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!