Create Health Right In Your Yard!

If you want me to come give you a quote, call soon, my Spring is starting to fill in! I can offer a free quote, or a 1/2 price consultation if you book before April 1st- get to it Gardening Fool!

I create edible gardens and use herbs to create a living medicine chest in your yard. You decide what you want to eat this year, and I will plan your menus to come from the garden. Kale, chard, spinach, and other greens can live and be harvested from in the winter, and you can be the first on your block with peas for dinner! I once planned a solstice dinner backwards- deciding what we would need for the dinner and counting the days it would take for each vegetable to be harvested.

I can tend the plants for you, weekly-as much as harvesting, washing and putting them in your fridge, or as little as once a month to help with the more difficult gardening tasks. I even have one client who leaves me piles to clean up in the garden- she can weed, but not lift much. Each garden is custom to the location, and the time is variable and controlled by how much time you and your family can spend in your garden.  I will leave you with a garden map of your new plants and how to care for them. I use organic seeds and plant starts, and use heirloom varieties of vegetables almost exclusively.  I can even give you recipes on how to process the herbs into medicines, teas, and refreshing beverages through the year.

I have an herb farm on Vashon Island and own a natural remedies company (sistersageherbs.com). I am a former board member of Seattle Tilth, a non-profit teaching people to grow food sustainably, and WA Tilth Producers, the state farmers association.

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...