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.

Happy Re- Birthday Egypt!

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