a whole bunch of replacements ready.”

Looking at that book’s list for October, I see you can take hardwood cuttings now from aucuba, berberis, heathers, rock rose, cotoneaster, daphne (so UNwinter-hardy!), holly, bay laurel, honeysuckle, pieris, rosemary, sages, sarcococca, skimmia, viburnum, and vinca, among many others. 

So for a little winter insurance for your garden, take cuttings now. And watch for announcements of three classes on propagation that Colleen will teach: the first will be in December.

I heard plenty of comments like Gene Kuhns’ “I was not too impressed [with eating green tomatoes].  I ate them because I did not want them to go to waste.”

Then there are the Scarring Childhood Experiences, shared by Al Watts. “I am not a fan of green unripe tomatoes because my Grandmother was noted for her ‘Green Tomato Pie’ that she cooked and baked for us even though she was nearly blind.  I hated it, but it really wasn’t much different from green apple pie.”

Then there’s Karen Biondo’s stance that things should be eaten in their season (and, though she didn’t SAY this, that if the durn fruit hadn’t ripened in the season it’s supposed to, phooey on it!) Admitting she did not care for green tomatoes, she insisted, “It’s okay to be done with the garden at the end of the season. Appreciate it, be grateful for it, and TOSS IT!”

For those of you still game for the garden, who still have Kerr jars to fill, who have eaters that don’t say “Phooey!” and “Ick!”, here are some more recipes recommended by Islanders. These are more in the Preserves category: chutneys, pickles, and plus a mincemeat/pie filling that’s great for really cold weather dining.

Green Tomato Pickles

This recipe came from Mary Ornstead. Her source is Organic Gardening, Winter 2009-2010.  ”The recipe is from Renee Erickson of Boat Street Pickles, in Seattle no less, and it states that these are a ‘succulent condiment for hamburgers, roast chicken and charcuterie.’  You can check out www.boatstreetpickles.com per the article.”

In stainless steel saucepan, combine vinegar, sugar, salt and garlic.  Bring to boil.  When sugar is dissolved, add the tomatoes.  Simmer over low for 10 minutes, or until tomatoes are tender but not mushy. Strain tomatoes, reserving liquid in one container and tomatoes in another. Add tarragon to the liquid. Refrigerate both until cool, then combine. Spoon into lidded glass containers and refrigerate for up to 3 months.

Green Tomato Chutney

This from Carol Spangler, a fellow yogini who has helped us at the Homeless Dinners. She freezes hers in small containers “and have been happy to have them all year.” Such a chutney goes well with rice, meat kebabs or slices of ham, or in Indian dishes.

Use a food processor to chop the tomatoes and set aside.  Repeat process with apples, set them aside.  Chop onion and set aside. Place all ingredients in a large heavy-bottomed pot and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until it reaches a jam-like consistency (about 1 hour).  As it begins to thicken, reduce heat to low and stir more frequently to prevent sticking or scorching. Store chutney covered in refrigerator and use within three weeks. 

Green Tomato & Apple Mincement / Pie Filling

The above recipe, with dried fruits used instead of onions and even more sugar added, becomes a hearty, sweet pie filling that I really enjoy once cold weather sets in. This is from Julia Rosso’s “Great Good Food.” Both this and the chutney can be “put up” in sterilized jars immersed in a hot-water bath while the concoction’s still hot. Quantities below will probably fill one pie (use a double-crust recipe of your preference) with leftovers for ice cream, yogurt, or a condiment for meats or indian dishes.

Place the tomatoes in a large stockpot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and blanch for 4-5 minutes. Drain. Add all the remaining ingredients. Mix well; bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce the heat and simmer for 1.5 hours, stirring occasionally. Let the mincement cool. Remove the orange slices and cinnamon sticks and transfer to a covered container. Store in the refrigerator; because of all the sugar & acid, this keeps for a long long time (as in, months) in the frig.

NOTE: The mincement can be preserved in sterilized quart jars. Leaving 1/4 inch of headspace in the jar, seal and process in a hot-water bath at least 15 minutes. 

At GreenDale Farm, our 20 tomato plants are still loaded with fruit, red and unripe green. Anything with a bit of pink will ripen, eventually, if I move the fruit indoors where the temperature is 55° or better. But that leaves rather a LOT of unripe tomatoes that just won’t ripen, so for the last ten days I’ve been asking everybody “Do you have a recipe for green tomatoes that you actually LIKE?”

LIKE, because despite having Fried Green Tomatoes recommended to me constantly, I have yet to meet a method that turns those green slices into anything better than deep-fried hockey pucks. And I’ve tried. Last Saturday, I egged and dipped slices into cornmeal, panko, bread-crumbs, and combos thereof. While the vaguely ripe slices (as from the pink-in-the-center tomato above, an example showing how toms ripen from the inside-out) were somewhat tasty, the pure-greens were all, well, pucker-pucks. Surely there’s better things to do with all those green tomatoes?

When I put that question out there, Islanders, you came THROUGH!  Below you’ll find recipes that will take you from appetizer to dessert (oh LORD, the PIE!!!). Some recipes, I tried; some, I haven’t yet. To make this entry shorter, if the recipe’s already online, I’ll provide just a link. All meet the criteria of “Did you REALLY like it? Would you serve it to your guests?”

And message to VIGA: some year, we need a Green Tomato Taste-off. 

APPETIZER: Green Tomato Salsa  

Thanks to Kathy Bosler, who found this at Cooks.com. This works fine fresh or canned, and it would be good with some Truly Green Tomatoes, such as ‘Green Zebra’, mixed in.

Chop all ingredients and place in saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Then cool, or if canning, pour salsa into hot jars, seal and hot-water-bath for 30 minutes. Makes 3-5 pints. 

SALAD: Green Bruschetta on spinach or on toast

Chop 1-2 pale green or pinking-up tomatoes into 1/2″ chunks and marinate for a few minutes in olive oil & balsamic vinegar with S & P, maybe a little sugar if tomatoes are too tart. Then grill for 5 minutes with some minced garlic. Meanwhile, into remaining vinaigrette add chopped fresh spinach, cubes of fresh mozzarella, and more fresh basil threads (or, replace mozzarella with shavings of blue cheese and diced walnuts). Serve grilled tomatoes on the bed of spinach, or on toasts basted with olive oil & garlic.

ENTREE: First the Sauce, then the Green Enchilada Recipe

Buy a bag of tomatillos, an equal quantity or less by weight of green tomatoes, and about 25% that weight of yellow onion—a ratio akin to 4 cups tomas, 2 cups greenies, 1 cup onion. Also get a few hot peppers (hungarian wax or jalapeno), a handful of cilantro, lime juice, and some garlic. There are two methods, plus you could probably use the salsa recipe above.

Roasted & Food-Processed: de-husk and lightly wash the tomatillos; wash and core the green tomatoes; put toma/toms plus peppers on a sturdy cooky sheet and roast in a 375° oven for about 20 minutes, until tom skins are toasted & puckery. Pop peppers (whose skins should be browned) in a small brown bag to steam for 10 minutes, then peel skin, split & de-seed, and chop. Using a food processor or blender, grind tomas/toms, then peppers, then add about a cup chopped cilantro, a tbls. minced garlic, big splash of lime juice, S & P. Pack into pint butter-tubs or Seal-a-Meals and freeze.

Kettle-cooked: Under broiler, brown peppers until skin is darkened; bag & steam for 10+ minutes, then skin, seed, and chop. Husk and wash tomatillos; wash & core green tomatoes & chop. Mince the yellow onion and saute in big pot in a little oil until golden, then add garlic and saute until you smell it, then add the tomas/toms, and the peppers, lime, cilantro, a little cumin and perhaps sugar to balance the acidity, S & P. Cook until the tomatillos basically fall apart. Grind as above and freeze. 

Chicken & Cheese Enchiladas

Heat oven to 375°. On a counter, deploy your pint of sauce, your bowl of chicken/onion/peppers, and warming tortillas. Shred some cheese into meat bowl and mix together. In an 8×8″ baking pan, spread about 1/4 cup of green sauce. Across the center of a warm tortilla, make a fat row of meat mix; over it dribble a spoonful of green sauce. Roll up and place in pan. Repeat with all tortillas to fill pan. Cover roll-ups with remainder of green sauce so that sauce touches all exposed tortilla; scrape more cheese over roll-ups until lightly covered. Bake for 20 minutes until enchiladas start to golden. Serve 2-3 per person.

FINALLY—DESSERT—Green Tomato & Spicy Apple Pie

This recipe is from Renee Shepherd, famous seed-purveyor and cook. Since this is a long blog entry, I’ll just give you the link and the photo. Karen Brewer, fellow volunteer at the Food Bank, says she’s had a 100% green tomato pie this week and thought it too was wonderful. Who knew! But THIS recipe is TRULY WORTH EATING!!!

 http://www.reneesgarden.com/recipes/green_tomato_apple_pie.html

Feel free to send me your tried-n-true Green Tomato recipes. Next week, I’ll post what I couldn’t fit on today’s entry: preserves, pickles, chutneys, and a bundt/quick bread that the Food Bank volunteers wolfed down today.

First, some events coming up soon:

CiderFest is this Saturday, Oct 8, from 10-4. Drink fresh cider at the Farmers’ market; try varieties of apples at the Senior Center; try Ron Irvine’s hard cider at (I think) Cafe Luna later in the afternoon. Check out posters around town for more specifics.

Come help plant next year’s garlic for the Food Bank Farm this Saturday, from 10-4 at 24026 Wax Orchard Road. Hot drinks will be served.

Interested in food preservation? The Vashon Food Security has a lending library of canning equipment, plus dehydrator, food mill, pressure canners, vacuum sealers, and other stuff to help you preserve excess fruit, vegetables, sauces, soups, and even meats. They also have a DVD demo for sale at $5, and a resource pdf on Food Preservation: click for that info and how to check out the equipment.

The Wheaton Garden

Driving down the highway toward Burton, I used to pass this run-down homestead with some great old trees out front—particularly a weeping pink cherry tree. But over the last couple years, somebody’s been sprucing up the place, giving it new life and a big new vegie patch out to the side.

Turns out, this is the home of Kathy & Lloyd Wheaton, they of Kathy’s Corner. I asked for a quick visit a couple weeks back, asking particularly to come in late afternoon, when the last light is slanting down the side of the “Rock” and seems to pour right into her river of marigolds.

If, during this Friday’s Art Cruise, you will be motoring down to Silverwood Gallery, look to the east along the long flat above Morgan Hill. The yellows, golds, and apricot tones of her front garden cannot help but catch your eye.

Kathy’s family moved here in the 50s. When I got there, she toured me through Lloyd’s vegetable patch. “Once this whole hill was covered in peach trees: Red Havens, Veterans, Rochesters. I started picking berries on my 9th birthday, 25¢ a flat for berries, 30¢ if you filled up your punch-card.” 

At the “Corner,” they’ve been offering Lloyd’s tomatoes—102 plants’ worth—plus cukes, squash, beans, and six different varieties of corn. If you want to have ripe corn by July 10—as they did—you do what Lloyd did: pre-starting corn in trays in early spring.

As we walked along, I noticed a double set of wires running 6″ and 12″ off the ground. “This is our raccoon fence,” she said, “the raccoons can’t get underneath, and they’re too heavy to get over it without pressing down the wire.” The system, by “Patriot”, is charged by a solar panel that can electrify up to 20 miles of wire (whew!). One does have to look out for the wire grounding if a cornstalk falls over the wire and pressed it to the ground. At $200 for the system, it’s not cheap, but “the raccoons haven’t touched our corn since we put this up.” 

Shadows were stretching toward us as we ambled back to the front garden. There, Lloyd and her crew had surprised her with a birthday garden of shrubs and perennials. Helenium, penstemon, sweet peas, and cosmos ‘sonnet’ glowed hot in the last sunlight. “This hydrangea ‘Quick Fire’ is really fantastic, she said, gesturing toward a 3′ high shrub with big lace-cap blooms of pink and white. “It blooms in pink in June on old wood, then grows new wood and blooms again later on. The older flowers fade to white, but they look just as good as the fresh pink ones. And the leaves turn burgundy-red in fall.”

“I don’t know why people don’t use clethra more,” she said when I admired its white bottle-brush blooms. “This is ‘Hummingbird’—deciduous, it comes out with mid-green foliage, blooms with honey-scented flowers by August, and turns a clear yellow in fall. There’s also a pink variety called ‘Ruby Spice.’” 

In Pacific Northwest magazine a couple Sundays back, columnist Valerie Easton warned readers off the tradition of dividing perennials in fall. She noted the heavy losses of perennials to the early/late frosts and hard winters since 2008, and she recommended only dividing woody shrubs now. Mulch everything with a loose, fluffy mulch such as hay or mowed-up leaves, then divide the perennials in March or April when danger of frost is past.

Kathy has her set of fall plantings to recommend, and the woody plants in her list include boxwood, conifers, veronicas, callicarpia, red-twig dogwoods, barberries, and grasses such as carex. 

Her driveway dahlias were catching the very last light in their petal-tips as I was leaving. Sunset will be at 6:30pm this Friday, so if you want to enjoy a “Golden Hour” viewing of Kathy’s garden, start Art Cruising by 6pm and head for Silverwood’s hold-over of Ted Kutscher’s paintings, all of them baskers in sunlight as well. (Pause to admire Kathy’s golden plantings, but don’t linger: the dogs won’t welcome you.)

The Van Fleet pond, part of an Audubon class/tour this Saturday

A couple of Bog Wallows are scheduled for this Saturday morning, and neither one will get your fenders muddy. 

Tom DeVries, our high school’s science teacher, will lead three hour-long tours of the Whispering Firs Bog, starting with a 9am tour. This is more a “stand -n- listen” tour than a walk-about, though you will probably want to wear grippy mud-boots against a slippery shore. Other tours run at 10am and 11am: call the Land Trust to reserve your spot. It’s a $5 admission if you’re a Land Trust member; $25 for your whole family, which gets you Land Trust membership. Email beth@vashonlandtrust.org with your reservation.

It may strike you as odd, as it did me, that the TOP of our hump-backed Island features a number of ponds, bogs, and swamps. Why don’t they drain out or dry out during our droughty Puget summers? Are they an interaction between our Vashon Till and top-lying Recessional Glacial Outwash? Does the County give a care about these wet spots? Is it a bog, a fen, or a wetland? And will we need mosquito repellant?  Join me in hearing Tom DeVries unravel the mysteries of our Island bogs.

The other will be part of Alan Huggins’ “Enjoyment of Birds” series, which starts Wednesday tomorrow night at the Land Trust Building from 7-9pm. This first, 2-part class is on “Attracting Birds to your Garden, Naturally…” and features a Saturday, October 1st tour, 10-noon, of the Sara & Sam Van Fleet garden, which was on the 2006 Garden Tour and has been written up in Pacific Northwest magazine and in Fine Gardening magazine. The landscaping of the Van Fleet garden is centered around a BOG they found in their front yard; landscaped with wildlife in mind, it apparently hosts 70 different species of birds through the year. 

Other classes in the series—

Winter Water Birds

On Oct 26/Nov 2, Dr. Gary Shugart will introduce you to the goldeneyes, loons, grebes, buffleheads, and colorful ducks that will soon return to Vashon bays, shorelines and ponds for their fall & winter stays. Field trip Saturday, Nov 12.

Gull Identification

Gulls all look alike to you? Did you know we have eight different species here—just in January? Dr. Shugart will help you sort them out, via slides and a field trip. January 11, with field trip TBA.

It’s Only April, So Who’s Singing Outside My Window?

On April 11 and 18, Alan Huggins will introduce you to the “hardy winter resident robins, song sparrows, juncos, towhees, and others awakened by the surging hormones of their early breeding season. Get to know them by eye and ear.” Field trip on April 14.

Blasted Out of Bed by Birds in June?

Tis’ the season for birding by ear, as all those migratory songbirds arrive from the tropics and add their songs and calls to the soundscape. Classes are June 6 & 20th, with field trip Saturday, June 9th. 

Fee for each of the 5 separate programs is $30 for current Audubon members; non-members add $15 per household for a membership to Audubon. Contact Alan Huggins at alanhugs@comcast.net or phone.

from left in the "Jam" category: Wild Evergreen Huckleberry, Organic Nectarine, and Plum Framboise

VIGA held its “Jam, Jelly & Salsa Contest” last Saturday the 17th at the Farmers’ Market, and yours truly was invited to be one of the judges. When I arrived at 11, thirteen of the soon-to-be 15 competing concoctions were lined up in categories, each jar numbered, and new Farmers Market manager Rebecca Wittman was duplicating those numbers down a clipboard.

Rebecca has helped run the Heritage Museum’s Jam Contest in recent years, and it showed. She had pre-printed cards for each judge, showing the five categories—originality, color, texture, consistency, and taste—to be ranked from a low 1 to high 5.

I soon learned judging would be limited to us four: King County’s food department doesn’t want masses of public hands dipping into small pots of food. Though not very democratic or fun, it’s an understandable precaution,  even for our small crowd of four. We finally decided to give each jar its own spoon, from which we’d drop tasting samples onto our palms.

At 11:30, the palm-licking began. Not wanting to kill off my taste-buds too early, I started with the chutneys: peach, mango, and apple ginger. Here I have to say that in a chutney, riper is not better. You don’t want something that looks like jam on your lamb burger—you want chunks of fruit caught between tart and fully ripe, still firm enough to hold its shape against the vinegar every chutney contains. (And that bacon flavor—not my cup of chutney…) The winner: the Mango Chutney by Sheree Tomoson.

Savories was a catch-all-oddballs category with two entries: a spicy pumpkin butter and a gooseberry sauce, both excellent. The pumpkin butter was brightly colored and complex—a little sage note? very subtle. The gooseberry sauce—tiny brown seeds floating round gooseberry “islands” in a translucent brown sugar “sea”—would be wonderful on a big slab of ham. The winner: the Pumpkin Butter by Jasper Forrester of GreenMan Farm.

Salsas three were all pretty good: a hot green tomato salsa, an organic peach salsa, and the “Agnes” salsa, loaded with chunky variety in a peppery tomato juice. And this “Agnes Salsa” was the winner of this category, submitted by Jack Churchill.

Though the “Very Cherry” Jam soooo wasn’t, the blackberry jams were VERY berry:  though not terribly original, both caught their fruit at almost alcoholic peaks. The organic nectarine was very fruit-forward—something often buried under spices in other entries—as was the deeply complex Plum Framboise (framboise is french for raspberry). The Wild Evergreen Huckleberry Jam needed straining, in my opinion: the skins definitely had that wild WOODY note (but other judges liked that quality, so if that’s to your taste…). The winner of this category, and second place winner overall, was the Plum Framboise Jam by Shannon Flora, with a third-place overall win going to Allen de Steigner for his Wild Huckleberry Jam.

There was only one jelly: a crabapple ginger, glowing coral-rose in its tiny glass pot. But what a taste! Delicate yet full. Congratulations to Karen Biondo of K-Jo Farm, winner of the Jelly category and overall Grand Winner (beating the Plum Framboise Jam by half a point.)

Obviously delighted by her Big Win, Karen told me the recipe was inspired by memories of her Great Aunt Doris’s jelly. The crabapples came from old trees in front of the “O” space: 10 gallons worth of crabapples “the size of the end of your thumb” which came off the tree quickly. She cooked the apples and strained them overnight over a bucket to capture the juice, then added sugar to the juice in an open kettle over heat until it jelled, then jarred and placed in the usual hot water bath for sealing. Being made of crabapples with plenty of their own natural pectin, the jelly set up quickly within 20 minutes, and I can testify that it shakes like jelly’s supposed to.

After testing 15 sweet samplings, my brain was buzzin’ and the back of my jaw clinching from sugar overload. When I mentioned that, Rebecca, saying “Oh yah—I wanted you guys to try this—” and pulled out a jar of her own Apricot Jam. “Don’t worry—it’s low sugar,” she said. “I made it by pitting and halving apricots, cut side up, into the bottom of a big dutch oven, sprinkling the fruit with MAYBE a 1/4 cup of demerara sugar, and letting it all roast in the oven for a couple hours until the fruit melts down into this paste. What do you think?”

Warm, sweet, intensely apricot, with a toasted color—pretty good jam for such a little sugar. Good job, Rebecca, with your jam and with your Jam, Jelly, & Salsa contest. Thanks to Lindsay Hart, Rebecca, and Bernie O’Malley of East/West Produce for judging, and to all the contestants for their entries. Watch the paper—or contact Rebecca Wittman or Lindsay Hart—for details on the upcoming Pumpkin Pie Contest.

Colleen James, perhaps rationalizing her inclusion in the upcoming Farm Tour by wearing a stylish Italian zucchini.

We’re at harvest-time, and the To-Do List is growing as fast as an August zucchini. Summer’s cresting over the start of autumn, multiplying and overlapping tasks.

It’s a great time to divide and transplant perennials and small shrubs, and it’s time to get fall bulbs ordered at least, if not dug in. But meanwhile, the food garden is ripening fast and furiously. There’s more food than any family can eat, which means that somebody’s got to tackle freezing, canning, and drying, and right NOW, while the fruit and veg are at their ripest best. 

So a few odds and ends first:

• This Saturday, the Farmers’ market will host its Jams, Jellies, and Salsa Competition. Come taste and compare. I’ll be helping with the judging between 11am-12:45pm.

• Organic roma tomatoes at $1/lb at Thriftway—a screaming deal. If your garden (like mine) hasn’t quite ripened enough plum tomatoes to “put up,” you might consider supplementing your batch with these robust romas.

• Birder Alan Huggins and Vashon Audubon will offer a five-program series on Vashon birds. The first is Wednesday September 28th. All classes 7-9pm at the Land Trust building. Questions, contact Alan at alanhugs@comcast.net or 567-5166. You can probably find a flyer at the Land Trust building or the library.

• On Sunday, September 25 from 10am-4pm, Vashon hosts one of King County’s three “Fall Harvest Farm Tours.” (Look for a pretty large booklet/brochure put out by King County and WSU Extension on these tours.) Vashon Winery, Greeman Farm, and Island Meadow, Plum Forest, and Sun Island farms will participate. So will Colleen James, perennial plantswoman of Burton Loop. Suggested donation is $5 at the first farm you visit (beyond anything you buy, that is.) Leave dogs at home.

Dividing and Transplanting

With the heat simmered down and a protective cloud cover back over us, this is an excellent opportunity to divide and transplant perennials and small shrubs. The warm soil means severed roots will quickly regrow. But you’ll have to keep disturbed plants well-watered until fall rains kick in and take over that chore for you.

Colleen James propagates perennials at her home garden on the Burton Peninsula, so I consider her an expert on perennial upkeep. I asked her what plants are good to divide right now. She said to look for plants that aren’t blooming as much as in former years: it’s a sure sign they want dividing. Lift the whole plant and, if it’s gone hollow in the center, chunk off a couple daughter divisions with a shovel, sharp knife, or by teasing it apart between your hands. Big, tough perennials like daylilies may take two big garden forks, back to back, to pry the plant apart.

Replant the “mother” back in place, refreshing the soil with some compost and watering in. Then move the new “daughters” to new sites, also tucking them in with compost and lots of water. Don’t use fertilizer: you want the plant to recover, not have to put out new growth that will just be killed off by a frost in a couple months.

Here’s her list of perennials to divide now: Yarrow (Achillea); Lily of the Nile (Agapanthus); Tickseed (Coreopsis); Prairie Coneflower (Echinacea); Cranesbill (Hardy Geranium); Daylily (Hemerocallis); Bee Balm (Monarda); Phlox; Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia); Lamb’s Ear (Stachys).

You can add to that list, the following: Lady’s Mantle, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Boltonia, Brunnera, Bleeding Heart, Epimedium, Irises, Peonies (3-5 eyes per division); Poppies, Penstemons, Solomon’s Seal, and Soapwort.

Some of these plants (particularly in Colleen’s list) will still be blooming. So cut all blooming stems back to the crown, fill your flower vase, then cut off any other dead foliage and stems and divide. By late October, new leaves may have filled in “mother’s” gap teeth, giving your garden a more filled-out appearance going into spartan winter.

It hasn’t been a long summer, but my potted plantings are looking beat from the heat. Stretched, dried out, flowers faded from sun, foliage a little chewed from deer and multiple dead-headings. 

Time to go get a new Fall wardrobe for those pots.

Both Kathy’s Corner and DIG are throwing late summer specials right now. DIG is moving many plants out for a “Driveway Sale: 75% off”. Kathy Wheaton has carts of plants at half off, with many more plants at 25% through next week. 

Think “Thriller-Spiller-Filler” for Pots

I went first to the Labor Day Sale at Kathy’s Corner, picking up pansies and geraniums for some quick color “fillers.” Kathy had some good ideas to carry pots into the cooler months. She suggests using small evergreen shrubs as center “thrillers”. Choose those that offer color or texture contrast, such as red twig dogwood, carex, sedums, boxwoods, hebes, or barberries. She also suggested redbor kale or rainbow chard as colorful, practical plantings: her nursery will be getting new starts of those by mid-month. 

For flowers, she particularly likes Veronica ‘georgia Blue. “It has medium-blue flowers that last into winter. The green foliage goes to bronze later in fall, and it’s frost-hardy.”

As for spillers, I found purple potato vines screaming “BUY ME!” at $3.00 a 4″ pot. Frost will kill it, but that’s two months away, and meanwhile that deep maroon will set off pansies beautifully.

Kathy’s got the “fillers” and “spillers”, but DIG has more small shrubs that make good backbone “thrillers.” Ilex mariesii ‘Golden Tips” is a small, barbless holly, each tiny leaf tipped in gold. Berberis thunbergii ‘Helmond Pillar’ will eventually be 4′ tall and 12″ wide, but for a couple years will rise from the center of a pot in a vertical column of deep maroon. 

If you’ve ever visited the California Sequoia forests and remember that citrus/cinnamon smell of the myrtle leaves lying all over the ground, a 16″ Umbellularia california will (with some protection, say close to your house) provide your cooking with that scent and your pots with spiky, mid-green evergreen leaves. If you prefer an evergreen grass with some light in it, seek out that Libertia ‘Gold Finger’ with its yellow strip running the length of each olive-green blade; it thrives in dry soil, in light shade or sun, and has tri-petaled white flowers in late spring. (I saw one note that insinuated Libertia is poisonous—but then, you’re not eating this stuff.)

Since you’d probably want to build a pot based on the central “thriller,” I’d suggest starting at DIG, then find your flowery “Fillers” and drooping “spillers” among the many annuals still blooming their heads off at Kathy’s Corner.

A couple of years in pots and these small shrubs will have sized up enough to move into the garden proper, without fear of being swamped by the more mature plants. In the meantime, they’ll provide a backbone upon which to build a colorful, refreshed fall dressing to carry your pots into winter.

Here’s a close-up of one pot with winter pansies, zonal geranium, and purple potato vine.

Dark red and ripe: Island Loganberries

Loganberries, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, and the promiscuous clan of blackberries: chesters, marions, boysens, olympics. These are the berries that once put cash in Vashon pockets, from the kid picker to the grower to the cannery.

“Hey, they’re paying 4¢/lb at the Vashon Island Fruit Company!” (that’s back in 1915). It’s not much higher by the 1960s when Kathy Wheaton of Kathy’s Corner was picking for 25¢ per flat (6 containers holding a pint each). By 1979 toward the end of picking here, Tokio Otsuka, who everybody knew as  ”Tok,” was paying $1.30/flat to as many pickers as he could find. He told a Seattle P-I reporter in 1979, “ ”Berry growing on the island was a tradition, but there are only 3 or 4 of us left now. People don’t want to work on the farm anymore. The kids all want city-type jobs, they rather be a box boy at Thriftway.” 

So the fields, without enough workers to pick them, went from commercial crop to u-pickings to finally hay and gentlemen homesteads. But that doesn’t mean all the berries vanished…

Here and there, old berry bushes carry on, though sometimes with help. Craig Harmeling, former fire chief native to the Island, told me he rescued some loganberries from the field once farmed by Fred Eernissee, before Island Lumber came in with bulldozers to rip it all up for their big-box store and parking lot. His great-grandfather, Stephen Jay Harmeling, ran a nursery from the 1910s-40s on Bank Road that sold many Island farmers their berry and fruit tree starts (that property houses the old brown bungalow opposite the Sunflower housing campus; Stephen Jay built its now-defunct greenhouses.)

Hal Green found a source of “Vashon heritage berries” when he decided to replant his father’s berry patch at Triplebrook farm, installing marionberries, loganberries, and a thornless “Chester” berry. I saw them during my tour of Triplebrook for my VAA garden previews. From Hal, I learned about Helen Brocard of Dockton, his source for those island-grown loganberries.

Island Heritage Loganberries—still growing in Dockton

I went to meet Helen at the very end of the loganberry season. On the phone, she told me she might be able to find “just enough to make a pie,” and yes, I could come help her pick them.

If you visit the VIGA Farmer’s Market, you might have already met Helen. A short, lean, straight-backed gal somewhere above 70, she shared a table selling berries and local fruit with Dr. Bob Norton of the fruit club. They’d alternate as each one’s fruit came into season: first Bob with his strawberries, then Helen with currants and loganberries. She also sold her fruit through Bernie at the main corner, and she’s spoken at the fruit club.

“Oh, she’s probably our Island expert on those berries,” Bernie had told me. So I was expecting a planting a little larger than the two 20-foot rows just west of her house. “It’s a personal planting, really,” she explained when I got there. “I don’t want to become a nursery.”

Loganberries grow as canes that need trellising on wires. Her first-year “primocanes” were growing on the ground while the second year “floricanes” had been brought up during the last dormant season to the double row of wires and wrapped around them; the berries grew off their short secondary branches.

The ripe berries were a dark purple-red, “but you can also eat the bright red ones: they’re good enough for pie,” she advised. “Do you use flour in the filling? I don’t: I use a tablespoon of cornstarch mixed into the sugar because it makes a beautiful transparent filling that shows off the color of the berries. Flour just mucks them up.”

And then she told me the story of how she got her berries.

A Story of Hardship and Survival

This was her parents’ farm: back in the 40s, they grew gooseberries, loganberries, and ‘Red Lake’ currants commercially. Her father, Ivan Kranjcevich, came from Croatia in the 1930s and jobbed across the country. Once he met and married Eva, they bought seven acres to farm on Maury Island.

Sunny Jim Fruit Processors in Tacoma used to send a man out to inspect and offer a price to farmers for their crops. Then they’d send a truck out to pick up flats from not only Ivan’s place, but his brother’s farm and their neighbors. “This was all berry- and fruit-farming, back then,” Helen told me. 

But berry farming couldn’t pay all the bills, so Ivan, like many farmers, hired out elsewhere. Ivan took a job cooking on the Dockton fishing boat Umatilla, captained by Lucas Plancich. Up near Cape Flattery, in the middle of a clear, moonlit night, the boat was rammed by the U.S.S. battleship Arizona, cutting the boat in two, killing two crewman, and spilling 7 men into the water, where they were fished out by their companion boat, the Emblem. The captain of the Arizona kept right on going until the Navy forced him back, tried and demoted him. 

Ivan had severe internal injuries and eventually a stroke from the accident. But he could still cook for the family, so he took over the kitchen while they carried on berry-farming; he died in 1945. Faced with a choice between going on welfare and keeping the farm, Eva chose the farm. They kept going until, with her kids grown, Eva remarried in 1960 and moved to Tacoma—taking some berry plants with her.

In Tacoma, Eva dug up her yard, installed her berries and other productive plants and flowers, and started selling produce and flowers to local restaurants and neighbors. Helen, who eventually married and settled in Bellevue, started her own restaurant, “Pogachas” (which means “flatbread” in Croatian) that served California-style cuisine; it’s still going strong today. And from her mother’s garden she took cuttings of currants and loganberries and “stuck them into pots, lost 2 out of twelve” and nursed them on for several years.

When Eva died, Helen and her brother inherited those original seven acres. After selling Pogachas, and after volunteering for four years at the Bellevue Botanical Garden, Helen moved back to the Dockton homeplace. She took the berries with her.

She carried them forward: those 1940s loganberries and currants are back where they started. Still ripening, still filling pies, still tasting wonderful. Maybe if you join the fruit club and ask her nicely next year, she’ll dig up some rooted starts of those Vashon heritage loganberries for your own garden.

THIS is the Olympic Berry.

If you are old enough to have visited the Tea Room of Frederick & Nelson, Seattle flagship department store through much of the 20th century, then you may recall ordering, for a whopping 40¢, a slice of their exclusive “Olympic Berry Pie.” Exclusive, because the store bought out the entire crop.

That Frederick & Nelson Exclusive was a product of Vashon Island.

Back in 1909, Mr. Peter Erickson of Vashon Island took himself to the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, held on the grounds of what would become the University of Washington campus. There he met the famous plant breeder Luther Burbank, up from California to extol the virtues of his ‘Phenomenal’ berry, his cross between a loganberry and a wild blackberry.

Mr. Erickson thought he “could do better.” It is not known whether Erickson made this boast to Burbank’s face, but Burbank did eventually send Mr. Erickson a plant of ‘Phenomenal’ to use in developing his own berry. Erickson, with the help of his son-in-law Halleck F. Greider, crossed ‘Phenomenal’ with a wild black raspberry of Minnesota called ‘Plum Farmer’ and came up with this new berry.

The berry was large, sweet, hardy to -18°, and productive over a long season (July-October). And, because it wasn’t prone to breaking and thus bleeding its juice all over everything, it was probably easier than most berries to harvest and handle. The men named the berry ‘Olympic’—perhaps in honor of the wonderful view from his fields of that mountain range—and in 1937 they took out a patent on the plant in Halleck Greider’s name.

I can still enjoy a glimpse of the Olympics not far from where I picked my handful of berries. 

By 1948, both Erickson and Greider had died, leaving the widow Pauline to struggle on. By the 1950s, the 25,000-ton crop had dwindled to six tons. In the 1990s, grandson Hal sold the property to the Green family for their alpaca farm. Here, I share a garden plot with Bill—our “GreenDale Farm”—and that’s how I came to be holding a handful of these succulent, Vashon heritage berries.

There aren’t many plants left, Bill told me when we went scouting for them. The one surviving row he found upon moving here was drowned by standing water a couple of winter storms ago. His son Nathan keeps the few surviving plants encased within concrete rubble to make sure delivery trucks don’t run over them.

But they ARE survivors. And the flavor is complex, full, very sweet. If only there was a pie’s worth to spare…

“A thin layer of silt, clay, sand, and gravels ground underneath the glacier,” is how Vashon Till is usually described. Well, “thin” is relative when you are talking about something made by a mile-high sheet of ice.

I’d asked Ann Spiers, co-author of the new edition of Trails, Walks, and Parks of Vashon Island, where I should go to see the best effects of the Vashon Glacier that formed Vashon-Maury Island about 13,500 years ago. She sent me and my four companions to KVI Beach to investigate the bluffs along its northern shore.

The first thing we saw, Linda & Peter Milosoroff, June Niece, Bob Dale, and I, was the sheer face of a massif about 50 feet high. Pale gray, polka-dotted with pebbles from top to bottom, with a thin scalp of grass and side-winding roots on top and a few tapered veins of larger cobbles poking through to break up its massive uniformity. Linda grasped a half-bedded cobble and tried to pry it loose. Not a chance: it might as well been bedded in concrete.

That’s Vashon Till.

Also called hardpan,” Vashon Till mantles the upland of Vashon Island, as it does most of the Puget Sound landscape. Anywhere from 5′ to 125′ thick, it’s covered by topsoil and, in some less-eroded places, by a layer of loose sand, gravel, pebbles, and boulders that the glacier left behind as it melted, called “recessional outwash.” In some places, that cover is several feet deep, but in other places, like around the homes that top this bluff, the till rises nearly to the surface. 

Kevin Freeman, who taught a geology section for Vashon 101 a few years ago, lives on this bluff. “When I’m gardening, I have to deal with compressed, rocky soil because the Till is right at the surface,” he told me recently. “We’re all into raised gardens; we import a bunch of stuff that nature didn’t give us. It’s Geology that’s driving you to Kathy’s Corner and Island Lumber to get stuff for raised beds.”

I asked June, who used to design septic fields for Islanders, about her encounters with Vashon Till. “When we were searching a property for a drain-field, we did not want to find this stuff,” she said. “No bulldozer can get its teeth into it, and nobody has enough money to dig through it.”

That makes till a good base for a house foundation, but a lousy place for a septic field. Water perks through till extremely slowly—about 1-1.5″ inches per month—in a day, the thickness of a playing card. A few days of rain can dump far more than that, so water spends some time sitting on top of the hardpan, backfilling the topsoil and (if it’s present) the recessional fill and making your garden too wet to dig in. Eventually, what water isn’t sucked up and out by plants will drain through the soil into low points like ponds, wetlands, springs, and streams (scrape through the muck of any upland Vashon pond, and you’ll probably find it bottoms out on Vashon Till), will ”perch” in depressions in the till layer itself, or will find cracks in the till and drain into the ground below.

And there, the water collects. It’s sandwiched between the lid of till and the clay bottom of the old glacial lake in a layer of compressed sand and gravel that geologists call “advance outwash.” Using the force of its own meltwaters, the glacier purged sands and gravels from itself and dumped them out front of its advancing toe. Those same glacial streams washed most of the silts and clays out of this loose material before the glacier overran the whole mess, so those sands and gravels are pretty clean. And while compressed by the weight of the glacier, they aren’t cemented together, but actually have quite a bit of space around the bits of rock and cobble—space where water collects. This clean, abundant source of water is our Island’s aquifer, tapped into by Island wells and Island water systems. And it’s kept pure and clean thanks, in part, to the lid of Vashon Till lying on top.

“As you walk north on that beach, you’re actually walking back in time,” Ann’s husband David, who is a geologist, told me later. “The land uplifted after the glacier’s weight was gone, and at that point the till layer is above you. Nearing Klahanie, you get the ‘advance outwash’.” [It's harder to see because trees have gotten their roots into it.] “If you find a clay layer down at beach level, that’s the Lawton clay, made of whatever sank to the bottom of the lake in front of the advancing glacier. And in the beach itself, did you see a layer of what we geologists call ‘woody peat?’ It’s made of twigs and old trees from the inter-glacial period. That stuff’s REALLY old.”

Husband Bob is a slow walker, but he’s leap-frogging past us rubber-neckers, as we point and poke and puzzle our way along the cliff face. We start to find the cliff’s made of looser sand, with small strips of “rust oxide mottling,” says June, that show where water has leached from the bluff. Is this some “advance outwash”—that sand & gravel layer that stores our island’s water supply? The surface’s loose enough for somebody to scrape “Geri” into its sandy face, for me to squeeze some scrapings into a ball. We debate: is it silt? clay? Esperance Sand? or just erosion? 

We can’t walk any farther back in time: June’s got an appointment, and backs are starting to ache. So we turn back, filling our pockets with leavings-behind: chunks of Canadian granite transported here by the glacier, bits of red brick from the old brickworks, shells that came in with the tide. It’s marvelous to look underneath the skin of the earth. Quite a puzzle for a layperson, trying to assign geology labels to the chaos that Earth actually shows. And humbling: it’s all been here long before we were, will be long after we’re gone. 

Still, how many places can you take in 13,500 years in an hour?

Caught in a sun-spot: Julia's daylilies

I’m excited to get hiking this week. I finally snagged the new edition of the park district’s trail book, plus found a place to print out a huge geologic map of most of Vashon and Maury islands.

This handbook for explorers, Walks, Trails and Parks on Vashon Island, was first published by John Gerstle and Susan Sullivan in 2003, with net proceeds given to the Vashon Park District. This fourth time around (the book keeps selling out), they recruited naturalist writer Ann Spiers, who often publishes articles in the Beachcomber, to add her perspective. (Doubtless they got her husband David, a geologist, to lend his expertise as they tromped around the Island taking notes.)

So not only is this a book to walks on the Island, it’s packed full of information on our flora and fauna, geology, Island history—even the original S’Homamish tribe’s place-names. To give you a sense of how MUCH this book offers, here’s an excerpt about KVI Beach:

“KVI Beach is a sand spit bordering a tidal salt marsh, a very rare wetland in King County. Salicornia grows here, a low springy vegetation foraged by many waterfowl, such as ducks and gulls. In spring an fall, sandpipers and plovers migrate past here. In July, there are purple martins, and by August, swallows and martins appear in large flocks… The Native American name for the area is Tuqo’olil, or “hidden spring,” after a secret spring where a young girl was hidden to keep her from an unwanted marriage. 

On this short hike, you walk the shore of Tramp Harbor. In the 1880s, Chautauqua, now Ellisport, was the site of a 1,200-seat pavilion and campground, the gathering spot for participants in the Chautauqua movement. An East Coast phenomenon, Chautauquas were events dedicated to adult education and recreation.

Tramp Harbor is a migrating bird stop with an overwintering flock of American Wigeons. The first set of pilings you pass was once a dock for the Mosquito Fleet. Later, perched above the tide zone, pioneer Hiram Fuller built a store and a 14-room hotel. The first stream, Ellisport Creek, empties through twin culverts from under Chautauqua Beach Rd. SW onto the beach. The extensive wetland across Chautauqua Rd. served as a mill pond with an adjacent lumber mill…”

All that, within a single page. 96 pages worth for $12 bucks, including a fold-out map of Vashon Island tucked in the back (they didn’t manage to fit Maury Island on the fold-out, however). Even if you are just an armchair hiker, you will find out TONS about the Island you never knew (such as why those reflector tapes are on the telephone wires strung across Portage). Theoretically, the book’s available at bookstores and the big retail stores, but in truth they’re sold out everywhere but at the Park District. 

The Big BIG Map

After reading the book, I called Ann Spiers to tell her how much I enjoyed the new naturalist/geologist component of the Trails book. I asked her where the best geologic exposures were found, and she suggested I explore the cliffs around the corner from KVI Beach. “And do you have the Derek/Troost GeoMap?” she said.

I knew just what she meant. And If you’re at all interested in the Island’s geology, if you want to know what all those layers of cobbles and clay mean as you walk along the shoreline, let me suggest the “Vashon Quadrangle” map created by UW geologists Derek Booth and Kathy Troost. 

You may know that Vashon-Maury Islands were formed by the movement of a large ice-sheet that covered Puget Sound about 15,000 years ago. During this last ice-age, the glacier that once covered Puget Sound a mile high left behind debris piles layered in silts and clays, cobbles and sand, that today ARE our Islands and the Puget Lowland land-mass.

This particular map, one of many, of The Pacific Northwest Center for Geologic Mapping Studies (GeoMapNW) is (quoting from their website) “a collaborative effort to develop new data and greater understanding of the geology of the central Puget Lowland.” On top of a detailed topographic relief map, it plots where the various types of glacial layers are exposed on Vashon Island. Viewers can plainly see the regions of Vashon Till—our notorious hardpan—the areas of loose recessional advance that the glacier left behind, and the advance outwash layers underneath the till that hold, within their compressed mass of cobbles, sands, and gravels, our precious single-source aquifer of drinking water.

You can view the map online at http://geomapnw.ess.washington.edu/services/publications/map/data/Vashon_11-10-06.pdf. South Vashon/Maury Island, and west Vashon, are shown on other Quadrangle maps: to find them, go to http://geomapnw.ess.washington.edu/

As a 36″ x 48″ map with legend and essay, it’s a large map and a little awkward to view online. However, Island Lumber has a large-scale color printer  that can print out an emailed pdf attachment. Call Karen Abott at the Contractor Sales desk and ask how you can email her the pdf of the map: I got mine the day after I sent it. 

It’ll be awkward unfolding it at KVI Beach (I hope for a NON-windy day), but it’ll be a treat to trace out, on the map and the lines of the KVI cliff-face before me, the tracks of a 15,000-years-past glacier. Plan A is to go at 1pm Saturday: Contact me if you’re interested in joining me.

One of the charms of summer is harvesting with your friends. Climb into the trees, forage through the berry vines, stoop to pluck and cut, your voices floating over the crop rows. 

At GreenDale Farm, our rows are finally fulsome, really yielding good stuff. The carrots are surprising sweet, the one cauliflower (so far) grew big enough for us to split, and we ate the first tomato, a ripe ‘Stupice’ covered with leaves of basil, right in the field.  We have way more than we need, but the point of this garden (besides gaining me some sunny growing space) was to grow an excess and give it to the food bank (like this harvest in the back of my Subaru that Bill’s showing off). Bill estimated last week that we’re giving about 85% of our mutual patch to the Food Bank. And it’s appreciated: even with the additional yield coming from the food bank’s garden and half-acre farm, staffers at the food bank tell me the produce shelves are stripped bare by the end of Wednesday distribution. So bring on the vegies, folks: the food bank clientele will eat it up! (By Tuesday noon or Wednesday 9:30am, please.)

I spent a couple hours at the food bank farm with Jenn, Kyle, and Becca last Tuesday pulling up the last of the ‘Sugar Ann’ pea vines. These peas had been picked through twice before, but on their last legs, mildewed and yellow, they still yielded a couple bin’s worth of incredibly sweet snap peas (mental note: plant THIS variety for myself next year…)  Becca and Kyle sat with me, plucking peas from vines out the back of the collection cart, and I listened to them compare notes about what it was like to grow up on “the Rock.” College aged, freshly seasoned with off-island experiences, they both confessed a strong pull BACK “because no where’s quite like this is.”

Ann's vegie and berry patch

A yoga friend has long invited me to come see her garden, and finally the offer to come “pick my Royal Ann cherries” was too much to resist. Her ten acres are on the very top of the Judd Creek Watershed, and driving up, I could see hers was our “hole in the forest” type of garden.

Thirty years ago, she and husband Dexter came looking for a well-timbered acreage, intent on his dream of building a log cabin in the woods. They harvested their own trees, peeled and graded them, then spent the next two years building their home.

It’s actually two buildings—an A-frame and a rectangle—connected by a covered foyer. Here’s the A-frame with its deep eaves, framed between a lovely Japanese maple and a plume poppy on the right. Like anybody’s dream of a log cabin, this has upper lofts, a wood stove, wooden floors, and plenty of recycled windows and skylights that Dexter salvaged from here and there. “We built the walls to fit the windows,” Ann told me. “The light is so wonderful here: in autumn there’s all this color from outside bouncing in, and winter has this silvery light.” 

The kitchen is a bump-out created after the main structures were up (interesting omission…). The building method is not notched logs, but logs that float on rebar “pins” so there’s little wood-to-wood contact, with insulation and chinking packing the interstices between logs. “This building is very green: it breathes, and sometimes it leaks. But I don’t mind that.”

Here’s Ann reaching into her cherry tree. And here’s her raspberries, shining like ruby jewels in the afternoon sunlight. Thanks, friend, for the chat and the cherries, the berries with yogurt and your special ice tea, and the eye-popping inspiration of your house. Down with drywall!  Hurray for homegrown timber! and berries! and cherries! and all the good stuff we can grow on “The Rock!” 

I was in Portland last week visiting family & friends, and if it hadn’t rained so torrentially, I would be torturing you with yet more photos of roses, this time from the Portland Rose Test Garden. Despite protests that one of my best life moments was touring the rose garden “IN THE RAIN!” at the Parc de Bagatelle in Paris,  no amount of umbrella-brandishing would persuade my sister chauffeur to drive me there. “Don’t be stupid,” she said, and that was that.

So I returned after five days to a lonesome hubbie and a rain-fattened garden. It’s the only downer about coming home from vacation this time of year: you go down the garden path, and the new growth throws itself upon long-lost you: wet fondling ferns, block-your-way nettles, brambles tugging at sleeves, dandelion stalks beating their tiny wrists on your ankles. Time for a serious beat-back session out there.

Even the good stuff, such as sweet woodruff and foxglove, is charging toward weediness.

Case in point: in the photo above, the sweet woodruff is a thick blanket under the taller japanese anemone. When I planted the rose garden many years ago, I stuck in some woodruff side by side with primroses, purple heuchera, bergenia, crocuses, epimedium, rhubarb. A nice mix of ground-covers to hide the gawky legs of the rose bushes.

Sweet woodruff leafs out in early spring; in May, it blooms a lace of tiny, pure-white flowers. When it gets tatty, you can mow it—and, as the medieval floor-strewing herb it once was, it will smell good. I once passed a Seattle side-yard smothered in woodruff; in this small, sun-soaked space was captured a heady, sweet-grass perfume. Who wouldn’t enjoy that smell around the house? And, it follows, who wouldn’t like lots of woodruff in their garden?

Yes, but… Today, only the ping-pong paddle leaves of the bergenia rise from the run-wild carpet of woodruff. Hurky rhubarb is struggling, heuchera engulfed long ago. And she’s moving on, sweet woodruff, cascading down two—no, look, it’s three—terraces of my southeastern slope. She’s in the woodland. She’s in the ravine. She’s mixing it up with Creeping Charlie in this photo, another plant I thought was handsome until it tied my lawn in knots.
 

Down in Portland, I went to church with Mom, where I listened to the pastor take his sermon from the parable of the Good Seeds and the Bad. In this story, the farmer plants good seeds in his field, but during the night some joker also sows weed seeds down the same rows. Among the good grain the weeds hide, growing larger, inter-twining their roots and stems so the good stuff can’t be separated from the bad. “What’s gone weedy in your life?” said the pastor to his flock. “What grew to be unmanageable and out of balance? Will you recognize it and pull it before it takes over?”

Back in my rose garden, recently back from viewing that Island secret rose garden, I had decided two weeks ago that it was time to prune away the winter’s dead wood. My favorite rose, a pale pink blooming floribundantly, had a left trunk that showed no sign of life. I took my loppers and snaked its head through the thicket of sweet woodruff, found the base of the dead trunk, squeezed the loppers—and down fell the living rose bush in a flutter of pink petals, me screaming “NOOOOO!” as it timbered down. I’d been blinded by too much woodruff.

Today, there’s no more woodruff in that garden bed, just clean dirt—plus a stub of a rose bush I’m watering in hopes of a resurrection. I hope I’ve learned my lesson: to keep my too-enthusiastic growers in check so that they don’t become smothering weeds. Bindweed, nettles, blackberries, dandelions—they’re easy to spot and pull. When you’ve got WAY too much of a good thing, that’s hard to recognize, even harder to pull or prune. Just do it carefully so you don’t lose the Good Stuff.

Postscript, September 27, 2011:  I’m happy to report that, with plenty of watering and a shot of fertilizer in August, the timbered rose turned into a Resurrection Rose. Three new cane-breaks burst up from the graft and, by mid-September, this rose was topped with those familiar pale-pink, baby-powder-scented flowers. The rose has returned—Hallelujah!

Finally the sun is here, shining down on a Vashon rose garden.

It’s been a long winter, with lots of winter damage. She had to prune many of her bushes nearly down to the graft, then water them well, feed them, watch over them. But, by and large, they’ve come back, her 350± rose bushes. 

This is the private sanctuary of a private person—I’ll call her “Mrs. Rose” here—and I felt privileged to gain entrance. It’s not many rose gardens that grow not only hybrid teas, but old roses, too. Walking along the rows is an education, as you can see the incredible variations of expressions that breeders have coaxed from the rose’s basic, five-petal form. 

Species Roses—a simple, carefree look

Just to show you how far rose-breeding has pushed the flower’s form, let’s look for a moment at two species roses. Below left is our native Nootka rose, which can be found deep in the woods; though the plant may reach 6′ tall, the flower is coin-sized and the leaves aren’t much larger than a pinkie-nail. On the right is a Rosa Rugosa, which flowers in colors from white to pink to nearly red. Its pleated leaves are so resistant to damage from sea air that it’s been called the “Salt Spray Rose”; it’s much planted along shorelines (and to the entrance to the Vashon Athletic Club.) Both plants have that basic rosea flower form shared by relatives the apple, cherry, strawberry, even blackberry: a cupped flower of 5-16 petals with a central boss of yellow stamens. 

These plants are carefree, disease-free plants; you can grow them on their own roots and won’t have to spray them for insects or common rose diseases. But they will bloom once, in early summer, their flowers transforming into bright orange or red hips in autumn. 

Old Garden Roses—cupped, many petalled complexity

Their descendents, the Old Garden Roses such as the gallica, moss, damask, Portland, bourbon, and hybrid perpetual, and rugosa hybrids, are, according to Mrs. Rose, also carefree, disease-free plants. They need feeding before bloom, then after bloom. The form tends to be cupped with many petals—’Konigin von Danemark’ has up to 200 petals—often grouped into “quarters.” These plants provide many more flowers than the Hybrid Teas—but they aren’t the big blooms on the long stems of the Hybrid Tea Rose either. “Here in our climate, a flower with more than 30 petals tends to just ball up and not bloom,” Mrs. Rose warns.

I was thrilled to view the old garden roses Madame Hardy, La Reine Victoria, Mutabilis, Rosa Mundi, Marbree. As David Austin wrote in his introduction to Old Roses and English Roses, “The Old Roses began to lose their popularity in the latter part of the 19th century, and by the early part of the 20th century had almost disappeared… in the face of competition from the al-conquering Hybrid Teas.”

The Modern Rose: the Hybrid Tea, Floribunda, and Grandiflora

“Hybrid teas are the Prima Donnas of the rose world, but they are a superior rose,” said Mrs. Rose. “When I’m picking a bouquet, I pick Hybrid Teas.” She has 124 hybrid tea bushes, nearly all in a triple row with other Modern roses along the wide eastern border of her lawn.

The form of the hybrid tea is the opposite of the Old Garden Rose: it peaks in the middle, with the outer petals often flaring outward instead of cupping. The plants throw long stems, and with judicious de-budding of extra buds on that stem, you can produce a very large flower for exhibition: a very Vase-Worthy display. She said, “The old advice to ‘deadhead back to a stem with five leaves’ is to encourage a single big flower on one stem, exhibition-style. If you want more flowers on a stem, prune back only to the 3-leafed stem.”

From the Rosa Mundi onward, I quickly saw that Mrs. Rose was a big fan of the variegated rose. “But they don’t look good with other colors in a bouquet,” she lamented. Not even with pink roses?

The hybrid tea was bred in part for cutting, and one of its beauties is that the flower is beautiful all the way through its passage from bud to full flower, as here shown with the floribunda ‘Lady of Guadalupe.’

And of course there are so many enjoyments with the rose: the way the light and shadow play within the petals, the way the colors fade, deepen, or change as the flower ages, the way the petals unfurl so hypnotically. 

Breeders have pushed colors in so many forms: streaks, bi-coloration, reverses where the outside of the petal is a different color than the inside. 

Eventually, a nostalgia for the Old Garden Rose—its cupped form and particularly its fragrance—led the English breeder David Austin to cross a  floribunda rose with old garden roses to create his “English Roses.” He tends to name them after characters in literature or history, and here’s an example: ‘Sweet Juliet.’

My visit was on a hot afternoon, and though I snifted each and every one of those blooms, the scent tended to be soft. I asked her when fragrance was at its strongest, and she said, “in the early morning or the evening after the sun goes down.”

Care of Modern Roses

In the summer, Mrs. Rose gives each of her plants an inch of water a week. She has drip-lines to each plant, and she also waters herself, by hand, at least once a week “to keep an eye on the roses and know what’s happening to them.”

Though her plants are bursting with health, the occasional bit of black spot or rust gets through. “A leaf with black spot will fall off within 2 weeks, and black spot can kill a bush if it has a serious infestation.  Black spot defoliates a bush, causing it to drop its infected leaves.  It then makes new growth, which is higher (further from the soil), but that new growth can also become infected.  All this creates stress for the bush, which will weaken it.  This is why it is so important to know what is going on in the garden, so you can take corrective action if needed.”

“You can try to prevent these problems, but don’t treat until you see a problem. Disease comes out of the soil, so keep a clean ground, give your plants good air circulation, don’t let your weeds or cuttings sit on the ground, and use mulch.” She uses a shredded bark mixture she buys locally. And yes, she sprays, fully covered in a moon-suit, using either Safer organic products or non-organic products from Bayer or Ortho.

She is a Master Rosarian now. But how did this obsession with roses begin, 20 years ago? “With this birdbath—I just wanted something nice around the bird-bath.”

Thank you, Mrs. Rose, for showing us that beautiful roses of every kind can be grown on Vashon Island.

Plum Forest also reports that they’re including the first of their basil, as well as anise-flavored chervil, in their Gourmet Salad Greens Mix. They do have peas, and they’re also harvesting kale, swiss chard, red romaine, small turnips, pickled jalapenos from last summer, and broccoli and a broccoli-raab cross called ‘Piracicaba.’ Joanne quotes from the Washington Post as saying—

“(Piracicaba broccoli is)…so good you could eat it raw.  All the parts I sampled raw were sweet, mild and tender. I took a bowlful back to the house and steamed it for lunch. Equally delicious! It needed just a few minutes of cooking, and since so much of it was leaf, bud and narrow stem, there was less risk of overcooking the tips before the stalks softened. And the buds didn’t disintegrate in the pan.”

Here in my somewhat-shaded kitchen garden, the spinach is done and pulled, replaced by bell pepper plants in a low hoophouse. I’m taking a tip from Island Meadow: if it’s good enough for basil, it’s good enough for peppers.

At GreenDale farm, the ‘Stupice’ tomato has its first, dime-sized fruit (whoopee!). The transplants  of lettuce ‘Australian Heirloom Yellow’ and ‘Four Seasons’ are big and luscious, thanks to good soil and a good headstart from Langley Fine Gardens.

The moral of this spring? Starting seeds in a protected space gives you insurance that yes, you WILL have a spring garden, no matter WHAT the weather does. Thanks to using transplants, I’m betting we’ll have TOMATOES before peas at GreenDale Farm. What a year…

Next week (or soon anyway): start of a series on roses.

VAA Garden Tour Preview #6: the Richard and Kathleen Farner Garden on Maury Island

Past foxglove-lined lanes, winding past hill and dale and ferns and forest and more ferns and more forest until you wonder if you’re lost, you’ll eventually wind up at the farthest-most garden on this year’s tour.

It’s worth the trip.

Personally, I find roses irresistible. I adore getting my nose right up inside them, my eyes focused on that center roundness of the collective petals unfurling. If this means I look like a cross-eyed bee when appreciating roses, SO BE IT!

If you’re like me in adoring the rose, then you’ll love this garden. Richard and Kathleen Farner, with the help of architect John Thomas AIA, have created an exquisite courtyard garden that shelters around 70 hybrid teas, floribundas, and David Austin roses. 

The garden actually started with a pair of Mt. Fuji cherry trees to cut the brightness of sunset glare into their house. John Thomas suggested this answer to their problem and added “Richard, considering your age, get the biggest trees you can.” Richard told me, “Kathy and I remain very grateful for his wisdom and candor, as the big trees have proven to be exactly what we needed.”

Richard had grown roses in Tacoma before, as Kathleen had given him roses bushes on his 50th birthday. But they were too well established to move with them to Maury Island. So, on his 60th birthday, she presented him with several that are now growing on the outside/south side of the rose garden. There you will find familiar roses such as ‘Mr. Lincoln,’ ‘Fragrant Cloud,’ ‘Crimson Bouquet’, and the big, bumptious ‘Dolly Parton.’  Rich marks each plant with a sign indicating name, type, breeder, and year of introduction; his flyer does as well: pick it up from the docents at the entrance.

One of his favorite roses, ‘Karen Blixen’, was thick with buds in its corner when I visited Monday. “It’s a pure white, no yellow or pink tones at all.” Next to it, a golden ‘Julia Child’. He entertains some classy ladies in here.

…’Fragrant Cloud’, ‘Fragrant Hour’, ‘Fragrant Wave’… This is definitely a Scented Garden. The volunteer docents arrived during my visit and exclaimed at the scent when they walked in. Fragrance seems to be a Farner priority: they also grow sweet peas along the garage south-facing wall (though they’re struggling this year, like all peas) and white carnations in the perennial bed. Richard said, “That way, if we pick a bouquet with roses that don’t have any scent, we can put a few sweet peas or carnations in and still have a nice perfume.”

Kathleen tends to the big square vegie bed, loaded up with nice-looking lettuce heads grown from Langley Fine Gardens’ transplants. She’s also responsible for the colorful plantings in the metal horse troughs outside their living room windows. 

The Farners also have a little pond with waterfall, created by Tim Holtschlag and “MarkthePondGuy.com”—”yes, that’s how he’s known.” And there are sculptures, walks… but you’ll be drawn back to the roses, I’m sure of it.

Not many folks out here cultivate these highly refined roses, the Hybrid Teas and Floribundas. They need spraying and watering, rose food and fencing, annual and after-bloom pruning, and yes Richard does all that for his roses. And he started with heaps of compost, which he renews every year.
But this garden might make you think all the work could be worth it. If that’s a possibility for you—you know who you are!—I suggest taking in this garden in the morning, then sticking around for the 1pm lecture by Cheryl Prescott:  “For the Love of the Rose.” 

Cheryl is a Consulting Rosarian and Master Gardener. She currently grows 350 roses of all types. She will present information on rose care, including watering, fertilizing, pruning the various types and protecting roses from year-round forces of nature. The talk will last an hour.

Here’s Richard with ‘Fragrant Cloud.’  On the left, the floribunda pink climber ‘Dream Weaver’, which is planted around both entrances. 

You’ll find this this garden ‘Sheer Magic’: the roses will leave you “Spellbound” and “Over the Moon.” So come enjoy the “Radiant Perfume” of this garden and give “Honor” to the man and wife who created it. That is, if you don’t get all “Topsy-Turvy” driving here!

Elegant, barely-in-check abundance—that’s what you see in Cynthia Johnson’s garden. Once planted in strawberries and now in lavender rows, Cynthia Johnson’s acreage is kept visitor-worthy (yes, with help!) for weddings and summer events. At least during the summer months, Fox Farm may be Vashon’s premiere stroll garden.

I did one of my first “Labor of Love” weeding sessions here about ten years ago. Back then, Cynthia and I weeded the kitchen garden’s raised beds and cleaned up the grass edging; the islands of roses and shrubs were young then, the outer pergola just built and the inner pergola still a dream. Since then (and in addition to many other landscaping projects) she installed a field of lavender and joined the Lavender Sisters and Cathy MacNeal in putting on the Vashon Lavender Festival. And the garden has been on the Garden Tour before, in 2004. But unless you’ve been at those events, you haven’t seen this garden, because the roadside pergola fence intrigues but does not reveal what’s inside to the drive-by curious.

The pergolas, both roadside and interior, give this garden Romance with a capital R. They are planted in the rose ‘Cecile Brunner’,  also known as the “Sweetheart rose,” a climbing sport of the bush polyantha rose. Cynthia’s plants demonstrate this rose’s reputation for growing VERY tall: these pergolas are merely steadying plants that want to be trees. Walking under THIS pergola, you won’t be batting away limp rose brambles—no, the roses rise like a geyser through the inner pergola and arch over slightly less large roses, the bluish-leafed Rosa Glauca with its simple, cherry-red blooms. 

Remembering other, shorter roses from before, I ask Cynthia why only climbers. She replied, “We did have carpet roses for awhile, but they took a lot of work to keep looking good.  The farm is organic, and I didn’t think I could keep hybrid Teas looking good without sprays, so we have stuck with Rosa glauca, Rosa rugosa, and climbers.” 

Between the two pergolas is a small lawn with apple trees and perennials. I find interesting ground covers here: by the house a Toothed Saxifrage (I also saw this at the Thompson/Bruno garden and didn’t know what it was: thanks to Cynthia for ID’ing it) throwing up a small cloud of tiny white blossoms. Cynthia says this plant takes little care, and since the leaves are evergreen, it would make a good all-year ground cover. There’s a brick-laid path leading out of the pergola toward the kitchen garden that also has another good ground cover used as edging: muguet des bois, commonly known as lily of the valley. Again, here’s another symbol of affection: muguet sprigs, so highly fragrant, are given on May Day in France to friends as a token of friendship. 

The kitchen garden is one of Cynthia’s first plantings, and it’s a mixed garden full of vegies, herbs, berries, and flowers. You may first notice a boldly variegated perennial; Cynthia says it is “Scrophularia auricula var. variegata.  It is a great plant that will also grow in dry shade and is a workhorse returning every year, needing no care.  Soon it will have tiny burgundy flowers that the hummingbirds love.  It is next to a monkshood called Aconitum ‘ivorine’.  I got the Aconitum  from a seed exchange. I love it because it blooms relatively early when you need it!” 

Around the central garden shed—which doubles as a lavender drying shed after the harvest—I notice one sign of this garden’s maturity: intermingling perennials. The deep-blue flowers of a hardy geranium—possibly ‘Johnson’s Blue’?—hold aloft from foliage mingling with lady’s mantle and variegated solomon’s seal. In a mature garden every few years, you have to decide whether to go with the tangled look or dig out the jungle to impose newness and order. Here, the jungle is a small one, but back at the entrance island, Cynthia has opened up some of the rosa rugosas v. rosea to make a space for a planting of mountain laurel. 

If you steer northeast, you’ll find more beds of perennials, a brand-new bed for rock roses, a blueberry cage, and finally a cutting garden with fern-leaf yarrow, delphiniums, and ornamental allium. Later it will be planted with sunflowers and dahlias, planted I suspect will be going into service at the weddings and events scheduled after the Garden Tour.

It’s a Big Sky garden, this home-spread cultivated by Sally Fox and Steve Brown. It seems larger than five acres because its wide lawn and pastures cover Raecoma’s hill top, the tree-line receding because they’re slightly downhill. Borrowed views peek southeast into Kay White’s ten acres, while the paddocks of Fran O’Reilly’s riding school spread like chartreuse carpets south and west.

This is Maury Island horse country. Its soils are dry and gravelly, home to firs, madrones, and hazels—and the gardener’s nemesis, scotch broom. Sally used to train her horses next door at Fran’s, and when the gardening bug bit her in 2006, here is where she found the land—more than enough land—to pursue her passion.

“I never gardened before,” she told me as we met in her driveway roundabout last Thursday. “I grew up in the suburbs of the Northeast, and I thought it was a chore down there with cleaning bathrooms.” But now she’s a Master Gardener; last year, she was president of the garden club. She progressed from a garden 40 square feet to 10,000, from five plants brought from their Seattle house to hundreds, many given by friends who recognized the plant would be in better hands at Sally’s place. 

Her transformation began in Kyoto. A word-smith, she had a consulting gig in Japan, and twice she and Steve traveled to see Kyoto’s famous gardens. And as she writes beautifully and perceives her garden as a series of stories, I’ll let her tell it—

‘The gardens there were more beautiful than anything I had seen in my life. I remember standing mesmerized at the gardens of Nanzenji, trying to absorb the stunning variety of shades of green surrounding the pond. Flying back to Seattle, I lapsed into a daydream about fragrant peonies, colorful maples, and rich dirt. And then I had my epiphany. At 55, I decided to become a gardener.”

“Moving to Vashon, I was a seed that hit fertile soil and exploded. The palette I was given was far too big for my experience, time, or budget. I could have waited to know what I was doing, but I was possessed. I decided to make mistakes, learn by doing, and let myself dig.

“We brought 5 plants from our Seattle garden: a dogwood and four barberries. Without a plan to guide us, we plunked them in a section of grass outside our bedroom. Later, this would become the pond garden.

“Outside the back patio, I began digging to discover where I was living, digging to get my hands dirty, digging to find myself. I wanted flowers. I planted peonies. Starting without a plan, I have redone it several times… The temptation was too great for a beginning gardener.”

Getting a Handle on It All

So there was Sally, digging without a plan, and Steve with a new tractor “because he WANTED one.” At some point, sanity must have shouted from afar, because they hired landscape Bob Horsley to come out, have a look, draw them some battle plans so all their efforts would organize into a coherent homestead. One of the first things he said was, “You have to enlarge your driveway’s round-about.”

I met Sally here, and I’m guessing that’s where you, the garden tourist, will meet your garden docents and receive the map by Annie Brulé that Sally & Steve commissioned to help you navigate these wide-open spaces. You’ll walk up the gravel driveway past the gravel border on the left and the orchard on the right, toward a circle of mature firs underplanted with sword ferns, hellebores, luzula grass, and oregon grape. Notice the cobblestone edging created by Mark, the brother of the brother-in-law: a compulsively obsessive job that’s just plain beautiful.

left: woodland round-about; right: starflowers

Noticing the ample spacing between plants, I ask her how she keeps down weeds so successfully. “Cardboard and chips: I don’t know what I’d do without them.” She usually gets them from the local woodchipping trucks, but this year she’s found them harder to snag and thinks the reason is King County isn’t issuing as many roadside pruning jobs. “It’s steep competition for those chips, you know: Islanders watch for those trucks.”

The front entrance garden, dominated by a weeping blue atlas cedar and two huge pieris, was installed by the previous owner. Passing through the breezeway, the scale of the garden opens up, over paver patios and generously planted flower beds to the broad lawn and arboretum beyond. Poppies, lupine, bellflowers, and a few peonies bloom, easily seen up close from the chipped paths that quarter this bed.

“We didn’t do EXACTLY what Bob’s plan indicated, but it usually turned out we did something close,” said Sally. “For instance, Bob said we needed a focal point beyond the perennial beds; he wanted a birch grove, but we put in the writing cabin and that’s our focal point.”

She pulls me over to the pond, where I spot that red-flowering dogwood from Seattle. “Bob thought we needed another patio here surrounded by the crescent of flowers I was planting.” Instead, they installed a pond, the watercourse laid by DIG’s Ross Johnson, but most of the labor done by themselves. 

Casting off into the sea of lawn, we tour the young arboretum that includes a weeping katsura, red gum, korean fir, and tri-color beech. To the left is the entrance to the Maple Walk, inspired by a spectacular stump (now rather buried in greenery); when some of the blue spruce hedge was felled by winter, Sally found she could move in more sun-tolerant plants. 

Turn left and proceed toward the writer’s cabin, entering a hazel grove full of chartreuse plants: golden sambucus, golden red current, a golden heuchera or two, and an interestingly variegated columbine drooping with purple “bonnets.” By the cabin there’s a pair of adirondacks chairs where you can rest and regard the sunlight dappling onto the golden understory—surely a distraction to anyone trying to write!

Back onto the lawn and across southward, you’ll see into Kay White’s estate with its mature rhodies, viburnums, and Rainier Viewing Pavillion. Soon you’ll dip into the hazel-shaded lanes that Steve keeps clear with his tractor (though Sally says she uses it “almost as much!”). These groves of hazel, willow, and madrone were once choked with lamium, blackberry, broom, and dumploads of just “JUNK that people came and DROPPED HERE,” says Sally, still a little aghast. Once all that was trucked away, she dove in with cardboard and chips, adding to the natural understory of ferns, starflowers, and oxalis with Land Trust natives, more ferns and luzula grass, even strawberry plants. If the tour days are hot, cool off in the light shade of these walkways.

After about 200 yards of shady lane, we climbed up into the food production area: the vegie garden, berry patch, and orchard. The vegie garden reveals the soil that Sally’s up against: even with drip-lines and applications of horse manure, this “alderwood” soil remains dry, sandy, parched, and inhospitable. Nonetheless, the plants are plentiful and robust and a LOT bigger than mine (darn!)

The orchard is about four years old and includes cherries, pluots, apricot, apple, and an italian pear. To the west, you can see the barns and bins of the stables. Sally & Steve worked with King Conservation District on eco-friendly ways of managing water and compost, earning them a “Farm of Merit” award.

You’ve now come around full circle. The driveway border is her Beth Chatto-inspired gravel border; when I was there, the parahebe was blooming as purple-blue as any lavender. Check out how Steve cleverly covered an ugly gate with bamboo panels that fold back, two over two, wide enough for any dump-truck. 

And let Sally have the last word—

“The stories of our place come in many forms.  There is the story of the couple who built it and created the Front Garden – their last. There is our story about how we left Seattle and became gardeners when we bought the property five years ago.  There are the stories of the people who have worked here, either hired or colleagues and friends, who have sweated here, dirtied their hands, and strained their muscles.  There are the stories of fellow Master Gardeners and Garden Club friends who worked or toured the garden and always provided encouragement.

Paths. Edges. Changing levels. Make these badly, and your garden becomes a muddle, even a safety hazard. Make these well, and your garden provides a graceful navigation from one beauty-spot to another.

The Kate Thompson/Mary Bruno garden is a small one, and you may recall it from VAA Garden Tours past. But if you’re looking for ideas for paths, edgings, stairs, or how to manage the edge between the Natural and the Cultivated, you should come have a look around.

Gardeners in Cedarhurst deal with heavy shade, hard-pan, and a high water table constantly recharged by runoff from the hill south. Kate and her partner Mary have adapted to the situation by installing shade-loving perennials, readily-draining gravel paths, and a rain garden to catch some of that slope’s runoff.

Heavy rectangular pavers lead me toward the house and one of Kate’s favorite plants, a Cornus Controversa, its white edged leaves a brilliant contrast to the ground cover of pink-flowering Oxalis beneath. The rectangular path switches to circles—Chinese millstones acquired from importer David Smith—as the path turns the corner and heads to the studio. There, celandine poppies (Stylophorum diphyllum) glow yellow against the dark green darkness of bamboo, their seed capsules dangling (unlike the look-alike icelandic poppy whose seed capsules stand up like salt shakers at stem’s end).

Kate meets me near the studio and leads me to the top of the rain garden. “Here we have a high water table, so this isn’t so much a rain garden as a place for plants that can take wet feet.” I notice astilbes, bleeding hearts, spirea, ferns, ribbon grass, and—surprise—a euphorbia and a banana plant in a pot that, Kate says, “isn’t making it back much from this hard winter.”

Between rain garden and dark house is a gravel path with steel grills set down in the gravel; the stairs are made of the same grill material. “This is standard ADA grating, usually used on catwalks,” Kate told me. I LOVE them: these grids add texture, cadence, and geometry to a path that, if you left it in mere gravel, would be dull as ditch-water. And I’m on firm footing, not sinking into a pea gravel quagmire.

At the southwest corner of the house, a gorgeous clematis blooms. How well a dark house works in a woodland setting: its darkness lets the mid-greens of perennials and vines stand out, even glow.

To the left/west, we enjoy the towering rhodies, red, purple, and hot pink with bloom. Behind them, a startling pine tree pokes its head up: “That’s what we call the Dr. Seuss Tree—it’s really the neighbor’s Himalayan Pine.” Under these mature rhodies that came with the property, Kate has planted perennials and bulbs: tulips, geraniums, saxifrages, heucheras. In the sunnier areas, alliums and lilies are starting to come on.

At the top of the lawn, what they call “the small deck” hangs on the brim of the medium-high bank. Kate says, “This was once covered in ivy. I called the Noxious Weed department and told them it was holding the earth of the bank, so they told me to strip away just a foot at a time and replant immediately. So we’ve replanted with land trust natives like Vashon rose (probably Nootka rose), oceanspray, elderberry, salmonberry, that kind of thing.” To the right is the last survivor of three grapevines, hit hard by winter and deer. “We’re seeing deer eating things they never have, this year.” Deer fencing surrounds many of the plantings: they’ll remove it in time for the Garden Tour and hope for the best!

I find a little stairway leading down the hill: it’s their beach access. I ask about its construction—wood risers, gravel backfill with an imbedded paver, the tread’s edge covered with 1/4″ metal mesh. “No, I started to put in a stairway and found that already here, but buried. So I ‘released’ it and added the nose of metal mesh: it was pretty slippery when wet.”  The sides of the stairway are lined with a short wall of bricks, pavers, cobbles, whatever they could find. The area’s named “Blueberry Hill” after the berry plants they installed at the top.

A little vegetable area, fenced in against deer and cats, provides them with a little fresh produce. They had another rock wall installed outside its fence, topped with chives, marjoram, oregano. 

One of Kate’s proudest gardening accomplishments is only accessible if you squeeze back around the east side of the house (DO watch out for the overhang from the house deck). It’s her shade garden, and I DO MEAN SHADE: what with the overhanging bamboo backdrop and the two surrounding wings of the black house, you feel like you’ve entered a terrarium under a gro-lite.

Kate carefully lifts the large palm-shaped leaves of a May Apple to show me the actual “apples”—really its flowers, silken blood-red petals that curve into balls under the leaves. Here too are maidenhair and deer’s tongue ferns, ligularia, lamium, and hiding under all, “Jacks in the Pulpit.” Take a moment to look inside the dining room and notice the “Infinity” sculpture hanging like a chandelier over the dining table. It seems lit from within, but really that’s a gilding creating that warm glow.

I almost leave, but notice the entrance garden and flag Kate back to tell me about it. Here is another graceful transition: using the native bracken fern, huckleberry, and salal as a backdrop for introduced holly fern, deodar cedar, and ribbon grass. Across the entrance, another garden of natives—kinnickkinnick, meianthemum, and yellow flag iris—growing with carex pendula and a Loderi Rhodie. Standing glaring guard over all, a statue by Island artist Dean Hammer, “the spirit of the woodland,” says Kate, “though at first I found her a little scary.”

Perhaps it’s that Kate and Mary “inherited” this garden from their predecessor and so were able to spent time (and money) cleaning up the margins of an already-fine garden. However it came to be, this is an extremely well organized and sequenced garden that’s worth your time. June 25-26, VAA Garden Tour, tickets probably going fast.

November 16, 1929—Purchased approximately 19 acres waterfront from W. W. Prigg for $8000… Farm includes house, barn, 2 chicken houses, brooder houses for 1200 chicks, two ponies, 350 yearling hens, 480 pullets, and all tools and equipment. About 8 acres cleared part of which is in family orchard. 3-year-old Montmorency cherry orchard of 100 trees about to bear.”—from the Triplebrook Daybook of Robinson C. Jenner.

If you want to visit a place that holds loving memory of how Vashon places have changed over time, visit Triplebrook. It’s been a homestead, cherry orchard, egg farm, summer place, and B&B. Every stone, tree, plank, and plant touched by human hands has its story, saved for, and savored by, the next generation.

The farm was homesteaded in the 1890s by Jedediah Paige, whose oxen probably helped Paige clear the land—the barn was built for them. Paige went bankrupt, took his oxen and left; the land passed through an unknown number of hands until Mr. Jenner bought it in 1929. He kept a daily journal—

Dec. 7—Wired rafters of  house #1 to prevent pullets roosting on them. More wires needed. Paid 1.32 for 6 gal. gas. Rec’d check from Fox River for $46.01 for 131 doz. eggs. 

—and kept the daybook right through 1949, when he passed his log onto Athol Green, the present owner’s father.

This is Triplebrook Farm in 1949 as seen from uphill east. The montmorency cherry trees lined the highway, not tall enough to block the view of the white farmhouse; berries were grown across Westside Highway. 

You can no longer see the farm from uphill: firs, spruce, cedar, and coast redwood planted by Athol have grown to tremendous height along the highway, long shading out the pie cherry trees. But Hal Green told me he once picked those cherries when he was a kid, filling orders for his dad’s co-workers and making a little pocket change.

I met Molly and Hal Green last Thursday on what turned out to be our first hot afternoon. Molly met me at the end of the long shady drive that curves up to the house and onto the barn. “We renovated the house after we moved here in 2003, but it’s pretty much the same house as before,” she told me as we walked among the mixed border that she’s created around the house. It’s too early for all the David Austin roses, but today peonies, pacific coast irises, lewisia, and an unusual viburnum plicatum ‘Kern’s Pink’ are in vibrant bloom. 

Triplebrook seems arranged in three parts, like a dangling three-leaf clover. The house is the central lobe, to the west/left is the vegie garden and guest cottage, while to the right is the apple orchard, berry garden, and pond. At the top of the driveway (the central stem of my metaphor!) is the original red barn. Molly walks with me down the stone stairs toward the vegie garden, where we pause to admire the wisteria colonizing its west fence. Then it’s up a little rise and down another stone-lined path to the restored Brooder House.

Dec 10—Shipped 111 dozen eggs to Fox River. Weighed out grain allotments and found we had been feeding short. Will increase scratch food to 9# per 100 hens. One hen died. Counted pullets—464 in house #1, 7 in cull pen, and 1 in hospital. Total 472.

Molly tells me they cleaned and restored the brooder house, and it now sleeps five humans for weekend B&B visits. There’s a west deck (seen in the first photo) that looks out to Colvos Passage, and a deer-proof shrub border below the deck with azaleas, rhodies, dahlias, and hydrangea. 

Hal joins us near the red barn, now restored, that Jedediah Paige had built for his oxen. Hal is very proud of the white star and Triplebrook logo painted above the door in white: “I found the original sign that Mr. Jenner had made for this barn, and we repainted it under the star, up there. We hold events now in this barn: you should see the photo on the website of the night we had a banquet for Kaffe Fawcett, with all the quilts hanging from the rafters.”

Molly tells me that many of the replacement rafters came from wood salvaged by builder Peter Anderson after the 2008 windstorm. “And see that chestnut tree right there? (to the right of the barn, yes, a SPREADING chestnut tree just like the poem). “There was another to the left of the barn that up and died, but Peter cut it up and we got two coffeetables and a fireplace mantle out of it.”

Once we reach the berry garden, Molly begs off to go weed and let Hal tell me about “what’s really HIS project.” So Hal continues, “My dad had this wonderful berry garden when I was here around 1949-52. But over time it got eaten up by deer, cuz they didn’t have it fenced like we do, so when we moved here, I really wanted to restore the berry patch. But I also wanted HEIRLOOM VASHON BERRIES. When I joined the Fruit Club, I met Helen Brocard of Dockton, and she said “I’ve been growing Vashon heritage berries for years—I’ll give you some. So these are her loganberries.”

The patch also has boysenberries, marionberries, raspberries, strawberries, espaliered pears, and a robust row along the east of thornless blackberries called Chesterberries. Plenty of these berries came from Fairie Hill farm (now something else). I admired the way the strawberries provided a foundation fringe under the looped-over wired rows of caneberries. 

We stepped out to his greenhouse, which turned out a three-generation structure. His father had built the foundation upon the cracked concrete floor of some older building, but he’d roofed it with yellow corrugated plastic, “which I replaced with twin-wall.” Behind the greenhouse is one of Hal’s shade gardens: some hostas underneath a Thundering Plum, backed by a naturalized spread of buttercups and bluebells that make a beautiful transition zone “between the parts of the garden you take care of and the parts you just want to leave to nature.”

We leave the hot greenhouse for the shade of the old apple trees (Esopus Spitzenberg, Gravenstein, King) near what he was told was once a blacksmith’s shop, now as bright red as the barn. We loop around the south back of the house to visit yet more old apple trees, one sprawled over the ground like a giant dead spider. “Bob Norton advised me that I could just prop it off the ground and it would continue to bear for another ten years. The older I get, the more sympathetic I am to maintain the life of my old trees.”

We visit the old fish-pond under the cedars, his dad’s stone BBQ, the mason bee condo, and finally the big pond that his dad Athol created by damming up a brook. He points out the trees that his dad, a forester, planted along its rim; the tallest one, turns out, is a Coast Redwood; I identify it partly by its needle’s citrus scent when crushed.

Finally, coming full circle to the first thing I—and you—saw as I walked into the property, he explains the ENORMOUS tree trunk that lies like a giant’s bench across the lawn. “THAT is the bottom third of what Jim Biel called ‘the biggest tree that I ever took down.’ It was an old poplar, 140 feet high and getting rotten—and if it fell wrong, it would take out the utility lines for all this end of Westside Highway. So we asked Jim to think about it—that took him about a week—then he spent another week cutting it and hauling the chunks across the road to our other property. By the time he got to this bottom third lying here, he said, ‘Let’s just LEAVE IT.”

At that point, I almost trip across a cross-section of what I thought must be tree trunk, but Hal says, “Nope, that’s just from one of the LIMBS.” 

It was easy to spent two hours here. Triplebrook Farm has enjoyed over 110 years of human TLC, and it SHOWS. It’s yet another example of how folks move to the Island, fall in love with a place, start polishing it up, putting down roots, making it good as it’s been and all that it can be.

The Rainbow Garden of Karen & Richard Person

From darkness to sunlight: that’s the way the Person Garden unfolds. And it’s rather like the hit I get off Karen Person, who I know from yoga and who teaches at our local grade school: she’s willowy tall with white-blonde hair and always a big smile that will light up your day.

Their garden is on a high bluff overlooking Dalco Passage, Pt. Defiance and, in the distance, the entrance to Gig Harbor. She’s seen dolphins at play, even gray whales, in the wide waters 140′ below. “This property was bought in the 20s by eight Swedish brothers from Skåne, via Tacoma,” she told me. “Uncle Karl had his house here, Uncle Emil over there, Uncle Vic’s over there. So my husband Richard, when he was a kid, spent his summers here.” 

Some of the plantings are original, but most was planted by Karen these last 20 years, starting with the front “Norwegian” garden. “There are three influences to this garden,” she explains, “Scandinavian, Chinese, and Welsh. This little boxwood hedge here?” she points at a little hedge encircling a massive white rhodie. “You see such little hedges all over Norway. As we walk through the front garden, she adds, “And boulders: they have rocky soil so they dig up the big ones and display them in their gardens. And you see rune stones with writing on them all over, too.”

I love the undulating hosta growing along the stone path, and the bugle lifting its purple blooms from the ground up. There’s a little tree that looks rather odd, then I realize: it’s a dogwood with a pink clematis top-knot. 

But Karen wants me to notice her new garden shed: a Norwegian “Hytta” (pronounced “HOOT-ta”), every plank face and cut end painted a different red, blue, or yellow. “That’s also traditional in Norway: they’re really into painting in bright colors.” 

Along the Tacoma side of the house stands an old wisteria arbor that guards her “Chinese” garden. Here, where Buddhas stand, the planting is spare, clean, focused on hardscape like stone path, planted pot, and “in every Chinese garden, there’s a red gate.” The wisteria jumped its space and established an offshoot, which Karen espaliered along a split-rail fence; another baby is blooming at the foot of a nearby fir tree, its intentions clear as it snakes a tendril counter-clockwise around the fir. Going up!

Here, pause a moment and look right into the house’s basement. Against the sliding glass doors, they’ve pushed a red Wedding Bed that they brought back from Shanghai. You don’t see one of those every day!

A new gravel path will walk you along the edge of their high bluff, planted in grasses, color lent by two adirondacks painted a truly GAUDY hot pink. When I asked what doesn’t grow well here, Karen said “Flowers. You know, with deer and this soil, it’s hard to get flowers. So I put as much color into pots and chairs and benches as I can, to compensate.” 

This same strategy, she claims, is key to the most unusual feature of the garden: seven tall door-lights painted in cobalt blue, lavender, coral, yellow, chartreuse, purple and turquoise. “When we were in Wales driving along the Irish Sea, it was a really gray, dreary day. Then we rounded the corner to the village of Portmeirion, and there were these row cottages painted in these wonderful colors, so welcoming. The whole town’s painted up like this.”

At the end of this cliff-side walk, you’ll all take turns sitting in the turquoise bench on the point overlooking the Sound. Richard Person will be making music on the back deck, and you can have a look-out for whales or dolphins.

And while you sit, consider the colors on display and whether they’d light up your garden. A coral bench, a pot of chartreuse, a shout-out of cherry red? Maybe, on these gray days, along our somber green pathways, we all could use a brush-load of Karen Person’s rainbow?

Free soil tests from King Conservation District

King County’s Conservation District offers free soil tests to most county residents, including us. You can get up to five soil samples tested for pH, nitrogen, phosphate and potassium (NPK), sodium, magnesium, calcium, organic matter, and cation exchange capacity (measures how well your soil holds nutrients). Once you gather and mail in your samples (and the website tells you how to sample), the testing process takes about three weeks. 

Last year, I paid the University of Massachusetts’ Soil Testing Lab about $13-16 for a SINGLE test. This local program offers you FIVE FREE testing opportunities. You can sample across your property, compare one area to another, see all that composting, green manuring, and fertilizing vindicated as you compare your best garden bed to the virgin soil. 

So you soil geeks and mad composters: put quants on all your hard work, numbers to your labor, know what you got out there in the dirt. Get out the trowel and bucket and then click on these instructions for King Conservation District’s Soil Testing Program. 

(Thank you, Roberta, of King County’s BioSolids Management program).

Pull the Broom with the Land Trust’s Weed Wrenches

As I was helping set posts at the Food Bank Farm, I couldn’t help but notice the huge piles of scotch broom yanked out of the ground, thanks to a couple of bright orange tools on loan from the Land Trust. The landowner showed us how these bruisers work: a toothed clamp near ground level grabs hold of the broom’s trunk, then you pull back and leverage the nasty invader out. 

Tom Dean, executive director for the Land Trust, confirmed that they own four Weed Wrenches. And yes, the tools are freely loaned out to the community; you don’t HAVE to be a Land Trust member “though of course we would like everyone to become a member!” he said. 

Scotch Broom is a Class-C noxious weed: it’s recommended, not REQUIRED, that landowners control this particular weed. Broom thrives in sandy or gravelly soils with sun exposure: we’ve all seen how it takes over unused pasture-land, roadsides, driveways, even trails with a little sun exposure. Keep letting broom go to seed, and you’ll lose that trail in just a couple of years.

“And the seeds remain viable for decades: you might clear out a grove of alders and you’ll get this instant bloom of little broom sprouts from a previous exposure. This time of year, when the broom starts to blossom, we get a dramatic uptick in demand for the weed wrenches.”

Weed Wrenches come in four sizes: the Mini opens 1′ wide, weighs 5 lbs and is 24″, the Light is 11.5 lbs and 43″, the Medium is 17.5 lbs and 53″, the Jumbo opens 2.5″ wide, is 24 lbs and 60″ (five feet tall). I found both the Medium and Jumbo fairly heavy, comparable to a big brush-hog or a broadfork, but then I’ve got 50-year-old girly arms. Have a look on their website: www.weedwrench.com

If you drop by the Land Trust office on Bank Road, you might get lucky and find one in to test for heft, or you can call the Land Trust and put one on reserve; they’ll phone you when it’s been returned. This time of year, they want the tool back in a week.

Broom is blooming now and easily spotted. Smaller ones up to 3′ high can be yanked out by hand; larger ones need a weed-wrench, shovel, or hoedad. And for those brooms with trunks thicker than 2.5″ (too big for the Jumbo), Tom Dean says they can simply be sawn level to the ground: the oldest brooms, unlike their younger brethren, won’t resprout from their base when cut.

Brian Fisher/Peter Criss garden

Facebook Scoop: thanks to friending Sylvia Matlock of DIG, I caught her post about the garden tour she’s organizing for June 11th. Clicked to a slideshow on her website and saw immediately that I’d better go get tickets before the tour fills up.

She’s organized a tour of three gardens: an artists’ garden, a sculptor’s garden, and a kitchen potager with an outdoor pizza oven. “I wanted to do a tour that’s less overwhelming than VAA’s garden tour: something you could take in within a day.”

Brian Fisher and Peter Criss will open the garden that surrounds their studio: an island of gravel paths runs around “islands” of flower beds toward a white pergola draped with red roses.

Fisher / Criss garden

Penny Grist, a sculptor who lives on Quartermaster Harbor, has a small garden studded with her signature sculptures, gates, and tiled pathways. 

Grist Garden

John Jex and Sari Graven’s garden is a kitchen garden that includes an outdoor kitchen and a pizza oven. Sylvia said, “This oven was really simple to make: just buy the oven insert and build concrete blocks around it.” She said that John will demonstrate how to use this oven during the tour—some fresh-baked pizza al fresco, anyone?

An outdoor pizza oven anchors the Jex/Graven kitchen garden

Sylvia hopes to take about 30-50 folks on this tour; the $20/person admission covers refreshments. Phone 463-5096 or drop by the nursery at 19028 Vashon Highway to get tickets.

We picked up this box from a local grocery (won’t mention which), and later, Bob noticed where these “West Coast Tomatoes” actually came from. !!!

Which brings me to the subject of tomatoes. I’ve usually got my ‘Siletz’ bush tomatoes into the ground by mid-May, but this year I have only just moved them out of the house and into the cool greenhouse. Nights in the 40s are still in the forecast, and that’s cool enough to set tomatoes back a bit if they are unprotected. 

That hasn’t stopped some of us, reports Michelle of Pacific Potager. “The oldest gardeners on the island all seem to have planted their tomatoes already, and are picking up the odd ones that they like but don’t grow themselves. They’re looking for squash and cukes now.”

When I asked for tomato-protection ideas, she suggested, “Many people are using cinder blocks, which hold warmth and also have holes for hoops to make moveable impromptu greenhouses.  People line their tomato cages with plastic, tent their south-facing walls, line old bits of fence rolls with plastic, all kinds of things.”

Across from the Burton Post Office, I snapped this plastic lean-to protecting half-a-dozen tomatoes. Can’t say it felt much warmer in there—the sides were side open—but it’s got to cut down on moisture-sucking wind while still letting in the pollinators when the flowers appear. In years past, I’ve covered newly-planted tomatoes with reemay or clear plastic, both supported by hoops, and both times I was rewarded with ripe fruit in August.

Left: a Burton tomato lean-to; Right, Tony & Joe hardening off tomatoes

Amazing, Joe Curiel and Tony Raugust have had their tomatoes hardening outside since mid-April. He claims that younger plants don’t seem as affected by cold as more mature ones, and they “cozy them in” with a straw mulch, but no top cover. In the photo (taken two years ago), they were hardening off their plants on their south-facing porch, using this lattice to cut the wind a little and help prevent sun-scald on the leaves. They plant their tomatoes around April 29: “That way, we have a good shot at fruit by July 23rd or so.  Last year they went out May 8th—way too late—and August 8th was our first fruit.  But all of our varieties were disease free well into the fall and did surprisingly well last year even with the below average heat.” 

Choose varieties that claim to ripen in the 50-60 day range, such as Siletz, Stupice, Early Girl, or Taxi, or cherry tomatoes which don’t seem to need quite as much heat to ripen.

Another protective tip is to warm the soil with a layer of black plastic. It adds 3-5° more warmth to the soil—I measured with my compost thermometer to prove it to myself—plus it will retard weeds. Make sure your plastic makes contact with the soil by weighing it down with a few pebbles or ground staples.

With a little protection above and below, you can keep your just-planted tomatoes in the 50°-and-over temperature they require. And hopefully by August, you’ll have a crop like THIS— WhooHoo!

My 'Siletz', ready to eat on 8/14/2009. What a great tomato year...

Time to plant those empty rows at the Food Bank Farm on Wax Orchard Road

Two Saturdays ago at the Food Bank garden, Jenn Coe introduced me to four young AmeriCorps volunteers who were energetically turning over cover crop in the raised beds. I thought this spade-work must be part of their duties, but NOOO—they were digging for fun, in their spare time, doing back-breaking labor for extra credit.

This team of 3 girls and 1 guy arrived in March at Camp Sealth, who is hosting them for a 6-week stint of work there and around the Island. They’re specifically part of AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Community Corps, a descendent of the old Civilian Conservation Corps, plus a little military discipline thrown in. By committing to go serve four different non-profits in 10 months, a young person age 18-24 can earn a stipend of $200/week, plus an educational grant of $4725 to put toward college costs (or repayment).

So far, Stephen, Melissa, Jill, and Amy have been in Sacramento and the San Bernardino mountains, with their next stop Los Angeles. They’ve busted a lot of trail and are now all chain-saw certified, plus they’ve been trained in hazmat work and as first responders in disasters. They need to accumulate not only a total of 1700 hours of work for their host non-profit, they need to do 80 hours extra on their own. So they got in touch with Yvonne Pitrof, head of the Food Bank, and asked what they could do for the farm.

Jenn had high praise for them. “We were at the farm last week expanding the fence out, and you should have seen them, in the POURING RAIN, just soaked, but it didn’t phase them!” This comment got a laugh out of Stephen from California and Amy from Georgia: they shrugged it off and said, “Hey, we’re used to it: we’ve been busting trails a LOT down at Camp Sealth!” 

Next weekend will be their last on the Island, so next Saturday at the Farm (April 30), they’ll be leading a big Planting Party from 9am—noon. The first plantings went in last weekend, when Jenn, Jeff Lou, and myself plugged in 800 row feet of broccoli (Jeff did 800 feet’s worth of peas by himself!) There’s still many flats of chard, broccoli, and spinach waiting to go into the ground, so they sure could use your help next weekend. They’ll have coffee donated by the Roasterie, and perhaps some bakery treats as well.

So time to bring those seedling flats you’ve been growing on for the Food Bank, and bring your smile. And let’s all pray that you’ll need your sunscreen as well!  The farm’s at 24026 Wax Orchard Rd. — please park on the road.

1908 "Berry Booster" map, Courtesy of V-MI Heritage Association

I’m guessing that every Islander, during some Strawberry Fest of years past, has stuck a fork into the ersatz berries that come with the shortcake and asked “Whatever happened to those famous Vashon strawberries?”

Berries were big on Vashon: farmers started growing them as soon as the trees were cleared. The crop grew from being something you handed up in a basket to the ferry, to refrigerator cars barged over to be crammed full of strawberries. Thanks to our sandy loam soil, exposed slopes, and ocean-moderated climate, Vashon berries could ripen earlier and thus fetch the best prices.

For Vashon farmers, strawberries were good business—for awhile. But WWII’s internment of the Japanese farmers, who had a regular industry of berrying here, dealt quite a blow; cost and difficulty of getting labor, increasing federal regs, and the opportunity of better jobs off the fields finally ended commercial strawberries as a viable living by the late 80s. Beyond the highway’s commercial strip you can still see those wide-open fields, but there’s no berries there.

Today, with only a couple exceptions, you’ll find strawberries growing only in home gardens. I’ve long found that surprising, especially now in this era of new-gen Island farmers. The sun, the soil, the organic amendments, and yes the rain, all are still here—and now we have a local farmers market and CSAs. So why hasn’t some energetic farmer picked up the torch of this long-lost Island tradition and started growing berries for sale? 

I asked around.

What do berries want?

Before we can understand what our new-gen farmers are up against, you have to know the fussy requirements of the strawberry: 

Now much of the above will seem doable. Many of us already garden on raised beds that give good drainage and are easily netted against predators. Organic amendments like horse bedding are easily found. The Island’s soil is already at the right pH and texture. We’ve already put up the deer fencing and bird netting, and we can all hold a hose.

Still, it’s a long list—and I think the problem is that if you miss one thing on the punch-list, the whole crop goes downhill fast.

Tales of Woe

I heard a lot of frustration when I talked to several new-gen farmers. “Strawberries are a pain in the neck: they’re too hard to work into our crop rotation.…I couldn’t get to them when the runners needed to be culled.… They never did grow, so I tilled them under after the second season.… I had a beautiful crop, and then the raccoons found them.”

This last comment came from Jen Coe, Food Bank farmer, who then suggested that the “growing day-neutrals as annuals” technique might solve many problems.  “If you buy in bulk, your price drops down to something like 12¢ per plant. Grow with plastic-mulch, no weeds. Treat as annuals, no maintenance, no culling, less labor expense.” (See Kathy Wheaton’s comments below on ‘Albion’ if you find this idea intriguing.)

Pursuing that suggestion, I googled up a couple studies on using day-neutrals for shoulder-season production  by growing on bare-root plants in late winter in the greenhouse to create plugs that can be planted in early May for fruiting that season. Maryland Cooperative Extension found silvery plastic mulch helped plants keep fruiting through high summer heat, and found de-budding them in May-June had no effect on fruitfulness. (Another study I found would have reported on how well some day-neutrals could perform in the fall season, but “the deer grazed on the spring plantings and ruined the trial.”)

Another sufferer for his good intentions was fruit club founder Dr. Bob Norton, who has planted an 1/8 acre in newer varieties of day-neutrals to see which do best here. After killing off all the weeds and grasses, he planted in raised beds under black, non-permeable plastic. Eventually he dreams of a U-pick and selling at the Farmers’ Market. This year, he just wants fruit. “The deer poked around and around our fence until they found a weak spot, got in and ate all the strawberry leaves.”

I could only find one farm that has regularly raised enough strawberries to sell. Celina Yarkin wrote me that “we have done both plowing under as annuals and using the runners for next-year stock. We grow them in rows with mulch for weed control, and we grown both June-bearing and day-neutrals. When the berries finally get ahead of the kids, we take strawberries to market.”

For now, the Island Strawberry remains a homegrown treat

If you want an Island-grown strawberry, you’ll need to do it yourself. Alpine strawberries at DIG, everbearing Tri-Stars at Island Lumber, and many varieties at Kathy’s Corner are now available. 

You can plant bare-root strawberry plants up until May 1st—probably even later, given how cold this month is. There are two types: June-bearing strawberries, which ripen a big luscious load of berries in that month, and day-neutral berries, also known as everbearing, that will produce fewer, smaller fruit throughout all but the hottest parts of summer. 

In addition to the conditions mentioned before, never plant strawberries where you’d grown potatoes, tomatoes, peppers or eggplant: these plants can host Verticillium root rot fungus, which will then infect your berry plants. You also want to avoid recently plowed sod, which can harbor white grubs that also love strawberry plants.

Strawberries are heavy feeders: they want well-draining sandy loam soil with lots of organics mixed in, PLUS feeding. Wheaton told me that in the early 70s, her Ace Hardware franchise shipped in “Ten to twenty tons of 10-20-20 fertilizer for the berry farmers, and some of the old timers STILL order that for their home berry patch.” I found several web-pages on berry cultivation that recommend 10-20-20 be added to your bed before planting: it should last two years. Or, you can do light feedings every month through June, then again in fall to support (in June-bearers) the formation of next year’s fruit buds. 

Strawberry plants can rot if the crown sits in too moist a soil: my friend Lee lost all her plants to this year’s winter wet because, even though planted in gravelly soil, the patch was in the path of winter run-off from the slope above. Rest the plant on a little mound, flare the roots down its sides and cover with composty soil, leaving half or more of the crown above the soil-line.

Tom Spring's strawberry boxes topped with chicken wire to keep out raccoons

If you won’t have a lot of plants, you’ll want strong, well-supported protection. On www.GrowVeg, there’s a long whine about how birds have used loose netting as a trapeze to swing toward the fruit and get in a good peck. To shield against raccoons, Tom Spring of Shawnee build wooden frames holding chicken-wire: when opened, the frames are supported by pipes that fit into plumbing fixtures. He thought boxes 6” deep and lids 8” high would give enough room for the plants, but next time, he’d give the plants even more head-space.

 If you’re still game, plant any of these strawberries now

Island Lumber is offering ‘Tri-Star,’ the first popular day-neutral strawberry. I’ve grown it, it’s an okay producer, but I’ve just bought some ‘Albion’, a patented day-neutral that Kathy Wheaton at Kathy’s Corner is calling “the BEST strawberry I’ve have ever had in my garden. … They were the first to have fruit, the last to give up and all season long we had berries, lots and lots of YUMMY berries.” For somebody who wants to raise berries as annuals, this variety sounds perfect.

Kathy’s Corner also has that nostalgic favorite, Hood, plus Shuksan, Rainier, Fern, and Puget Summer. She’s also got a 2-page write-up on those varieties and care of your strawberry bed. 

So good luck with your strawberries: we can all use a little luck keeping this Island tradition alive.

UPDATE 5/21/2011: a friend who works for METRO just told me about the FREE SOIL TEST available to King County residents. You can send in up to five samples and get results back within 3 weeks. Since this tests for the same things the UMass tests for, save yourself $13 and go for the local freebie! Here’s the link: Free King County Soil Test Available

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No waiting around for me: I’m a ‘Jump In’ kind of gal.

For years, whenever I’d read up on planning a new garden bed, I’d leapfrog right over the advice to “Get your soil tested” to the much greater fun of “Add Organic Matter.”

When you’ve got that spring fever to dig, who wants to wait for labs?

Turns out, I should have.

Since I’m doing this blog to force myself to garden better, I thought it was high time for me to get my soil tested “officially.” So three weeks ago, I googled “soil testing” and found a reasonably-priced test through the University of Massachusetts Soil Testing Lab. 

For a $13 basic soil test, you get readings of pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium (the big NPK), plus calcium, magnesium, and trace minerals. It compares those levels with normal ranges and gives recommendations for improving your soil’s fertility. For an extra $3, I also asked for a reading of how much organic matter was in my soil. 

I thought I’d test the potato bed because it’s virgin: its soil hasn’t been amended at all. The potato soil would be my baseline.

And I wanted to test my tomato bed because, over the years, I’ve fed it a LOT of amendments: manure, wood ash, seaweed, compost, and organic fertilizer. They say sandy soil loses its nutrients quickly: would any of my good organics, after a season of heavy-duty tomato growing, be left in the soil? By comparing the two beds, would I see whether all those amendments had made a long-term difference?

Results are in—now the head-scratching begins

Early in March after I’d winter-cleaned the beds, I scooped 12 spoonfuls from various spots in the tomato bed, blended them in a bowl, poured one cup’s worth into a ziploc baggie, and labeled it “tomato bed.” Ditto for the potato bed. Stuffed the baggies into a Priority Mail box and sent it to UMass Soil Lab.

Two weeks later, I got the tests back: two pages each, plus an “Interpret Your Findings” sheet and a Fertilizer Recommendations page. (Wish Washington or Oregon state universities still do soil testing, but seems they don’t.)

And the bad news is—

OUCH!— I’ve been poisoning my tomato bed with wood ash!

The test results began with a pH report and a warning for my tomato bed, “Reported pH is higher than desired. Do not apply limestone, wood ash, or any more amendment that might raise soil pH further.”

In a region where acid soils of 5-6.5 pH are the norm, my tomato bed registered 7.6. We’re talking the alkalinity of a desert here.

In an attempt to keep our tomatoes from developing blossom-end rot—a product of irregular watering or calcium deficiency, in which wood ash is rich—we threw on WAY TOO MUCH. 

The potato patch, by contract, had a pH of 6.6, which is within the optimal range for MOST vegetables but is still high for potatoes, which prefer a range of 5.5–6 pH. The lab recommended I choose scab-resistant varieties of potatoes if planting them in that spot again.

The Good News

Other results were more pleasant to read: phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) were very high, as was calcium and magnesium. The CEC rates, which measure the soil’s ability to hold nutrients available for plants, was “adequate” in the potato bed and “very good” in the tomato bed. [note: tests using the simpler Rapitests bought at True Value didn't register the presence of phosphorus at all.] 

Apparently the tomato bed’s soil can supply as much nutrition to my plants as a clay-loam soil. Since adding humus is said to help sandy soils bind together, as well as hold water and nutrients in the root-zones of plants, I guess all those applications of seaweed, manure, and compost gave my sandy soil the ability to hang on to the good stuff I was heaping on it.

Trace minerals were in the normal ranges, and there’s little lead in the soil. (I didn’t chose to be fearful about, or test for, arsenic, which fell on southern Vashon lands during the run of the Tacoma smelter. Other gardeners with kids might want that test.)

Nitrogen seemed to be the only nutrient lacking; the Explanation Sheet said it’s assumed “that very little nitrogen remains in the soil after the growing season.” The report recommended various quantities of this-n-that fertilizer or amendment to make up the missing nitrogen.

When I took the samples, I was surprised at how similar the soil looked between the much-amended tomato bed and the “virgin” potato soil. So I should not have been surprised at the organic matter readings: with a desirable range of 4-10% organic matter in the soil, the tomato bed had 6.5% and the potato bed 6.1%—not much difference for all the amendments that had been thrown at the tomato bed.

The Moral of this Soil Test

If I’d done a soil test years ago, I wouldn’t have dropped all that wood-ash on my sweeter-than-average dirt. And judging from how fast the organics and nitrogens burn out of the soil, I think I might need a bigger compost pile.

I got a lot of information from the UMass Soil Test, much more than from the little test kit you can buy at your local hardware store. In fact, a couple weeks after I’d posted the “20 Soil Samples from Vashon” blog, a soils specialist I know told me “those soil testing kits you can buy at the hardware store aren’t any good at all, you know.” Oh—well—oops! but then, I wasn’t going to spent $13 x 20 just for curiosity’s sake. 

But for your OWN place, and for your vegie’s sake, spend a few bucks and send in that soil sample. Two weeks later, you’ll know everything there is to know about your soil, BEFORE you thrust your plant-babies into that dirt. 

And let’s find another place to dump the wood ash!

But before the mayhem of weekly harvests start, Chandler Briggs of Island Meadow Farm organized another farmers’ get-together last Tuesday, March 29, at the Grange hall, this time to hear stories of ol’ time island agriculture.

Two of the speakers have written books: Mary Matsuda Gruenewald wrote an autobiographical tale, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps, and Pamela Woodroffe interviewed 12 (at least) former tillers of Vashon soil for her book Vashon Island’s Agricultural Roots: Tales of the Tilth as Told by Island Farmers. One of those farmers she interviewed was Tom Lorentzen, and he was also on hand to entertain us with stories from his youth in what he called “the Norwegian ghetto up in Colvos.”

Pamela started first because in talking about her book, she could also introduce Mary & Tom who she interviewed for the book project. Tales of the Tilth started out as a small 20-page chapbook suggested by David Warner, then president of the Land Trust, but quickly expanded when Woodroffe realized what rich material she was getting from her interview subjects. (The original interviews are now in a big notebook in the library reference section, and Tales of the Tilth is available at local bookstores, the history museum, and amazon.com.)

Woodroffe came from a journalism background, but she farmed here for ten years on “Sweet Woodruff” farm and pieced together a living from that and a couple other jobs. “The only people who consistently made money are the Mann Brothers (earth-moving, tilling, haying). When times were good for farmers, the Mann Brothers would go till their fields, and when times were tough for farmers, they’d sell land and then the new owners would hire the Mann Bros. to clear it.”

“There were a lot of teary-eyed breakdowns during the interviews,” she said. “Economic changes, like the energy crunch of the 70s that forced the Beall Greenhouses to close, that stuff just breaks your heart. So it’s beautiful to see so many generations coming together tonight. Keep it going.”

Mary Matsuda, Japanese-American farm girl of Vashon

That farming is a tough way to make a living was also the running theme of Mary Matsuda Gruenewald’s talk. Her father left Japan when he was 18, paid off his passage by working in Hawaii’s sugar-cane fields and then in Alaska coal fields, worked farms for awhile in Fife, then moved his young family to our Shawnee area. Mary was 18-months old at the time. They worked a farm with sour cherries, “and in those days we didn’t have insecticides so the cherries were wormy, but it didn’t matter because we sold them to a winery so people would never know—clever, huh?” (big laugh).

“We had a horse named Dolly. When the folks harvested vegetables, they’d put them in gunnysacks and my dad would toss those sacks on Dolly’s wagon and she would take the wagon down to Shawnee and the passenger boat. Dad would toss these sacks of vegies on board, the boat would go to Tacoma, a Japanese man from the market came down, took these sacks of vegetables and sold them.” 

She described how her father worked for minimum wage for 27 years, but saved enough money to eventually buy ten acres behind what would become the K2 factory. 

“One horse, one plow, one harrow, all those 10 acres. These people worked hard,” she said, leaning toward her audience. “We learned how to manage.” When someone asked about money, she said, “Income was earned during the summer months, and you made do through the rest of the year. You figure out very quickly what’s important. Someof my happiest days were spent here picking strawberries behind K2.” 

Eventually, her father possessed 52 acres of farmland. “My papa-san tried Olympic berries, gooseberries, blackberries, eventually settling on strawberries.”

“I remember when we had gooseberries, they’re very prickly, all the pickers had very thick leather gloves, Papa made flats and the pickers would scoop over this big flat and the berries would fall off. He’d climb up this ladder and a chute went down from its top, at the bottom a big electrical fan would blow all the leaves away and the berries would drop into the flat clean. You learned to make do with what you had.” 

Mary eventually moved to Seattle and became a nurse at Group Health; she started the Consulting Nurse Service that’s still going on. When her father died at age 93, she inherited the southern half of the acreage behind K2. “In 2004, my younger son and I planted native trees, which will eventually become a forest. Our plan is to donate it to the Land Trust.”

Tom Lorentzen, scion of Colvos’ Norwegian “ghetto”

Tom stood up and immediately had us laughing when he said he was glad “None of my neighbors are here so they can tell me when I ‘m lying and when I’m not!” Tom was born in the area he calls “Calvis—and we were not allowed to leave that part, what we called the Norwegian ghetto. That’s Cedarhurst down to Robin Wood Road, west to the passage and east to Mukai’s fields (now the airport). So I don’t know about the rest of the Island!”

He told us that area was logged off in the 1880s and 90s, then platted into 10-acre parcels with the roads running north/south. “And then they begun the halibut fishery off the coast and the Norwegians came running over. My dad and his sister and husband came over in 1907 and bought 10 acres on the Westside highway for $450—and then they split it. All these fisherman from the same northwest coast of Norway, they came, too: my neighbor George Olson, he lived two places NW of my dad in Norway, and he bought a place two places NW of my dad here. I guess they got used to looking at each other!” 

“All the income came from farming, except if you were a halibut fisherman, then you had a little bit more money. You went to Alaska for six months, and in the off-season, you cut wood, you harvested what you had, and you worked for a local farmer.  It was all chickens and berries. During the winter, it was still berries: you cut vines, you hung vines.”

“People got jobs working for the farmers, all kinds of jobs: cleaning and grading eggs, trucking. I used to work for August Wax: I was his swamper, I helped him load and unload the trucks. I worked for Masa Mukai as well: once school let out May 28 because the strawberries were ripe, so over the hill we went and Masa Mukai paid us 10¢ a carrier. I picked 26 and I thought I was pretty fast. Then I talked to some of the Canadian Indians who said they’d picked 40!” 

At Mukai’s cannery, they had a conveyor belt and 20-30 women there, picking out the hulls and the rotten berries. The berries were packed with sugar in big wooden barrels, then trucked down to Portland, where they were made into jams or toppings.

“Eggs, eggs, eggs. My neighbor was a shoemaker in Norway. Here he had 3000 white Leghorns and five acres of loganberries. Work, work, work, he died of overwork in 1935, his wife got married again rather fast.” 

“Some of us don’t change so fast. I wake up every morning in the same bedroom I was born in. Different bed, though” (laughs around). ” I don’t know what caused the change, but used to be when I went down in my lower field, my social life was the people coming by. Now I go outside and I don’t see anybody working outdoors anymore.”

The evening ended with a slide show of Vashon Agriculture Then and Now, put together by Jenn Coe for the Compost Fest. Amazing to see all the labels of Vashon value-added products, long gone: the Honey Fig Jam from Burmyrna Fig Gardens of Burton, Harley C. Hake’s Washington grape wine from Dockton, the Lande and the Fitzpatrick dairies. On the Wallflower corner, there was once the Kimmel’s “Shop-Rite” grocery with the “Every Day Low Prices!” sign. The movie theatre lot, once surrounded by martial rows of red current bushes. Refrigerated train cars on barges, brought right next to a dock filled with trucks loaded up with berry flats. 

Amazing to drive around town and see with these shared memories what once was here. If you want another big view of Vashon’s old time farming, have a gander at Will Forrester’s mural on the back of US Bank, which you can easily look at on your way to the Farmers’ Market next door. 10am-2pm—and the first 100 get a free cuppa and a baked good.

For now, dashing outside between the raindrops and starting seeds on the windowsill / greenhouse will have to do. If you want to read up on seed-starting techniques, click on my story written for the Beachcomber issue of March 31, 2009 (at least you can get the intro: the bulk of the article is hidden away from all but online subscribers.)

And here’s a notice about an upcoming Bio-Char Workshop on April 9th, hosted by bio-char champion Ken Miller of the north end. Cathy Fulton took the workshop last year, and her comments top the information below. Early in this blog’s life, I wrote up a visit to Ken Miller’s vegetable garden, which clearly showed the growth boost to broccoli given by bio-char; you can read that story on page 8 of this blog (You’ll find the page index if you scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN to the bottom of this blog page).

———-

Says Cathy—In case you missed the very excellent Bio Char Stove workshop last year, here is another opportunity. I took the workshop last year and it was a lot of fun and very educational. I brought home a nice little stove for myself. Below are the details. Contact Ken Miller if you have questions(contact information at the bottom).
Cathy Fulton

You are invited to attend a Biochar Stove Building Workshop on Vashon Island, April 9th from 10 AM to 5 PM. The instructor will be Art Donnelly of Seachar, the Seattle Biochar Working Group. 
 
You will build a simple biochar-making stove out of a metal 5-gallon paint can and other recycled cans. Come and learn about biochar, how to make it, and what to do with it. Art will also tell about his experiences with building stoves with migrant coffee pickers in Costa Rica. 
 
The workshop location on Vashon is:  24104 Wax Orchard Rd. SW (just south of Misty Isle Farms air strip.)
 
All materials and tools will be provided. The cost for this workshop is $45.00. 
A $20 dollar deposit is requested. Please make your check out to SeaChar.Org and mail to: 
 SeaChar.Org
603 Stewart St.,
Suite 906
Seattle, WA 98101
 
Or go to www.seachar.org and use Pay Pal under the donate button.
 
Please bring a sack lunch and water for the event.
 
For more information call Ken Miller at 206-947-1895 or email at islandcanyons@yahoo.com
 

She will have a list of plants that the island deer are not fond of and will share some of the tricks for keeping them from killing plants and driving you crazy!

Colleen’s garden on the Burton peninsula was on the VAA Garden tour last year. She propagates many unusual perennials from seed or cuttings, and she also makes ointments which she sells at the farmer’s market.

Event Location –Vashon Library

When–  Saturday, March 26^th

From 10am- 12 noon

Two nights later, as I was reaching down to pull the plug on the plant-lights, I noticed a bit of green emerging in the cabbage row. What—sprouting already? Yes indeed: more than a few ‘Golden Aces’ were sticking their little heads above ground. Green onions, too—and oh! there’s the broccoli!

Pleased but surprised, wondering why so fast, I pulled the power-cord—and a silvery light flooded my dark kitchen. So I went outside and, amidst the din of a thousand frogs, stared up at the brightest moon I’d ever seen. It wasn’t even full yet. And yet the frogs were yelping it up like wolves howling at the moon. What in the world is going on?

What the frogs sing Spring, believe

Two years ago, when I was researching my first gardening article on starting seeds, I talked to Jasper Forrester of Green Man Farm. “How do you know when to sow seeds?” I asked her. She replied, “Oh, when the frogs start singing, I can feel it’s planting time.”

Apparently the Pacific Tree Frog emerges from winter dormancy when they feel there’s no longer any danger of freezing; the boys find a nice spring mud-puddle for egg-laying and then put out the call: “Hey lady: I’ve got a nice pond, so come down and see me sometime!” 

So if the frogs think it’s spring, we must be getting close.

The Moon Theory of Starting Seeds

The notion that plants respond to the moon has been around a long time. The theory is that, similar to the tides, the sap in plants rises as the light of the moon increases. There’s no science to back this up, but our own PNW expert, Ed Hume, has run an unscientific survey that shows statistically better results if gardening chores are done in sync with moon phases. His little Garden Almanac, available on his seed racks in local stores, is largely devoted to month-by-month moon sign gardening.

This schedule of planting suggests chores in sync with each lunar phase. For instance, when the moon’s on the increase, it’s a good time to sow seeds of leafy plants, groom perennials, graft fruit trees, and fertilize. When the moon’s on the wane, it’s a good time to sow root plants like beets, carrots, and potatoes. When the moon is at its lowest ebb, its power to attract fluids is weakest, so this is a good time to prune trees or dig soil because there’s less water in there.

So the frogs say “it’s safe” and the moon says, “let’s go.” But you, looking at the muddy, funky, mess that is the remnants of last year’s garden, might think “Maybe later … much later.”

But then you’d miss out on the power of the “Super-Moon.”

Adding to the lunatic theories…

By tomorrow night, March 19, the moon will be the closest it’s been in 20 years. It’ll look 15% larger, 30% brighter, and at least according to one person, have a powerfully seismic influence on our planet.

According to 70s astrologer Richard Nolle,  75% of recent major storms and earthquakes on our planet occur during the 2-week window surrounding full Super-Moons.

Anything significant happen during the waxing of this moon? If a Super-Moon has the power to move the earth, think what it can do for your seedlings…

Don’t Miss this Chance to Power Up your Seedlings

So all this may explain why my leafy seedlings are jumping out of their soil. A Super Moon. Croaking frogs. A warm indoor greenhouse, with plenty of lights and a watering can standing by, doesn’t hurt either.

As I learned last year, the seed packs available in our stores, at least of Territorial Seed Company, are no more expensive than from the catalog—though the racks offer a smaller selection.

Jenn Coe of the Food Bank Farm will give you seeds, if you’ll start a flat of vegetable seedings for the farm. She likes to take a drainable tray, line the bottom with newspaper, than fill the whole tray with soil. “The divided cell trays dry out pretty fast, while a whole soil-filled tray doesn’t. If I dent the top of the soil with the bottom of a cell-divider, there’s my plant spacing, and the seedlings lift out pretty easily when I’m ready to plant.” Get in touch with her at Jenn@VashonFoodBank.org.

With all these special March powers working in your favor, surely you can squeeze room for an extra flat before it’s tomato-starting time?

The farm’s two hoophouses were taken down last fall so winter wouldn’t tear them to tatters. Consequently, the farm doesn’t have a springtime greenhouse in which to grow on flats of young vegies and get a jump on the growing season.

She knows folks are happy to grow starts. “We had TONS of tomato starts last year, and that was GREAT! We plan on doing another hoophouse just for tomatoes, and one for just basil. And I hope that folks will grow those on and donate those starts again.”

But first, she needs broccoli, chard, and spinach starts for spring and early summer harvest. This season, the farm will be devoted to just nine crops: broccoli, chard, and spinach first, snap peas, carrots, and beets, tomatoes, basil, and ‘Sweet Dumpling’ winter squash.

“Last year we grew a wider variety of plants. But that meant that each week we harvested maybe twenty of any vegetable—and we have 200 families to feed.”

I asked her, why not lettuce? She said, “we get plenty of donated lettuce. Spinach salads have so much more nutrition, and it’s not so perishable.” And I might add that it grows early and fast, making it possible to use the same row for a second, even third crop through the season.

So Garden Readers: would you be willing to grow a flat of spinach, broccoli, or chard starts for the Food Bank Farm? If so, Jenn would like to hear from you soon. And she ‘ll give you the flat, the seeds, and even the potting soil (if you really insist). Email her at Jenn@VashonFoodBank.org or phone her at 463-6332 (food bank) on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

I asked her how last Saturday’s spreading of the fence went. She said, “Fine: we didn’t get all the fence posts set, but we got the post holes dug. If the weather’s good this Saturday, I’ll put out the call for another crew to help set those posts and spread the deer fencing around them.” So if you’re interested in helping, get in touch with Jenn or swing by the Food Bank Farm on Saturday, March 12, after 10am. 

Some Good Tips on Starting Spinach

A couple weeks ago, I read about starting spinach indoors at my favorite gardening website, www.growveg.com. Spinach always sprouts erratically for me, so I’m going to try Barbara Pleasant’s tip for priming spinach seeds indoors by first soaking them, drying them at room temperature, and then storing them in an airtight container in a cool room for up to a week. Here’s the link to the article, “Getting a Good Stand of Spinach.”

I might go beyond that and try chitting, or pre-sprouting, a flat of spinach, so that I plant only the viable seeds. Scatter spinach seeds in a thin layer across a couple paper towels, then spritz the towel with water and lay a last layer of paper towel over. Pack this damp seed sandwich into a plastic bag and leave in a warm place in your house (my water-heater closet works well). Check every day, looking for the seed coat to crack and a tiny tip of the baby plant to emerge. Plant such seeds into your flat of potting soil IMMEDIATELY, before that tip grows into the paper towel.

Why was I surprised? Because over the years of gardening and of reading & listening to everything I can find on garden soils, I’ve run across a number of Received Truths about PNW soils. For instance, Steve Solomon in his popular “Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades” states categorically “Your soil is acidic, deficient in calcium, and almost certainly deficient in magnesium…. so apply lime.”

I’ve also been told that Vashon soil is poor. Yet the UMass report said that my soil was chock-full not only of the potassium Steve Solomon claims is ALWAYS found in maritime northwest soils, but is also rich in phosphate, calcium, and magnesium, the nutrients Solomon claims are easily leached from soil by our maritime rains.

All these contradictions provoked my curiosity. ARE Vashon’s soils as nutrient-deficient and acidic as we are led to assume? Only an Island-wide experiment could tell.

The Soil Experiment begins

I asked my fellow yoga students if they would contribute a baggy’s worth of soil from their properties. I asked not for their best, probably much-amended garden soil, but for a sample taken from untouched soil. To each willing participant I gave a baggy with a card inside it to note down their name, address & neighborhood. Sixteen people  responded; to those I added samples from two farms, the Borrow Pit, and my own property, for a total of 20 samples.

I bought two Rapitest Soil Test Kits (available at True Value) which each contained 10 tests for pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash (potassium). I also gave each soil sample the Jar Test to determine each soil’s mix of sand, silt, clay, and humus. I created a spreadsheet to hold all the information. Then, over two weeks, I conducted the tests. (Each sample takes two days to test, as in both the Jar Test and the NPK tests, you draw from water in which the sampled soil has settled.)

The Rapitests, designed for non-scientists, don’t give you literal amounts of the tested nutrient, but instead report on each element’s presence in a range from “Depleted” through “Excess.” The card that comes with the test then tells you how much of typical fertilizers (usually chemical) to apply to that soil to boost the desired nutrient. The fertilizer prescriptions from the UMass Soil Test report was much simpler (“Apply 2-3 lbs of 10-10-10 per 100 sq ft in early spring”) and easier to translate into an organic equivalent.

Observations:

pH: Most soils were between 6.0-6.5 pH, which is optimum for growing vegetables. The two farms, however, both had a neutral pH of 7—perhaps they have have been limed more than most?

NPK: Most, though not all, the soils had insufficient nitrogen and need more. As for phosphorus, it was so scarce in these soils, the tests could barely pick up its presence. Potassium varied widely: 4 had none, 5 had not enough, 3 were rated Sufficient, 7 had more than enough, and 1 had WILDLY more than enough (rated 7!) 

COMPOSITION OF SOILS:   It’s Sandy Loam, folks.
A sandy loam, according to Pacific Northwest Guide to Home Gardening by Ray McNeilan and Micheline Ronningen, is about 65% sand, 20% silt, and 15% clay. These percentages can be revealed in a Jar Test, in which you fill a jar halfway full of your soil, top it with water nearly to the top, close the jar and shake for one minute, then set aside and let the soil settle out of the water. Sand particles, the heaviest, will settle down first, creating your bottom layer. Silt follows next, then (usually hours later), the minute particles of clay settle, with organics floating on top of the water. 

In all the Vashon soils I jar-tested, sand made up the thickest layers, from half to 80% of each sample. Silt made up most of the rest. I couldn’t even FIND clay until I learned what to look for (THAT fingernail-thick layer?”); I finally tested for its slippery presence by rubbing the slurry between my fingers. Even those samples I expected to have lots of clay, such as from the North End or Burton Peninsula, were dominated by sand. 

Conclusions

Vashon Island has a sandy loam soil of pH between 6-6.5. It is thoroughly depleted of phosphorus, that nutrient needed for good fruiting and flowering: bonemeal is a good source. Our soil’s also thin on nitrogen, for which there are a number of organic amendments (chicken manure, blood meal, fish fertilizer). Some soils are deficient in potassium, and while it’s tempting to supply this with wood ash, that’s also the way I pushed my tomato bed’s pH to 7.6, which is WAY too alkaline for most vegetables.

Despite Solomon’s recommendation to add lime to new garden beds and every few years after, I don’t believe that we should take the recommendation to “add lime to new beds” as an Article of Faith. Test your soil first. 

Had our island conformed to the idea that it is “acidic and needs liming every year,” I would have expected a lower pH. A pH of 4.5-5 was what I had while living on the Oregon Coast in a spruce/alder/salal/huckleberry environment. But then, Oregon—the state where Steve Solomon lived and farmed—was never covered with gravel from the Vashon glacier… 

I believe it’s the gift of the glacier that Vashon Island has a mineralized soil with a pH friendly to growing vegetables. But the nutrient level is poor, and the results of the tests show a wide variability across the Island, within neighborhoods—even within single properties. No one gave me samples from Maury Island, so it was not tested.

I got quite different results from the UMass soil test and the Rapitest Soil test. The UMass test is more comprehensive, but often makes you wish you’d paid more attention in Soil Science class. The lab charges $13.00 per soil sample, with another $3 to test for levels of organic content. The Rapitest can be had from $13-19, giving you enough equipment and chemicals for ten soil tests.

My testing results will be posted on the entry hall of Vashon Athletic Club, should you be interested in the details.

Being raspberries, they grew lustfully up, down, and sideways, sprawling over the lawn. Then, on the one day I left the gate open, they got pruned (thank you, Bambi, but not so much!) just as they were coming into fruit, and I had to wait until autumn for ripe berries. They were SO good, SUCH a good complement to autumn cooking, so tasty in my breakfast yogurt, that I renewed my vow to find them a better home.

So during last week’s cold-n-clear days, I stacked the last course on a rock wall project started back in August. Here, where the ground’s a little higher, dryer, and sunnier, I plan to move those raspberries and let them have their raspberry run. 

With berries on my mind, when I saw the sign at Kathi’s—”Raspberries, here by Feb 12″—I pulled a U-turn and went in to talk to her.

Raspberry Plants at Kathi’s Corner Soon

She too had raspberries on her mind: I found her writing a flyer on the subject, stuck on page 3 at “Pruning: This is the most confusing part…” I think she was glad to stop writing and talk instead.

“The top question people ask me is ‘which one tastes most like a raspberry?’ But I think the top question is ‘What do I want to do with my berries?’ Do you want a long-lasting source of fresh fruit for your cereal or yogurt? Or do you want a whole bunch at once to preserve or freeze?” 

To answer such questions, her hand-out lists the varieties she’ll offer, adding comments on the taste, disease resistance, soil preferences, cultivation history. She’s tried most of these in her home plot (“These are the creme de la creme”) and includes her own observations. 

For instance, if you have heavy clay soil, you might want to try ‘Cascade Bounty.’ If you don’t want to train the plants on wires, try  ’Saanich,’ the plant that fruits on shorter lateral branches. If you want a long harvest, choose ‘Tulameen’ or an everbearing plant  like ‘Autumn Britten’ or the yellow ‘Anne’, the raspberry that might also be your best bet in a sun-challenged spot. If you know you won’t remember how pruning is done, pick the fall-bearing plants and simply “mow all canes to the ground after they’ve dropped their leaves” according to the Spooner Nursery website.

That last note comes from the website of Spooner Nursery in the Puyallup Valley, where Kathy sources her plants; they’ve been raising raspberries for the wholesale trade since 1955. 

Bare-root Plants in by this Saturday

She’ll receive the bare-root plants by February 12; they can be planted right away in fluffy, well-drained soil enriched with plenty of organics like compost, peat moss, manures. Her flyer states that you should NOT use an area that has grown potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, or bulbs within the last five years, as these plants are hosts for verticillium wilt, to which raspberries are susceptible. Nor, for many reasons, should you try to raise them in pots.

“I hear many people complain that their raspberries go downhill after a few years. But what people forget is that raspberries are heavy feeders: they want LOTS of organics like steer or chicken manure or compost, PLUS mulch, PLUS fertilizer.” She uses any all-purpose fruit or flower fertilizer like a 5-5-5—NOT a lawn fertilizer that’s predominantly nitrogen—and applies it in March and again in June when the plants are flowering. “If you do that, the bed will last for YEARS.” They also want plenty of water and sun, just as your flower beds do.

If you have already have summer-bearing raspberries, these mid-winter weeks are your last opportunity to cull away last season’s spent canes. Though summer raspberries bear on either 1-year or 2-year wood, don’t bother to decipher those because the past-it canes will be obvious: they’ll be brown as a latte and so brittle they’ll break away easily near the ground.

Around April & May, you’ll want to hoe out canes escaping outside your row, and you’ll want to tie up/train the taller canes to the tallest wire in your support system. For an excellent description of trellising and training, see Washington Extension’s “Growing Small Fruits for the Home Garden.”

Back at my rock-wall terrace, I dumped wheelbarrows full of compost, peat moss, and leaf mold into my sandy soil. Ready for raspberries. And in a few weeks, I’ll return to Kathy for word on strawberries.

Other Resources:  www.spoonerfarms.com, Iowa Extension Service, and eHow for videos and articles.

Books by the Way already have the hardcover on sale, and I picked up a copy yesterday and am already halfway through. It’s an absorbing read, almost a confessional, of how this city slicker turned himself by trial-n-error into a dairyman and fine cheesemaker.

 If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to run a small farm on Vashon, this book will give you that experience. Even without a farm, I’m sure a lot of us will recognize parts of our own Vashon stories in his.

How your dream of country living can put a rosy glow over that patch of weeds you just made an offer on. The blackberries. The deer. The half-buried bits of hardware that your riding mower—or your cow—manages to suck up into its guts. Who knew that cattle can pick up something called hardware fever? (I thought husbands only caught that, in True Value. If only shoving a magnet down his throat could be the cure…)

Even though Timmermeister says this is not a how-to manual, you the reader ARE THERE as he receives a new set of bees and sets up a hive, milks a cow, harvests honey, and gathers the courage to stick a needle of medicine into a sick cow. The tone is straightforward, full of facts, and honest; though he’s probably an old hand at these farm ways now, by writing of his early misgivings and failures he makes the experiences fresh and eye-opening for us. His tone is not, “You can do it!” but more “This is what it’s like, and been like, in making me into a farmer and this pint-sized homestead into a working farm.” 

I’ve got a wheel of his camembert, often available in Thriftway’s gourmet cheese case, in my cheese box. Now I know the work and investment it takes to bring that cheese into existence. So don’t feel bad if there aren’t any free cheese samples at the reading Sunday afternoon.

I got an email a few days ago from Cathy Fulton, she of the Compost Fest and other sustainable food endeavors. Tomorrow, Saturday, December 10, she and her fellows will be pulling out all the stops vis-a-vis locavore food and island self-sustainability. She and her fellows will be—

DEMONSTRATING HOW TO TURN A DEER INTO FOOD!

Crimson Christmas Coleslaw uses treasures of the season

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

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

Read on and “C”…

An Old Bird turned Coc au Vin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cardamon & Red Kuri Squash

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

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

Crimson Christmas Coleslaw

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

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

2 cups red cabbage, chopped finely coleslaw style

1/4 cup chopped nuts, either pecan or walnut

half an apple, chopped into 1/4″ pieces

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

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

Anise or fennel seed, standing by…

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Carbon Sequestration Project at the Borrow Pit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plum Forest Farm

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

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

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

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

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

At Island Meadow Farm

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

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

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

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

Time.

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

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

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

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

Seeing The Past in our Present-Day Landscape

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

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

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

Time Turnovers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noni Morrison & Delinda McCann of Calico Gardens

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

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

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

Keeping Flowers Coming All Week

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

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

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

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

“So Islanders have color preferences?” 

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

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

Keeping It Going All Year

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

The gate to Noni's flower field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, the News—

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

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

Thoughts on Garden Clean-up

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

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

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

A Tip for Successful Compost: Time your Gathering

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

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

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

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

Chores to Do Now

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

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

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

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

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

And what NOT to do:

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

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

• AND DON’T FORGET TO DANCE WITH THE BUTTERFLIES

My kitchen garden, after a bit of tidying

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

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

First, the news:

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

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

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

Ruth Sauer’s Garden 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Several types of Salvia and other unusual perennials!!

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

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!