Bees Hunker for Winter

My friends and I were lucky enough to find a swarm of bees while they were swarming! We (mostly my friends) collected the bees and put them into a frame around Earth Day this year, and by this fall, we had a couple of quarts of honey, and they had enough left to last the winter. But how do they last when no flowers are blooming and it is so cold and wet? Here is a great article about it. It sounds like they are just hunkering down and solidifying their community. I am down with that!
Enjoy!
thedailygreen.com

Got Organic Milk?

 Hip English Dairy Farmers in a cute rap video!



That just cracks me up!

Go Grab Your Leaves and Mulch when the sun comes out, or wait for your neighbors to rake them up and grab them! Mulch all your tender plants and in between your leeks! Cliff Mass is predicting a La Nina (cold and wet, with lots of chances for snow in town) this year. Great for Snowboarding, but less good for eating fresh greens from your yard!

I can build a small hoop house (3' wide x 5' high) to help protect your greens from the frost all Winter for less than $60! Salads in January are nice...

Fall Veggie Garden Prep Special!

We are now getting to the point where it is almost too late to plant veggies unless you have already bought the plants... So, if you want to make a new garden bed, the easiest way now is to sheet mulch and wait for spring... If you have a place in the garden that you think is a good place for your garden next spring, I can come and tell you what/when to do it, or you can have me out and I will do it for you- If you have leaves in your yard start collecting now!!

This is a great video from the originators of the Backyard Farm concept explaining why they think it is important to grow your own vegetables.

By By Tomatoes!

I finally gave up on my tomatoes... the ones that were ripe were full of slug holes, and the others were just getting waterlogged! Now of course there is sunshine. But I found that my strawberries have completely taken over the area! Yay, free food!  I am probably going to move them to underneath the cherry tree in the "fruit corner" and plant lettuces and cilantro, etc. I am finally also going to make myself a new hoophouse for the winter. I have lots of kale and chard and more volunteers at the community garden, so I am going to make sure it doesn't freeze in the Seattle cold winter that has been predicted (http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/).  My late planted (August) purple pole beans are finally growing into a pretty vine with a few beans on it. The celery is doing well, but I pulled the soil around it to try to blanch it for the next few weeks... I pulled all but the flowering leeks, and sauted some with chanterelles Marc brought home from the mountains! Leftovers were rolled into a nori for Chanterelle Sushi, Yum.

Grow Cook Eat Videos from my friend Willi!

Grow.cook.eat 
That is my friend Willi in her new cooking show Grow Cook Eat. In the kitchen with her husband Jon, and in the garden explaining how to plant and harvest the plants to optimize a small urban yard. She was a board member for Seattle Tilth and the Northwest Editor for Organic Gardening for years, and is currently working on a book called Grow Cook Eat. She a great resource for all things in the urban vegetable garden. She usually is a presenter at the NW Garden Show in February and is a regular on KUOW's Greendays Gardening Panel She has her own award winning website called Diggin Food, and she and her husband just opened a cool furniture store in Portland featuring custom, hand built furniture that is affordable. It is calledPerch, and it is in the Pearl District in Portland.  Check it out.

peace-
Jayne

Fall Harvest 2010

I love this time of stocking up.  We are going mushroom hunting, and plan to cook a bunch of sauces and store them in the freezer, and also to dry them. Even though we don't have that many tomatoes that are ripe on the vine, we do have enough to make a few dishes, and the leeks have been one of the best things we have grown- hardly any work for the effort. I can cut up a leek and make the entire dish taste better. I made a leek, carrot, celery, and burdock stock that will make a great base for either soups or for cooking rice or quinoa. 

Marc is the Souper boyfriend in the winter time! He loves to make soup on the top of our wood stove, getting up periodically to stir while relaxing after snowboarding on Sunday afternoon. I just harvested burdock root from the farm, and made a stock from it for the freezer. This stock plus an endless supply of leeks, potatoes and kale will make his job easier! You should have seen Marc's face when I showed him how to plant the leeks. He tried to put the whole 4" pot of leeks in one hole and complained that they were falling apart. I showed him that each toothpick sized leek had to be separated and planted about 2-3" apart from one another.... His mouth had dropped and he just glazed over and mumbled something about feeding the worms and walked off. I only had to weed the area a few times during the season, and I grew squash up the fence next to them. Definitely worth it!

Next year I plan to plant shelling beans to save seeds for winter soups. I was afraid they would be too much work to shell, but I think given the potential taste factor I am going to give them a try. I have Jacob's Cattle and have an affinity to them because I have a friend named Jacob who's family raise cattle in Africa.

Vegetables keep coming

Yum, Dinner!
Well, We are getting plenty of squash of all kinds out of the garden, and cukes and leeks, and green tomatoes. I forgot to take a picture of the fried green toms we made. I just cracked an egg and added a little water to whisk it up, then dredged it in flour with a little salt and pepper, and a little Thyme. I think one of the secrets to the toms is that you have to cut them really thick, and fry them for enough time for them to be cooked all the way through. The spices could have been better, but I finally got the texture right. I think we will be having a lot more of these!

Our friend brought us 2 king crabs that were caught and cooked that day on the San Juan Islands! We ate those up one day, then cooked up the shells at a soup base. We used that and these veggies to make a great soup for dinner, and froze the rest in 2 serving containers. We will see if they ever come out of the freezer, but I would add more cream and potatoes and it will be even better the second time around!

Tomato Trellis & Hoop House Time!

You might have just gotten some plants and stuck them in the ground and are hoping they do well and the soil warms up soon... well, that is ok sometimes, and especially with sungolds, and some past varieties, but not with the bigger varieties. You need to protect your babies from the cold weather, and help them keep upright and keep their leaves from touching the soil... I know that is a lot to think about all at once, but you need to start thinking about your tomato plants' needs.  1) Warm soil- you can use clear plastic to warm up the soil before you plant. Some people think that black plastic will heat up the soil, but test showed that the plastic itself heated up, but the soil underneath did not... The clear plastic really does work. 2) Warm air at night and protection form too much moisture- there are many ways to make a hoop house or temporary greenhouse out of greenhouse plastic and hoops made out of bent irrigation pipes over rebar and clips to hold the plastic in place. You can rig up some sort of angled windows supported by something sturdy like framing lumber, but be careful to make it strong enough- you wouldn't want it to fall on the plants or an innocent bystander...
If you have questions or want to purchase some of the greenhouse plastic in lengths of 20' @ 4$/ft, let me know. It is the 6mil greenhouse plastic that farmers use. email me at jayne@sistersageherbs.com- Only in the Seattle Area please!! I will be adding pictures as I get the tomato garden pictures together this season.
peace-
Jayne

Succession Planting

These are my notes from the talk I am giving tonight at West Seattle Nursery:

Plan Well: You will do much of your planning based on when each of the crops will be done, then you will know when & where to place the next crop.  It helps to buy plants already started or start your own in a separate place or between the crops so you can just place them in where you can, but you can start directly in the bed as well.

Calculate your needs: You will need to be honest about how much your family can eat in a given time, and how much space you have. Your family may be able to eat more than 1 salad per day, but not much more- the salad will be bolting after awhile- it is the same for all the early crops. Don’t be afraid to thin your plants- the best ones will feed you well, too many will be stressed at this spacing.

If you don’t have much space to grow the plants that normally take up space out in the yard- you can go up. Dig a trench and supplement the soil underneath with the complete fertilizer before planting   Tomatoes, Squash, & Cucumbers on a trellis or fence. This will cut down on soil-based diseases, too.

Irrigation: If you are tending a small garden, and in the garden daily, it might work out to have a pitcher for water right by the garden bed. If the garden space is larger, you can use soaker hoses or a drip irrigation system with a timer. It depends on your commitment and availability.

Season Extenders: Use irrigation pipe over rebar and greenhouse plastic to help your tomatoes, eggplants  & peppers ripen in the summer and keep your chard from freezing in winter.

Steve Solomon’s Complete Organic Fertilizer: *4 parts Cottonseed or Canola Seed Meal

*½ part lime (agricultural) *½ part Phosphate Rock or Bone Meal * ½ part Kelp Meal

Mix this together and add when prepping the bed, transplanting and mid/late season- it will break down slowly through the season and be available to your plants when they need it. 

Planning a Party from the garden to the Dish

My friend and I are each having parties on or near the Summer Solstice, and she asked me to grow a row of food for her and tell her what will be ready. So, I had to start looking at my garden in terms of when I want to eat the plants, when they will be finished producing, and what I will put there next. I look at the maturation date on the seed packet then count backwards from the party. That is when I plant the seeds...

So, spinach will be ready between 30 & 60 days depending on the weather and how big you like to eat it- so Solstice party is going to have spinach dishes. We may have peas still going and we will have chard, kale, broccoli, small tender beans and squashes and blossoms going, etc. It has been a fun way to look at home garden food production. Planning never has anything to do with reality some years, though...

The resources I used for planning are: Seattle Tilth's Maritime Northwest Garden Guide by Seattle Tilth, THE organic gardening resource in Seattle, The Square Foot Garden by Mel Bartholameu, combined with Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades by Steve Solomon are great resources for this exercise. Although Sq/Ft suggests cramming the veggies together, decide how many you will grow/use while they are in season, and then timing the harvest, and GVWC wants you to space out the plantings so you don't have to water so much and the roots don't compete with each other- both rely on fertilizing, turning the space as quickly as possible into the next crop, and weeding out all the other plants that grow nearby. I have to just take it all with a grain of salt and just trust that if I can find the vegetables in the weeds, it is a good day after reading The One-straw Revolution: Introduction to Natural Farming by Masanobu Fukuoka , a manual and biography about a cool farmer from Japan who never weeded or pruned anything in his garden, and planted his rice with "weeds" to nourish the land during the off season, and did not plow or flood his rice fields in the 1930's (which made him a complete freak farmer in those days)! He would plant his fields by putting together mud and seeds (all kinds) and throwing them into the field- they look like clay marbles. When they grew, he knew that the conditions were favorable for those plants, kind of like planting volunteers... he would send his interns out to forage for edibles each night.

10 Salads in 10 Days Challenge!

I have challenged myself and my clients to eat one head of lettuce per day for 10 days in order to make room for the tomatoes that are going to be ready by then. Then I realized that I have so much lettuce (& other salad greens) in my yard and they will all bolt as soon as the sun comes out in earnest. Actually, the hard rains every night and mild, partly sunny conditions in the day are perfect lettuce growing conditions. Which reminds me to seed more lettuce! The seeds you plant now could be part of a salad for your 4th of July BBQ... What are you having for dinner in October?

Garden Trellis Ideas

Here are some great Ideas for trellis' that my friend Willi is suggesting on her blog, diggin food. She is the West Coast editor for Organic Gardening ands she lives in my neighborhood. Although these are great ideas and pretty low cost, any way you can get the plant to grow upwards will work. I have seen so many make shift trellis' made from bed box springs to old hand rails turned sideways! We are using a scrap of my friend's deer fence that had gotten tangled in blackberries, and in order for them to get it out they had to cut it out... it was perfect for our fence. That was the first bed we readied for this year, since we can see it from the dining table. Now the peas are grabbing hold... We have our peas in containers because we have railroad ties as the border of our yard.  When the peas are done, the squash will be ready to go up! And on the other side, we plan to grow our cucumbers and beans the same way.

I am off to Vashon to plant more dang strawberries and clean up the plant propagation area on the farm. 

Volunteer Learning opportunities:

Check out the Spring into Bed Events going on in Seattle this Saturday, May 8th! Longfellow Creek Community Garden is hosting a garden revival work party from 10-2. Stop by and work, or just come say Hi and look at what we are creating down in the Del!

Sister Sage Herb Farm is hosting an event on May 29th for anyone who wants to help at the farm and learn about medicinal herbs.

Rainy Book Reviews

My standard reading material for gardening in the Seattle/ Vashon area is the Tilth Maritime Northwest Gardening Guide.  I am buried in the Steve Soloman book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, along with Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. For my after school program I found some fun ideas that I think the older kids would like in The book of Wizard Craft by Janice Eaton Kilby, Deborah Morgenthal, and Terry Taylor. I recently found this book review online for Maria Rodale's  Organic Manifesto - looks like a great book and I want to order it!

More and more Strawberries

Well, I planted lots of Strawberries this week, and have many more to go! At the community garden we planted 53 plants during and in between a hail storm with 2 little kids. It went pretty well all in all, but have over a hundred left!!! We are planting more at the garden, and I am sneaking them into other people's gardens, planting into containers for my friends who don't have gardens, and putting them in my own garden. I will take whatever is left over to my farm. It used to be a strawberry farm just like all the rest of Vashon Island before the farmers were interned into work camps for the war... but that is another story. Please contact me if you want to install a strawberry patch anywhere in the next few days and you live in or near Seattle/ Vashon. I will sell them for .75 per plant until I am out, and the varieties again are Tri Star and Puget Reliance- both good for places with poor drainage and resistant to root rots. Make sure you have a weeded area or good container to put them in first and contact me at jayne@sistersageherbs.com or goodfoodgardens@gmail.com
peace - Jayne

Planting bare root Strawberries & Blueberries

Yay Fruit! So, My strawberries are here, and they are scary looking! They come dormant and dank looking... They are not sprouting yet, which it says in the instructions is a good thing, but I have to put them in the ground as soon as possible, so I am off to plant in all the gardens I know. I am filling pots and planting them in every open row I can find! One of my clients cancelled on me, so I have a few extra! If you want to plant some this year, email me at jayne@sistersageherbs.com and I will see how many I have and the price after shipping.

The spacing is supposed to be one plant per square foot, but the ever bearing ones can be planted closer. I planned on planting equal amounts of June bearing and ever bearing so that we would have early and late crops from the Tri Star, and a big crop of Puget Reliance in the middle of the season all at once for canning, etc. Both were chosen because of the resistance to root rot, etc and appropriate for our climate and wet winters in general. I am going to try to dry some, can some, freeze some, and eat as many fresh as I can!

I have a couple of fruit trees I never re-planted- one cherry is already laden with fruit nubbins, and the other apple will probably be planted at the farm but both are espalier trained. I also got some black raspberries and blueberries (all bare root) and we will see how those go this year! Yay fruit!

More transplanting & tomato seeds started

I started tons of seeds for the community garden yesterday. We were given seeds from tomatobob.com for the garden, and have 8-10 of each variety if everything works out. The varieties are: Noir de Crimee, Giant Belgium, Mortgage Lifter, Money Maker, Missouri Pink Love Apple, Martino's Roma, Matt's Wild Cherry & Mr Stripey. I helped a friend transplant tomato seedlings yesterday for trade in future plants for insurance. She let me take home the smallest sprouts because they will never catch up to the stronger ones but they have a head start on my seeds. I put them in my truck so they stay warmer than I could keep them otherwise. I can't remember all of the varieties, but I know I have: Glacier, Brandywine, Abraham Lincoln, Paul Robeson, & a few more. I guess the next project is setting up hoop houses & researching their growth habits ...

Planting Herb Seeds with Kids

I brought seeds to the after school program I teach so that they could plant something for Earth Day. I brought chamomile, clover, calendula & dill, and had them try to ID them.  Everyone got chamomile right (we made chamomile tea, too), but the others were more difficult. We talked about what a seed needs to grow into a plant - sun, soil, air, water, care & love; and how the different shapes of the seeds could help them get themselves planted... the round ones can roll, the smallest ones can fly through the air, the pokey ones can grip onto things and get carried to another spot, and the flat ones can slip into cracks and still put down roots.  We went outside (the best part for the youngest ones) and planted them in four compartment pots with labels. The small kids definitely mixed all the seeds into all the compartments, but the older kids were writing their own labels and making sure they put their seeds in the right place.  They took them home since there is no greenhouse at the school,  and are to report when the plants sprout. They are all excited to grow plants somewhere in their gardens. Some of the kids already knew who would help them keep the plants alive! All in all it was quite rewarding for me & them.

Sow Seeds again and again

I just started my third batch of seeds of the year- I have lots of beets, kale, lettuces (I am trying Iceberg this year), leeks & yellow onions. It is a good idea to start seeds every two to three weeks in the northwest, because of the variability in weather and because you will want to have some plants to eat that are maturing each week. I like to eat salads from the direct seeded area between the seedling planted in the garden.  It is hard to remember to keep seeding while you are harvesting more lettuce than you can eat, but you have to, or you won't get good summer salads. I learned to put squash seeds into the lettuce bed near the end of the harvest, and by the time the squash are big enough to throw shade on the lettuce, you are done with that bed!
I just took a cool webinar class about crop rotation, and am going to try to incorporate some of the things they talked about in some of the gardens I am planning this year. I never plant the same food in the same beds year after year, but I have not kept track of exactly what was sown where in my garden... this year it will be different! I even learned a cool way to track the garden in a simple excel sheet. I will keep updating my progress through the season...

Seattle Local news reports on Edible Landscaping

I got several messages today from friends telling me they saw this story about edible landscaping in Seattle. I am happy to see they are noticing... They said that it is not yet time to plant food in the garden, so the piece might have been filmed a month or so ago, but it is time to start planting now!!! That is why Seattle Tilth and others are having plant sales- not tomatoes and basil mind you, but kales, lettuces, chards, mustard, and other greens are actually being harvested in my gardens. Some are left over from last fall's plantings, but  I had salad from some lettuce under a hoop house on my farm on Saturday! My little pea plants will need thinning and I can stir fry those with garlic, ginger and butter!
peace-
Jayne

Strawberry Shortcake & Dried Fruit! Plan Ahead

I have been drooling over all the different varieties of Strawberries that Sakuma Brothers Nursery in Mt Vernon, WA have to offer. I think we are going to try the Seascape for the ever bearing variety, and Puget Reliance for a June bearing variety. I will distribute them among my clients, our community garden, my house & farm.
I like to make jam, and lately I have been drying fruit and saving it for camping trips and winter snacks. We do a lot of camping, hiking and snowboarding, so it is nice to have quick snacks with a burst of energy that don't have extra sugar. I am not sure how many of these will make it to winter if they are not in a canning jar! We tried making freezer jam from some of the plums, but they are still in the freezer whereas the dried plums are already gone!
We collected plums from the neighborhood, and pears from our yard and dried them last year and were convinced this is the best way to preserve for our needs.  This year, one of our goals is to collect cherries from one our friend's three trees before the birds or her dogs eat them all.  It is tricky on the timing, but I am determined (and watching) this year.
peace-
Jayne

Second Plant Sale of the Season!

Hurray, It’s Spring!!!!!

Backyard Greenhouse 

7939 28th Ave. SW

(between Holden & Thistle in West Seattle / zip 98126)

Cool Weather Veggies  /  Perennials  /  Herbs

Organically Grown

Sat., March 27, 9:00-4:00   /   Sun., March 28, 10:00-3:00

Bring neighbors, friends and family!—Come rain or shine!!

My friend Karen has this great business of starting plants from seed and selling them to local nurseries and to the Seattle Tilth for their plant sales. She started more than she needed for the Tilth Sale, and is having a sale in her backyard (in West Seattle). I helped her transplant last month and went over yesterday to pick out some plants for my garden. We got 4 flats of plants! That is quite a lot!!! I am really glad we had already prepared our beds. We mostly got lettuces, lots of different types of chinese greens, some cabbages and kales, and soooo many onions! We got most of the greens planted already, but only the Blue Leeks- Marc was amazed that each leek (about the size of a toothpick) had to be separated and put into the trench about 1 inch apart. We will thin them and eat the baby leeks and leave the rest to mature. I am not sure where I will put the red onions or the Walla Walla Sweets! We have one new bed this year already mapped out, but the soil needs to be turned again, and it probably needs to be amended before planting the hot weather plants like tomatoes, peppers and eggplants! There is a little room left in the back, and there is always space to squeeze them into the front among the herbs... Too much food, what a problem, huh?

Eat Your Broccoli! and Plant More!

I was at one of my clients' house yesterday, and noticed she had not eaten the beautiful broccoli  that was in her front yard, yet.  If you don't eat it while it is perfect, it will sprout! Actually, there was a lot to eat if you know what to harvest (and now she does).  I always leave the scraggly dinosaur kale in the garden to sprout anew in the spring and the sprouts taste great in a stir fry, but not as good if they flower (although if they were battered and fried they might). She has some purple cauliflower that looks like it might sprout, too. I told her to make cream of broccoli soup! Yum. The  the cilantro is a bit tough, but tasty. The lettuce patch is actually looking good, and will be ready to eat from in a few weeks- there is some lettuce that overwintered, but it is pretty bitter to eat alone. So, there is food that is ready to eat, in some gardens in the maritime Northwest at this time of year! That is one thing I love about gardening here.

I am going to work on getting my potatoes in the ground this coming weekend. We are going to use some cinder blocks we have around to make a potato skyrise (a variation on the potato condo's we tried to make last year at the community garden). We will be attempting those again at Longfellow Creek Community Garden as well. Last year I forgot to hill the row on the farm, but got quite a few (probably not quite what I paid for the seed potatoes though. Some of those are now sprouting, and I know people say not to replant your own seed potatoes, but I am going to try to do it in the condo's rather than buy more. We will see how it goes- I am sure I will keep you posted.
I came across this article at the new Kitchen Gardeners website about the springtime dearth of food and the relation to Lent- read it here.

Grow Your Own!

We create a beautiful vegetable garden in your yard, and help you learn to grow nutritious food and herbs while building the soil fertility and conserving our resources.
In our great grandparents time, every household had a kitchen garden that was planted with hearty greens, salad fixings, and herbs. They were usually situated in the backyard, near the kitchen so the cook could quickly step outside to pick fresh food and herbs to liven up the meal. Our aim is to recreate those kitchen gardens and help you eat healthy vibrant food from your own yard, and eventually get you growing on your own.

Join Good Food Gardens and keep it real local- your backyard!

What do you get from Good Food Gardens?

You enjoy fresh, vibrant veggies and herbs weekly.
Your farmer comes to you.
You receive recipes weekly.
You know your food source intimately.
Your household can learn as we go.
You get a cool, back yard retreat.

What Good Food Gardens provides:

We use crop rotation and improve soil nutrition.
We provide the appropriate plants and seeds through the season.
We provide the expertise & hard work.
We tend and harvest the farms weekly.

We do all the work, you enjoy your Good Food!

We have different plans to choose from:

The Full Meal Deal- Installation & Weekly or Monthly Maintenance:
Once a week (or month) we tend your yard, harvest your veggies and healing herbs, and leave them in a basket on your doorstep ready to eat. You and your family are encouraged to harvest from the garden the rest of the week, picking the freshest possible vegetables for every meal. At the end of the season, we will leave your yard in a cover crop to enhance next year's soil.

Help Yourself! Consulting: Maintaining a garden takes skills, time, and organization. Many people have the time and energy to maintain a garden, but don't know when to start and how to plan for the full season. This is the service for you! You do the work, and learn different aspects of farming in your unique ecosystem each month. We will provide the plant starts, or we will help you start them yourselves! Everyone in the household can join in the consultation. Eventually, our goal is to teach you how to plan for and create a system that works in your garden, and for your household.

Stephen Colbert promotes Grow Your Own

Check out this funny video from Stephen Colbert about growing your own herbs on the Grist webpage- it is a reaction to an ad for "Survival Seeds" that was being advertised. I agree with the Grist writer who prefers organic seeds from a supplier like Territorial Seed Company or Seed Savers, or Horizon Herbs- all can be found at Peaceful Valley Farm Supply.

Start a Community Garden in your Yard!

We are very passionate about helping people grow food for themselves, and locally sourcing other foods they can't produce on their own.   Even though we create gardens for personal use in your backyard, we are also interested in developing community projects for people to share their food and gardening experience.  Jayne helped start Longfellow Creek Community Garden in her neighborhood, and so far we have grown a lot of food there.  Jenn planned and supervised the planting of the Food Bank garden and farm space on Vashon Island.

Today I (Jayne) came across a great site at communitygarden.org  that shows you step by step how to create a community garden. This year, I am planning the plot (on Longfellow Creek) and I hope it will be even easier to grow and harvest food there. Since we already have the site already prepped and some of the seeds, we have a head start. I plan to use the site through the season to ask questions of veteran community gardeners about the plan, the food, organizing community members, and whatever else comes up for us. I think it will be useful for inspiration this year. We have been wanting to grow food specifically for the food bank, and to grow enough to put some away for the winter. I hope this is the year we can make all of that happen- My winter food bills are way too much!
I hope to be included in a grant to create 4 more community gardens for low income folks in the Delridge area of Seattle. The criteria for having the garden at your house depends on the grant, but you have to share the produce, and maybe the work with your neighbors. If you have a large, sunny garden that you would be willing to transform, please contact us at goodfoodgardens@gmail.com so we can look at your space, decide how many people it could feed, and give you a quote on the hours/ money it would take to transform it into a Mini Farm or see if you are eligible for participation in the grant!

Seedlings in Frosty Weather

I started some seeds on a heat mat inside the house a couple of weeks ago. I was keeping them under lights, but off the heat mat once started.   I went out of town last weekend (to snowboard at Crystal Mountain!) and I didn't have anyone to watch them. I could not get the automatic timer to work correctly, so I decided to put them on the porch for the weekend. They are doing much better than I expected. The lettuce in the original pot is hanging on, but not thriving- the ones I transplanted into the garden bed are gone (either to the birds or slugs). The herb seeds, however, seem to be doing fine in this cool weather. They like to come up naturally, I think.  The beets, onions, and pre-sprouted peas, that I planted outside are not even poking up out of the ground yet. I keep reminding myself that they know what they are doing. We will see how they do as they grow through the season. I will start more seeds next week when this crazy night time frost is over. I like to check Cliff Mass' blog, Cliff is a UW professor and meteorologist and he always has something interesting to say relating to weather and lately he is on a crusade for better math books and teaching in Washington Schools.

Other Gardening/Food Information

The Grist Food Page is always good for some hard core information about the food we eat. I read it as often as I can. I especially love to see what Garden Girl is up to next. She has a cool set up for her chickens in a video posted last year sometime, She has beds that are all the same size, and a coop that sits on top. When they are done in one area, she moves the whole coop to the next bed. I would make the roost higher- chickens like to fly and be up high, and this works because she has so many beds (you can see them in the background of this video if you look for it).

Soil Nutrition Equals Food Nutrition

I came across a great article about the loss of food nutrition from food grown using conventional practices.  This is a great reason to build your soil's fertility and regenerate the nutrition lost from overworking the area! So get your worms growing by eating all your food leftovers, and add all that great compost back to the soil to complete the circle.  Cover cropping with clover in the fall,and tilling/turning  them 2-3 weeks before planting allows them to bring up the nutrients from below the topsoil. Leave a few clover plants in the ground to harvest from. After you harvest the flowers, you can chop in the leaves back into the soil for more plant available nutrition. You can get a few batches of clover flowers through the season, and just adding 3 or 4 of the flowere (fresh or dried) makes a delicious, vitamin enriched, sweet tea without sugar. The article is at Kitchen Gardeners International, check out their other great resources while you are there.

Herbal Landscaping Class at South Seattle Community College!

Herbal Landscaping
6pm to 8pm Tuesdays - 3 sessions starting April 13, 2010, ending April 27, 2010

I will be teaching an herbal landscaping class at South Seattle Community College starting Tuesday, April 13 through April 27th. I will give info about some useful & decorative herb plants that grow well here, as well as some of the benefits of leaving your "weeds" in place so you can harvest them. We will draw out a plan of your garden and make a unique design that fits into your space and your lifestyle using herbs you can harvest and make home remedies from in the future. We will make plant divisions and start seeds for you to take home and plant in your garden. Hope to see you there, or if you are interested in a private consultation, please call me, and we can work together to make your yard a beautiful healing space.
Valerian:

Year of Urban Agriculture in Seattle

Finally the city is catching on: Mayor Mike McGinn, Richard Conlin and other council members announced that 2010 is officially The Year on Urban Agriculture! They plan to "promote urban agriculture efforts and increase community access to locally grown food". They will be supporting the expansion of city P-patch programs, giving away fruit trees, helping to create community gardens, along with opening up the zoning for parking strip gardening.  Check out the Seattle City Council Announcement and thank them! I hope to be building gardens at the Spring into Bed event to build garden beds all over Seattle in one day! It will be held one week before the second Seattle Tilth Edible Plant Sale, so everything will be ready for those plants you buy, and hopefully you will know how much you have room for, and where in the garden they go! There is an early sale this year to benefit Seattle Tilth: March 20th at Magnison Park from 9-2.  Volunteer if you can and you will get first dibs on plants without waiting in line- there are always cool people volunteering, so you might just meet a new friend!
*On Tuesday's Weekday show on www.KUOW.org, Steve was talking to a woman about the fact that the city is promoting both Urban Ag and density with the new Mother-in-Law apartment ruling. It sounds like he wanted to have a good debate with her - I would say that people should consider roof top gardens to lower their energy loss through the roof, and to warm up the beds a little? I hope this show happens, I think a lot of gardeners will be happy to see that there are some green builders who embrace this solution.  Write to the station and request the show!
peace-
Jayne

Save the Bees!

Along with soil nutrition, Bees are the most important part of gardening of any type. We can have extremely fertile soil, but without them, we would be out there in the garden with a paintbrush (or a pigtail) moving pollen around on our own! Lots of work on top of tending plants and amending the soil. This is a great blog The Honey Phamplet about urban beekeeping from a guy who does it in the city of Seattle. I am going to get a beehive for my gardens as soon as I can, and sign up all my friends and clients who love honey for his services! He will take care of the hives, and they taste like your flowers- it is amazing. I tasted Lavender and Mint from one hive he has in a friend's yard. He has reviewed a book: A World Without Bees, Benjamin, A. and McCallum, B., Pegasus Books, New York, NY, 2009
It is now on my list to read, but I am afraid of what I will find out! I may have to stock up on those paintbrushes after all.... Another great source for all things about honey and bees is this blog from The Daily Green Beekeeper.

Peas are in the Ground!

I have planted sugar snaps in the ground in three sites so far, and I am hoping the warmer, weather we are supposed to get is going to help them grow. I have more peas to plant if those don't work out, but I am hoping they will! Just remember when you are planting to always plant  more than you need so you can share the bounty with the wildlife (slugs included). You can always thin them by cutting them back with scissors if you have them too close together (2").
I also planted some lettuces in various places, but nothing has grown more than 1/4" tall even in the hoop house. I will continue to plant lettuce seeds every two or three weeks so I will have lettuce to eat through the spring! Mostly I am planting cut and come again varieties outside now, but the head lettuces are started inside. Last year we planted romaine too close together at the community garden, and we never ended up thinning it well enough. It was too wimpy, and then turned bitter and bolted.... That is why we keep planting more- if one batch messes up, just turn it in and plant something else.

Gardening with chickens

Chickens are fun to garden with. They help you dig, although they love to find the worms and eat them, they also add nutrition to the soil with their poop. One of my chickens- the red one named Ms, loved to take a ride on my shovel as I dug. She could get the first worms. All the chickens loved to dig in the chip pile that we had on the side of our house to spread in the pathways. I was never able to keep them all cooped up, so I would let them out- you have to keep either your food or your chickens cooped up. I learned that the hard way- they would sit on the edge of the food bed and eat all the kale leaves and totally ate all the basil- it was really funny to see them jump up to the tops of the kale to get every bite! In the end, they mowed down most of the garden! I was growing food at the farm and at our community garden, so I didn't mind so much, but now we are ready to grow tons in our own yard now, thanks to them!


We started out with chickens a couple of years ago and they did a great job keeping weeds down and eating all of our food scraps. A friend ordered them (25 to share among 3 friends), and her kids raised them from fluffy balls of chirps to pullets (about 6 weeks). We kept the chickens in the garage for the first few weeks, keeping them outside in a small chicken tractor during the days, and back into the garage for the evenings. We let them out in the afternoon to watch their antics. I knew it was time to put them away when they all flew on my lap...  When it was warm enough and the coop and their yard were finished we moved them into their new space. We started out with three, but realized it would be awhile until they started laying, so we got three more slightly older ones who were already laying. We were worried about them figuring out their pecking order, but they figured it out right away- the ones we had first, even though they were younger, were on top! They each laid 1 egg per day with one day off per week, and after they all started laying we had 1/2 dozen every day! being able to give away extra eggs was an amazing plus! Our friends' loved it, and brunches were easy to host- We just had our friends bring the fillings andkept making omelets all morning.


We always called the black one the crow chicken because she was small and wiley- she would get up on the fence and hold watch- she always had to be the highest one. On the first or second day, two crows came down in the backyard (which they usually never do) and looked into the chicken tractor, and then flew away- satisfied I guess that it wasn't one of theirs. They all had many names, but that one had the most - Lips, Crow chicken, po-po (because the was like the police -settling squables), and blackie. Ms or Miz  or Holly or Red was another from my first batch, she is the red one in the picture above- she got her name Ms because Marc was exclaiming "what are we going to do when they stop laying? Just say "see you later mister?" Immediately we said "Ms!" We were not sure which one was going to be named Ms until we saw her...  She just fit the bill... and the other one we named from the beginning was Clucky Star- later a friend renamed her Heady, but we always called her Clucky-her colorings were black and white herringbone pattern (or starburst depending on your view) so that was that! The other three we got later were from an heirloom chicken breeder who sells eggs at the U-District Farmers' Market- he said they are a breed called Isa Warren- They were such good layers! The eggs were huge! Jumbo Jumbo you can't even shut the box jumbo! We named themDottie (she had a spot on her and maybe on her eggs) and Lottie (the biggest eggs)


I wish I had had a better system for moving them around the yard. I think if I were to do it again, I would measure out 3 zones that were the same area, and have a portable fence to house their yard. I never had a top for mine, but I would add one because of the raccoon threat (We have an apartment building near us with an always open dumpster which I think helped keep them away) . The chicken house could move around the zones and work the soil before cover crop goes in for the winter. I always thought we should share the chickens with our neighbors because their kids loved the chicks, and who has time to weed... We did share eggs, and when we were out of town, they always checked in on them and let them in on the nights we were out too late.

After awhile, they had eaten up all the grass, and turned the whole yard up looking for worms and grubs. By then, they were just sitting around most of the day on our deck watching us eat and pooping on the deck! We ended up taking them to Vashon, and a couple of my friends have them at their houses! The black one that laid white eggs, Lips Chicken is still an oddball- but I guess with a name like that, your gonna be weird. She roosts up over the screen door in her new coop and looks out over the others. She was always one to fly the coop, so that is why she is in the enclosed area now. All in all, it was a great experience, but it was also a lot of work the way I did it. I would still like to help other folks raise chickens/eggs in their own backyard, so if you are interested in my consultation or my services (I will even clean out the coop weekly or monthly for the right price!) email me at jayne@sistersageherbs.com.

Let Worms Eat Your Leftovers!

I came across this blog Urban Food Producer  today, and it explains how composting will help save the world! The blogger, Kate Kurtz,  is a soil scientist from Seattle, and she explains how bad landfills are for emitting greenhouse gasses. Why not start a compost pile or at least a worm bin in your own yard, and save the gas used by the compost trucks? We have a great,  and very small worm bin right now at my home, and it works great! We clean out our fridge every few days and feed anything we won't eat soon to the worms! They are our only pets right now, and so low key! They are multiplying like crazy right now!
Let me know if you are interested in receiving a worm bin, and I can source one for you- or check with Seattle Public Utilities for a sale of the green cones specifically made for this purpose. Seattle Tilth has worm bin kits for you to put together on your own as well.

Seed starting soon! Spring is coming

Here are some pictures of some of our clients' yards from 2009 summer of yum! 
I started a lettuce patch yesterday with a mix of lettuces... It is 50 degrees today and that is warm enough. We are seriously starting seeds here in a few weeks, and planning for the busy summer season. We are still eating from our gardens, even though a lot of plants died, the broccoli, kale and even some chard is doing well.
Call for a consultation to do it yourself. Start your garden early with our transplants- Our goal is to be ready to deliver by March 21st depending on the weather.