June 8

Nearly a month since my last post, mostly because I've been travelling a lot. Travelling a lot usually amounts to garden disaster, but this year I've got a daughter with a driver's license willing to do some watering in exchange for car access.

In early May, the hops all had sprouted and started climbing. In early June, Hallertauer is 14' tall, Glacier not far behind, and the rest of that row doing pretty well. I had to replace one of the Bush Homestead rhizomes that got fried (not sure if I mentioned these, but they're from George Bush, who homesteaded at Tumwater after Oregon said that blacks could not get land there; he was an educated and generous asset to the community). The Willamette-Cascade vine in the north part of the yard has reached about 20 feet, and Nugget is not far behind. Fuggles struggles to put on height, and generally has a more gracile demeanor, but seems healthy; it may be in poor soil, getting residual Roundup from the neighbor's spraying, or just be slower.

Mustard greens and now pak choi have bolted in the past week or so. Spinach is fully up and beginning to bolt even before I've harvested any. New spinach, carrots, beets, and some flowers have sprouted, and have not been knocked down by th heat yet.

Speaking of which, we've had a solid week of hot dry weather. Generally, everythign in Washington seems to be a month ahead of schedule this year, and the governor has already declared a drought. It will probably be a tough year on irrigation-dependent farmers, who can look up at the snowless mountains and see their arid future.

In the potato patch, the eastern type (purple flowers) has finally been caught up with by the western (white flowered) type, which is actually a bit taller. I've staked and twined around them to keep the vines upright, and can see little secondary sprounts everywhere. They all look healthy, deep green vines but not Nitrogen-overfed spindly. I have not watered these at all, and at this point probably won't. A single exploratory graffle yielded a nice purple tuber the size of a large goose egg.

Along the south side trench of the tater bed, I planted purple hull-less barley (couple of weeks ago?), which is now up. That does get water. I'll probably start beans on the north side trench this coming weekend.

Speaking of which, Lili planted some pintos from the 25 pound bag of dried beans, and they came up. Planted where they can climb the willow fence. They look fine.

Rhubarb seems to be in summer dormancy.

In the far north area by the hops, poppies are not numerous, but really kicked into high gear starting  week or two ago. Meanwhile, the cilantro went from 3-leaf directly to bolting, so I guess it will be a coriander year.

Thyme is going off and needs to be cut back, oregano OK but not as vigorous, tarragon & sage alive but not putting on much growth. Stevia slowly adding foliage. I moved the arnica from its original spot to the southern west wall of the house, and it's not yet thriving. Also in that area, I planted some Monticello seeds: Clarksia, swamp hibiscus. By the laundry room stairs, a rosemary plant seems fine, along with a potted bay.

Indoors, some old (one batch about 3 years, another maybe 7) Hawaiian tomato seeds have sprouted. They're in 4-inch pots, and I've thinned twice. Will plant them (some in a cascading basket?) next weekend.

I tried using 12-gallon fermentation tubs (white, translucent-ish) as greenhouses, but suspect tht I mostly managed to breed early blight. This is one area where a part-time plant watcher cannot compensate for out-of-townness. Some have already been ripped out.

Last I wrote, I was about to help with the school plant sale. I ended up buying some herbs, tomatoes (50% gone now), and some other stuff. Four geraniums and a scarlet begonia now live by the cider area, getting full sun through the morning; these have not grown a lot, but are beginning to flower.

Service and blueberries seem fine, if not producing much this year. Grandma's hostas look OK.

About 3 weeks ago, I got lacinato kale starts and spread them in various places, including the mustard and pak choy beds where they'll succeed the bloted plants.

Snap peas are over a foot tall, and beginning to attach really well to the forest of dry willow sticks I poked in among them.

The house-front rose is about done now, but provide a good 3 weeks of heavy blooming. More or less the same story for the NE corner hibiscus.

Onions and garlic began flowering in earnest this first week of June. Weeds are emerging ever more quickly from the pine straw mulch, and both egyptian Walking and Yellow bunch onions are flopping over.

Buttercup and morning glory continue to be the most difficult weeds, sprouting from seeds and from un-dead remnants. Consequently, the weed-heap grows. Without a kid to stomp them for the past couple of weeks, it is not breaking down as quickly, and is sprouting a mantle of mornign glory. Several of those and some other weeds are popping up also in the gravelled-in area by the house--I may use boiling water and salt on those, since I do not want to keep digging up the rock.

Alliums, Yummy Allies

Gene, holding Shallots.

Real life has once again intervened with posting here, and all I have is old news.

Last fall, I planted some red onions and vari-colored garlicks, and in the spring I transplanted and new-planted more of their kin. Throughout the seasons, my right finger would poke dirt so the left hand could deposit a slippery stub, bulbish-headed root-end of a scallion stir-fried or otherwise-et the day before, it's promise of free food affording it a place in the garden as I made my way compost-ward with the dross-veg. I cannot swear when I planted the Shalits, except that it may have been later than the Orthodox Fall-Planting school and earlier than the Rebel Spring-Planting outpost. Or maybe not.

It was what this immigrant thinks of as maybe a typical 20th Century Spring and Summer here in the South Sound, and all alliums seemed to thrive. True, the scallions do nothing but grow into gianter, tougher scallions, and the red onions succumbed to neglect (including the outright abuse of a summertime transplant), and of course there was the sheer scapelessness of the 2013 Summer. But the scallions did get ginormous and  the shallits [yes, I'm doing the Lewis-and-Clark thing of spelling a word diffrintly all-the-damn Time] grew fast and strong.

Cogniscenti gardeners will see from the photo that I scooped up the shallottes a bit early--shoulda let the tops die back more--but the haul was good. Same with garlic. See?

Garlic, Me.

Anyway, it was a good year for alliums. I have enough garlic to keep me happy for another year, and a pretty good haul of shallots.

One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, More

2013 was the first year I really made an effort to grow potatoes, and it paid off...or I was lucky. Now that I've harvested 2 of 3 varieties (I grew Ozettes by choice, as well as some Redskins and Yukon Golds because I didn't eat them in time), the experience is ripe enough to jot down some lessons. I've already posted about taters over at Mocavore, but here's where the gardening info will show.

Instead of buying seed potatoes this year, I just grew surplus food. The Ozettes came from Rising River Farm at the Olympia Farmers Market; I bought them in late fall and stored them in a shoebox in the garage. The others were probably from the supermarket, and I planted them because they were getting soft and sprouty at the right time. Lesson: As long as you keep an eye out for blight, you don't need to buy something labeled "seed potato."

In Olympia as in much of the country, St. Patrick's Day is a good time to plant potatoes, and I did put in the bulk of the crop around them. I tried some in February, tucked up against the sunrise side of the house, but it did not result in a head start on harvest. They're still in the ground, which I think is pretty poor to begin with and was negelected in terms of both fertilizer (none) and water (under the eaves, so not much rain, and I didn't really water). Lesson: Starting early may not hurt, but it doesn't seem to help, either.

The soil here is a sandy loam, which makes it easy to work, it drains well enough that the tubers won't rot, and there are not a bunch of rocks to get in the way and deform the potatoes. On the other hand, it's not very rich in nutrients, so I augmented it a bit. When I dug the bed and prepped it in January, I added bone and blood meal (didn't record the amounts, but less than 2 pounds on a 25-foot by 3-foot bed, as well as wood ash. How much this had to do with the rampant growth that followed I cannot say, this being my first crop on this ground (which was lawn for decades before). Lesson: Sandy soil may be great as a growing medium, but it probably needs some food; adding fertilizer a month or two before planting seems to have helped.

So yeah, growth took off  like crazy, but the plants didn't get too leggy, except for the Yukons, which were planted in a much shadier spot, and which at this point have vines nearly 6 feet long, sprawling all over the place. I hilled everything a couple of times, but contrary to mythology I've heard time and again, but at harvest time it appeared that a second hilling did not create a second round of tuber formation. Even when the plants were growing, and I still harbored the belief that another round of hilling would produce another round of potatoes, I held off on a third attempt, deciding to let the plants focus on fattening up the existing tubers. Lesson: You do need to give your tubers some protection and room to grow, but continuing to hill them up does not seem to give you a bigger crop, and only makes the potatoes harder to get at.

By July, the main potato row was yellowing a bit, and the rapid growth had stopped. Based on pretty much nothing more than a hunch, I figured that potatoes are a little like taro in this respect, with the rate of vegetative growth following something like a bell curve--a slow start, a vigorous middle age, and then decline. Working from little more than superstition, I like to let the decline take its course, as if the strength of the stems and leaves is draining back down and collecting in the tubers. At the end of July, with the tops partially drained, but not yet dessicated skeletons, I started harvest. Having controlled by urge to graffle, I got the whole crop at once. From a 25-foot row, roughly 2/3 in Ozettes and the rest in Redskins, I got a half bushel of the former and maybe 2 pecks of the latter. Looked at another way, each potato I planted turned into several pounds of potatoes that I can eat. Lesson: One row is only a long-term supply if you are on a low-carb diet, but it's a pretty good return on the minimal investment. Also, one of the things that makes gardening fun is that it give me an excuse to use what are otherwise archaic units of measurements--I can hear my grandparents saying those words.

Somewhere along the line, I've heard that you should let potatoes dry out for a little while without washing off the dirt (it being so sandy, not much stuck on anyway), and since this approach appeals both to my love of loam and loathing of extra work, that's what I did. In fact, a couple of weeks later, the Ozettes are sitting in my archaeology screens, which consist of a 4-inch deep frame with 1/4 or 1/8-inch mesh. They're plenty dried off now, and I suppose it's about time to put them in the dark, or maybe hang them up in one of those coffee shipping bags I've been saving. Lesson: Being an archaeologist has its advantages when it comes to harvest time.

The earliest Ozettes and most of the Yukon Golds are still in the ground, and I'm inclined to leave them there for as long as I can. Sandy soil is good storage, and until winter rains saturate the ground, they'll be fine. A holdout Russet from the previous tenant's garden did this, and put out it's own surprise crop this year, maybe a half peck from one plant. Lesson: No need to harvest everything at once; it's more work, and just creates storage issues. In fact, maybe with the remaining ones, I'll just graffle all but a few, and see if they produce and even lower-labor crop next year.

That exeriment will take a while to play out, but looking back at this year, I'm pretty happy. At $2/pound for good varieties of organic potatoes at the Farmers Market, it's not like I've saved a huge amount of money, but I did get enough for a bunch of meals. Being able to put them in in March and pull them a month or so after the Solstice also means that I can grow a Fall crop in their place, and in fact there are already radishes, beets, carrots and kale coming up where the potatoes came out. Because they start fairly early, and hilling happens later on, potatoes work well with the approach of having beds that expand as the season progresses (as in the Tidal Beds post). Lesson: The tater has a place in my garden.

Ex Scape

Weird, but this 5th year of growing garlic in the Northwest, and for the first time it did not put out scapes. Planted in October, and we probably had the most normal year of the past few, but May and June rolled by with almost no scapes.

I thought at first it might have been a nutrition issue--these were in an abandoned garden plot from the previous renters, and I didn't amend the soil heavily (although I do think the garlic got the same dusting of blood and bone meal as the taters)--but an afterthought planting near the house in poorer soil did send out a few scapes.

The garlic itself seems fine, if not particularly large. I saw some other patches that produced scapes, and farmers at the market were selling them, so it's not some Olympia-wide scape famine.

It's a mystery to me. A little sad, because I like chopped scapes (the Garlic Calendar makes a big deal of watching for and making use of them), but more of a teasing enigma than a disaster.

Anybody else have this problem?

Garden at the end of May

Let's see,...we had the fake Spring of mid-May, and then the week o cool rain, ruining many a Memorial Day plan.

I'll admit that the warm week tricked me into buying a dozen tomato plants (among them every single Paul Robeson I could find and several Marmondes), but at least I had the sense to tuck them into the hoop house, where carrots are also sprouting just fine. On the other hand, the beans planted without cover went into hibernation until yesterday.

Meanwhile, in the next row, Ozette potatoes are growing better than any taters I've ever planted. I've been good to them, prepping the ground with plenty of cultivation and doses of bone meal and wood ash, but not overly solicitous. I've hilled them up, digging into the grass next to them and shaking the dirt free where it could do some good. Mostly, sun and rain have done their job, and the plants look healthy and sturdy. Now, a week into June and back in sunny weather, they are flowering. I could start graffling soon, but will hold off.

"Graffling" is old southern term for reaching into the dirt and feeling around, pulling a few tubers without hurting the plant and stopping the rest of the crop from continuing to grow. There are variants, but this is how I remember Grandma saying it. She was a mischievious and skilled gardener. She might appreciate the random offshoots of my garden more than the neat rows. I wish she were around to enjoy a meal of new potatoes.

Toeing the Line

February is time to dig. The frost has only reached skin deep this year, and the rain rain has stayed away to come again some other day. This perfect non-storm afforded me the opportunity to dig, shake and rake. I dig up some sod, shake off whatever topsoil and worms I can (most of 'em, when to soil is not saturated), and use my grandma's long-handled garden rake to get the beds ready.

My maternal grandma, whose rake I think this is, was more unruly than row-ly. Like her, I plant haphazardly, tucking things in here and there. But a true chaotic high note takes some time to achieve, and being on rented land (owned by someone I have reason to believ would not appreciate random island of plants in his lawn), I've gone for a more orderly, rectilinear garden layout this year.

Ergo the row-beds and rectangles that comprise my garden this year. The ones pictured above (wide one is for a hoophouse full o' tomatoes, other one for taters and pole beans), and a strip along the house's eastern front for snap peas, the early potatoes and various herbs and flowers. Oh, and another rectangle in the far back where there is sun in the morning and again in the later afternoon, when rays sneak in beneath the neighbor's trees. 

Planting has begun--early taters and snap peas in the sundrenched east, poppies and the first lettuce and radishes wherever--but February is mostly about getting ready. Dig the bed. Apply gore (blood and bone meal).

The linear beds will flow and then ebb, and probably become a grassless mass by Summer's end. If this became my place for more than a year, a piece of ground I could count on long-term, the lines would meander, the rectangles would chaoticize. But however anarchic my gardening may be(come), however prone I am to planting hither and yon like my grandma, a Year 1 garden looks tamer, rowed, and conventional.

Garlic year: Sprouts, Procrastination, and Loving Your Volunteers.

Everything's tilted but the garlic.

Here it is the first week of February, and the tentative sprouts of January are already nearly a brick-width high. These were planted in October (barely) in accordance with (barely) The Year According to Garlic Calendar. Blanched tips were visible weeks ago, but now the Sprouts are well on their way to Shoots, the almost-halfway-to-Equinox sun tempting chloroplasts into action. Stand back and enjoy.

 

Meanwhile, those few cloves not already et, dried, salted, or drowned in olive oil are impatient with waiting, and haved decided to grow now. Mostly, these are the center cloves of large softneck garlic (Inchelium? Music? I stopped keeping track years ago.) that were already getting spongy a month or so ago when I was putting up the crop. These were the impatient individuals of their respective knobs, itching to sprout and grow as soon as the Solstice passed, and hence past their prime by the time I got around to preserving.

As is my wont, I procrastinated on the planting as well. They could have gone in my Puget Lowlands ground a month ago, but an additional month of delay--no, outright neglect, tossed on a side counter in the kitchen without even the benefit of decent light--is my bow to evolution. Or more precisely, selection. A month gives mold and rot a chance to attack, and forces the malingerers and weaklings to show themselves. Maybe they would not die, but I would kill them (in soup or fried with onions and sausage, if they grew not into blue  fuzzy mold-bombs), and plant only their virogorous sistren.

OK, I admit it, this picture is from October. There are no green poplar leaves on the ground now.

And so today, at long last, I poked holes in the ground and dropped in the sprouting cloves. Yes, you are supposed to plant in the Fall. No, I won't regret this come Summer when I am getting big-ass bulbs of garlic from this procrastinatory planting. 

Meanwhile, back at your ranch, check and see what's sprouting this month. The forgotten and ungarvested garlic will be popping up, and you can uproot and split these heads into cloves and re-plant if you want. Sure, it's not what the books tell you to do, and it may not be optimal, but as long as you have any space to spare, it's better than letting them cram together and produce nothing, and way better than pulling and tossing them out. Let the volunteers know they are loved, give them room to grow, and your nurturing will be repaid.

New Ground: Making a New Garden Bed

To begin with the end, a sunken raised bed, canted to the sun.

 2012 was a rough year in many ways, including gardening, but the world did not come to an end, and so another garden begins. Only a mile north of the last one, and in the same sandy loam glacial outwash soil, it's basically in the same ground. The main difference is that there is less shade, and should work out better for growing food.

With several days of rainlessness and the earth not frozen, I went out and started a new bed. I've explained before why I don't go for raised beds penned in by boards or stone, and attempted to explain why a sunken raised bed works better, but this post dispenses with the arguments and gets to work. Read on to learn how to start a garden bed and harvest some sod in the process.

10 AM. Ignore the row for beans at the right; the new bed is just a few lines cut through the sod at this point.

This yard has the advantage of a solid half day of sun, level ground, and not a bunch of trees or shrubs in the way, but the distribution of lawn is not what I'd like. The best garden spot is covered in grass, and an area where I'd like some grass is bare. So one objective here is to redistribute some sod. I know, redistribution is a dirty word to free market folks, but I am an unrepentant sodcialist. 

To harvest some sod means that just ripping away is not the way to go, and so I adjusted how I start the garden bed to yield pieces a bit over a foot wide, with enough roots to survive. The diagram below gives an idea of the sequence. 

The bed may expand later, but for now it's 25 feet long and 3 wide, and this image is looking end-on. First, I take the shovel and cut four lines down the length of the bed, as deep as the blade will go. Then, I take a pickax and peel back sod from the center section, cutting mats of sod about 18 inches square. If you want more, skip the middle two cuts and peel off the entire surface. Take the time to yank dandelions free as you harvest the sod; this job will never be easier.

As the green peels away, shake free some of the topsoil and earthworms (grass does not need them the way your garden does). I also chunk out some fo the soil beneath with the pickax to loosen it up, but because the soil is not too clayey and I hate cutting worms to pieces, I don't work too hard at it and this middle section is not cultivated as deeply as the side sections will be.

Speaking of which, the digging on the sides is done, and after you've skinned whatever sod you want, the work consists of shaking soil (and more worms!) free of the grass. I try and keep dirt toward the center of the bed. The grass will go in a heap in a shady part of the yard to slowly rot, or become a berm, or whatever. I am a miser when it comes to organic material, and will not put it, weedy as it may be, in a city greenwaste bin. In my old yard, I piled years' worth of grass by the fence, and eventually it became a berm where I planted berries.

2 PM. Done, with a side of sod.

At this point, all that's left is to go through with a garden rake. Lap after lap, I work up one side and down the other. First, the aim is to break up clumps of soil and remove roots and grass. Then, the job is sculpting the earth. I keep a bit of ditch on either side, and slope the bed surface down to the south to gain a few degrees advantage in soaking up sun. 

Blessed with nice easy soil, no rocks, and no freeze, the whole process took no more than 4 hours. The result is a bed the length of one soaker hose, amenable to making a hoop house (how? look here), and ready for planting. I'll probably toss in some early greens just to make use of the ground, but later in the spring, I'm pretty sure this will be the tomato bed. It may get wider to accomodate carrots or somethign else that doesn't need hoop house cover, or it may just stay the way it is. That's the beauty of working with this soil and not boxing myself in with a raised bed.

The Year According to Garlic

Sitting down to peel some of the 2012 harvest, 2013's cloves in the ground, I have time to think about garlichronology. Like its pungent Allium kin, it's ideally planted in the Fall, not too long after harvest. Add to that the need to cure the crop to get the best out of it, and the garlic cycle tales a year.

This will be my 5th year of garlic growing near the southern tip of the Salish Sea, and I feel like I'm getting the hang of it. At least on a forgiving glacial sandy loam at 200 feet above sea level. In this 5th year, I feel like I get the rhythm and finally can write about it without being a (complete) fool.

The goal is to write the garlic-centric year, and to post in time to be useful, instead of my usual procrastinatory irrelevance. Today, I'm posting a calendar, beginning with October planting. As the garlic cycle rolls on, I'll post with more detail. 

 

Tidal Beds

Low Tide

Back in March, I briefly referenced sunken garden beds, and just the other day I railed against the false wisdom of raised beds. The more I think about it, the more it seems like the garden wisdom takes a while to play out, and favors an oscillation, an ebb and flow, rather than zealous favoring of one level or another.

If you read the raised bed rant, you may have figured out that many of the problems stem from inflexibility: the unchanging, unyielding perimeter with a static elevation. Horizontal extent of a garden bed may be constrained by your available space, but still the bed (or at least the weeded portion thereof) should be able to grow over the summer, and perhaps retreat during winter.

Rising Tide

You can play around with elevation a lot more, though. Some plants like to be in mounds to begin with. You've heard of a 'hill of beans," right? My cukes start out in ringed hills worthy of Celtic chieftans. Then of course there are the potatoes and other plants that benefit from having more and more soil piled up around them as the season progresses. Meanwhile, blueberries and mints like the low wet ground, sopping up whatever water runs from the hills. Within a given bed, highs and lows occur across space and through time.

This attitude is especially well suited to my local soil, which is a fairly sandy loam borne of glacial retreat. It's easy to work. I dig out lawn and sculpt to the levels I want. Or give the bed a tilt. Banking a bed high to the north and low to the south creates a small advantage to crops in northern climes, bringing the ground a bit closer to perpendicular to the lines of photons coming from the sun, fooling seeds and starts into thinking they're a few weeks closer to summer. The same aspect that makes Washington's Columbia wines more famous than Oregon's--a southerly slope to the river--can be replicated on a small scale in my yard with just a shovel and garden rake.

The plants themselves add to the effect, and so planning is important. Put the raspberries and pole beans to the north, and work your way down to the ground-huggers at the south. A big plant at the south snags the photons, relegating anything north to a dank dark pit. Fine if you want ginseng and miners lettuce, but not so good for your garden variety plants. Knowing how early and how fast things grow matters, too; you can plant greens that rise early or late in the shadow of a mid-summer monster, since the don't much care for solstitial high noons anyway. Knowing when and how quickly each plant will grow and fade allows a gardener to overlap to a degree, getting more out of every inch of garden space.

Any one variety of plant ebbs and flows, and likes to be high and drained or low and sodden. Your whole bed may start small and grow over summer, flooding south, toward that that photosynthetic sunbilical, only to retreat again. I use this knowledge to be a little lazier, dispensing first with those heavy, labor intensive (and pestiferous, don't forget) walls. I may be still digging bigger well after the solstice if some plant or transplant could use the ground; no need to cram a Summer's worth of work in March. Go with the flow.

And don't fight the flow. Why would you want boards or bricks or railroad ties blocking your garden's roots? A single-level bed works fine for a monoculture, but not much more. Roto-tilling a big bed for a few tiny starts and seeds invites a flood of weeds. A rectangle of introduced 'soil' intensively cultivated, watered, and fertilized year after year is great, if your aim is to create pest habitat.


Summer's tide pulls high only once a year. Long northern days feed photons aplenty to the plants that ride this one big wave. Growth crests, and drops off when the clouds show up or the days just get too short. It's a good ride, and sooner than you'd like you slide into Winter, where there's time to reflect and maybe even think ahead.

Railing Against Raised Bed Orthodoxy

Earlier this year, I said something about un-raised beds. At the time, no allusions were made to the religious overtones--phoenix, messiah, or otherwise-- of the "raised" bed, and there will be no comment here other than to say I like the bumper sticker, rarely and courageously displayed in Born Again counties, that says "No thanks, I was born OK the first time."

Because today, sisteren and brotheren, let us instead turn our eyes to the earth, humble ourselves, and ask, "What do we when we pen our gardens in raised beds?" The answers speak to the soil, the people who would control it, and to their politics. That's right, this siblinglish English seeks not to sweet-talk your sacred center, it's after your political skin, the dermal you that touches the world, what everyone else is gonna see and feel.


In this physical plane, we can be good animals who adopt and adapt, or crazy ones who try to control, and end up starving. Not you personally (maybe), but the species at some point. When human populations reach a certain density, misery ensues on the coat-tails of a flea or a leader of men or maybe just a drought. 

Before the fall, we convince ourselves that we are smart enough to avoid the fate of the desertified Fertile Crescent and pauperized Aegean soils, or the overtaxed Yucatan and raped Rapanui palms. We thing that agriculture is better than nature, and never learn that as soon as we seek to select, to replace god or evolution with human intellect, things spin out of control, and one day land at a place where we humans are screwed if we cannot go elsewhere. Especially when we reach too far; take as an example the corporate American agricultural ideal: a single genetically-modified strain drilled into fumigated soil, fed aquifers, augmented with chemical feed and protection. What could go wrong?


All of which is my long-winded, overly-dramatic, tired-as-shit, fingers-doing-whatever-they-want on the keyboard way of saying that raised beds fool a lot of gardeners with promises of miracles that will one day be ground into the dirt.


Why would I besmirch the sterling reputation of the raised bed? People love 'em, and talk about getting great production, the ease (it's getting hard to concntrate here with a Cobain crazed jam going on).

By way of answer, this list of the characteristics of raised beds that you are not likely to see in the article with all those pretty pictures urging you to get out there and raise a bed (or better yet, buy one):

• Use untreated wood, and you'll be repairing the thing every year. Seems like a waste of wood, unless you pulled it from a demolished building (in which case, watch out for the lead paint), which leads me to
• Use treated wood, and you're putting your gardening taste (and quite possibly your desire to cut corners) above the health of the soil that you are asking to feed you. And, therefore, your health. This is especially troubling because
• Most raised beds don't last more than a few seasons. I admit that this statement is not backed up with data here, but there are a lot of neglected, abandoned, and ultimately forgotten raised beds. 
• When a raised bed dies, it often becomes a nursery for invasive weeds. They spread into the driveways and roadsides, and into neighbor's gardens. The un-tended raised bed often becomes a haven for weeds because
• Very few people make raised beds using the native soil. Often as not, they dump "soil" that fails to meet the actual definition of soil, comprised hereabouts of composted wood and food, bearing no relation to the stuff under the grass in your yard. Even if it does not carry a crop of weed-seeds, it is just what the invasive weeds want. You know why a certain wine appellation or coffee estate can make genuine claim to excellence? It's the soil there, the delicate balance of microbes, worms, and arthropods that stir it up. That does not come in a dump-truck.
• Speaking of arthropods, every time you install a rectangle of cinderblock or boards, you create ant havens. By way of thanks, they will repay you by opening aphid dairies on your plants, sucking honey shit from bugs sucking your plants dry. 
• Not speaking of dry, those same boards and masonry create slug havens as well, and I'm assuming you know that that ain't good for a garden. IF slugs are a problem, it's good to lay a board down in the path and turn it over once in a while to dispatch a few slime-bellies, but don't build a freakin bed for them.
• This idea of an unchanging perimeter is hardening, not gardening. My bedds ebb and floww with the seasons. As plants grow, I dig out more grass so they can expand. If you hill up potatoes in a raised bed, you either have to bring in more fake soil or pull it away from the edges, which end up being pointless free-standing walls.
• Not only is changing the size of a raised bed difficult, so too is moving the damn thing when the neighbor's tree grows and puts the original location in shadow.
• ...  

There are plenty more reasons, but it's late and even though the music is done I am getting no better at concentrating. If you are not convinced by now, you're probably not reading this far anyway. If you are, stay tuned, because next time I'll get back to the benefits of another approach to garden beds. Much better than that March post, I promise.


 

On-ward and Up-ward, or, An Ode to Cliches and Hyphens

Hops, hops, and away!

Vertical gardening has reached new heights (excuse the cliche, but it happens to be the direct and resonant way to say this) in the past decade, outgrowing tomato cages and trellises to climb urban walls many stories high. High concept architects and their landscape associates paint buildings with sedums and such, and occasionally recall the old Babylonian hanging gardens trick. While the web can cough up photos of these efforts without even turning its head, the search for a food garden cannot get much more than a couple of humans high without more effort than I'm willing to put forth. But if you look closely at the loftier architectural statements, of paradigm shifts to verticality and green living, you'll see that most of the images are of new installations and of high-end commercial properties maintained by professional crews; the same few places show up over and over in a single search, and many are still just conceptual drawings. Call me back when they've lasted a decade, and I'll be impressed.

Gardeners as I'm thinking of them tend to be (again, a cliche says it best) more down to earth. Our beans have always climbed cornstalks and poles and twine. Tomatoes and their friends clamber up cages like kids on the playground, branches hanging out on rungs, leaders never satisfied til they've summitted. Trellises and latticery are about as far as we go, architecturally (which we did generations before actual architects appropriated the forms).

Upward gardening's roots (am I pushing this cliche thing too far? Nevermind, it's working well enough) go even deeper than the gardeners, though. Some plant species and tribes just want to grow upward. Not just the obvious viney ascenders or even the sprawlers who can be coaxed onto a fence or frame. My Tongan mentors explained Polynesian gardening to me in this way: taro grows up and yam grows down...meaning that the big starchy corms of the aroid tribe build upward with each new leaf, while the yam tuber reaches further down into the earth with each week (the vine may rise five Tongans high, or six of an average human, but they aren't food, and therefore not the proper focus of Polynesian agronomic discourse).

Potatocage (background) and a rising sunken bed of spud-runts.

In my own Olympia garden, taro and yams are not possible (tropical species are by and large frozen out, I'd say, were I continuing the cliche theme), but potatoes are fine, and my tuberrific efforts cater to the plant's needs. The vines want to grow vertically, and must be propped up before they flop over, but with dirt or mulch instead of trellises and twine, so that they'll bear spuds. In theory, the higher you can pile the soil, the more taters you get. Northwest winters kill all manner of theories, this one included, but for a time I can fill this old cage made for tomato with it's rhyming tuber.

I love the down-to-earth climbing of soil-bound starch-balls (and hyphen-ation, clearly), but some plants do want to climb, to wrap one-tendril embraces as high as they can reach, and yield the fruit of this embrace way up high (often out of reach of tiny non-Polynesians like myself).

Last June, I wrote about hops being the upwardest of climbers, including an experiment sending them into the hazel. It worked well enough that this year I'm doing it again this sun-lap, but without the dead-hazel. Instead of a tipi of cut poles tied together, I just ran twine from the hop-sprout to the top of the biggest hazel-nut tree. Already, the vines have helixed up the line and into the tree (over twice my height, maybe even two Tongans high), with a few feet to go before they even think of budding. When the time comes, I'll cut vine and string at the base and yank it all down.

Meanwhile, the other aggro-climbers, the Himalayan blackberries, whose volume puts hops' height to shame, require restraint more than  support, or they'll eventually weave a thorny mat that begins in suburbia and ends with a net covering Puget Sound. I just now cut back a bunch of the vegetative canes, giving the flower-buds some sun and weaving a few leafy ones behind to make next year's berries; the cut tips are tender because of recent rains, and will become snacks or stir-fry or candy or pickles; I pretty much cut them just above where the thorns harden and skin toughens, so I won't have to do much peeling. I'm not even bothering with saving leaves for tea this time.

Once the vegetative enthusiasm is checked, what appears is a web of fruiting mini-canes, interwoven behind a few metal T-posts hammered in close to the house foundation. Instead of securing canes to a trellis (or, as some previous denizen of this house did, a 2-by-4 nailed to the siding) the idea is to pin the blackberries against the wall, which will help them ripen so that my kids can come along later in the summer and gorge on ripe berries...with only the occasional puncture wound.

As the world's population expands, land will seem to shrink, and we'll be forced to make the most of whatever patch of soil we can cultivate. I hope I never have to see the end-ish times when such things are a matter of survival. In the meantime, getting the vertical most out of horizontal space is a game I like to play.

Fourth (Maybe Sixth) Spring

At some point past, I began blogging re: The Many Springs. The  Anglicized seasons draw quarters of the year, but reality splits further. The first lengthening of days is not the latency is not the emergence is not the bloom. And certainly not the seed. 

But full-on bloom and filling leafage wait for no writer, and I don't think I did anything beyond the second installment. [I provide these links because some people would never scroll back through the 10 while posts it would take it find the originals, and because the colored font draws attention to the self promotion.] Gardening takes time, and who the hell wants to sit inside when they could be out soaking up the lengthening days?

Not me, and so Spring has flowered, and bees did their thing without my writing about it (well, maybe once, over there). And the birds did theirs. The eggs in the photo leading off today's post, laid by a junco on the ground, hatched and were eaten by racoons immediately, while the alien sparrows in the birdhouse by the front door fledged and took off. Such is nature. Sometimes.


Many Springs have happened, and now we stand at the verge of shortening days. It'll get drier and warmer (I hope) in southern Pugetlandia, but that counts as summer. Apples and berries are set. May they ripen.

Lil Tomato Houses

Girl in action. Lil tomato house inaction.

The first weekend in April, Olympia's Farmers Market opens (and I rejoice). That time of year around Puget Sound, even the best farmers don't have much produce, so they fill the gap with plants started in greenhouses (and all of us gardeners rejoice). 


But April, even May, can be a cruel time for plants to have their roots thrust into cold wet soil, tops shivering in the mist one day and wind the next. This is especially true for tomatoes, which might enjoy the occasional sunny days, but not the cool wet ones, and especially not the frigid nights (which tend to be even colder following a clear sunny day). They may not actually shrink, like mammalian maleparts may in such conditions, but they sure as heck don't wanna grow, and cannot summon the strength to fight blights and fend off fungal foes. 


So you either wait til it's warm, which may not happen til days are already getting shorter, or you give them shelter. Following Solomon's advice (conveniently reproduced for us moderns in Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades before he took off for Tasmania, that devil), I grew them in a hoop house (instructions here) last year, which worked out very well. Even though the Spring was long and cool, a little bit of plastic allowed me to harvest photons throughout, giving the plants a big head start by the time Summer finally arrived.


This year, I decided to grow more, and to experiment with individual tomato houses, which are basically cages with a form-fitting plastic cover. This will let each plant get about twice as big in the warm confines of its home before it starts bumping into the plastic cover, demanding release.

This shot gives you the basic idea. First, make a wire frame (what does not show up well is that if you use fence like this, you should cut out a few 2 x 2 holes in the grid so you can reach in later and harvest). Then, cut plastic wide enough to wrap completely around and tall enough to close over the top. Slide this prophylactic over the cage, and wait for juicy tomatoes to burst forth. That's about it.

But not completely it. Already, I've learned of some flows in my brilliant plan. Try not to replicate my idiocy and inexperience:

• Plant the tomato first, because it's a pain to reach inside to plant it. Literally, if your cutting left sharp wire nubs like I did.
• Stake down the cage, or it'll blow over. I used the wire I cut out to tie the cage to a rebar pounded into the ground, and it has held so far.
• Make the plastic slightly loose fitting. That way it is easier to slide up so you can water, or let the tomatoes breathe on the hot day that will inevitably follow your planting. 
• Don't depend on tape to hold the plastic together. In the photo above, I did not remove the plastic to make the cage visible; it fell off. [I am leaving a couple like that as controls to test the efficacy of the remaining lil tomato houses. Ineptitude and laziness can be recast as science.]
• Don't leave town. You can cook your plants in a hurry if you don't slide the plastic up several inches on sunny days, and make sure they are watered. 
• Try and make the roof tighter than I did. All I did was clip the top, which does not make anything even close to a sealed envelope. I am pretty sure the heat flows out by nightfall,  but again am too lazy and inept to fix it. [Sometimes they cannot be called science, although I am able to rationalize that I'm probably not baking the plants during days when I am not there to coddle them.]

No doubt, as time passes, I'll learn more. Maybe I'll follow up at the end of the season. It will be interesting to see if the covered plants outperform those left to the vagaries of the Puget Spring (as I write, they are enduring a cold rainy night). If nothing else, they are in nice cages, so I won't have to do anything more than guide a few branches through the holes to give them support. These plants won't be as crowded as their hoophouse sisters, which according to Solomon should pay off. We'll see. 

Heads

This post appears over a few blogs. I've been self-referential before, linking to old posts and between Mojourner blogs, but this time it's a matter of there just being two approaches to the same focal point: Spot Shrimp, Pandalus platyceros. Here, I'll do the heads--over at Mocavore, I'll deal with the tails.


In Hawai'i, shrimp tales involve the whole thing. Even though not everyone partook, every time shrimp or prawns showed up intact, some people could be counted on to rip off the head and suck down the juice before mocking non-partakers. But on the Salish Sea, that doesn't happen, and I can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that my manhood and epicuriosity won't be maligned for my reluctance to slurp green guts. A woman who grew up fishing and cooking Northwest critters and another whose husband fishes for a living both said not to eat the heads. One allowed as to how I could make a broth, but didn't sound too sure, much less enthusiastic. 


So what you do is snap off the heads and toss 'em. Unless you are friggin' frugal. In which case you make the shrimp-head broth, realize that not a single person you know will help you eat it, chicken out on eating it yourself, and decide to re-purpose. [In the interest of self-referentiality, may I digress and link here? If you can figure out why, I'll, uh, give you a prize, maybe.]


The broth I recognized as the far superior aromatic kin of that weird shrimp ramen stank, a single waft enough to dispel my 30-year befuddlement over why anyone would want shrimp-flavor. But I still didn't eat it; I fed it to an apple tree. No particular reason. 


Then I was left with a kettle o chitin and shrimp sludge. The dog was beside herself wanting to eat it, roll in it,...whatever it took to immerse herself in the smell. I figured raccoons and rats and various vermin would be similarly attracted if I were to compost it, or even work it into the garden. In the end, I decided to bury it in a pit near the base of a Japanese maple that decided to come up a couple of years ago. Then put a rock on top to keep the dog out. If the rats tunnel into this cache, no prob. They'll transport pieces and transform the rest into poop. It'll return to the earth, if not that particular maple.


The tides sent the plankton. The shrimp incorporated the plankton. The fisherman plucked pots of shrimp from Hood Canal. And I traded some cash and a stash of willow bark and red ochre for a few pounds. Thus flows the migration of primal sea life into an Olympia garden.


This ain't natural, I suppose, but a pulse of shrimp protein into urban soil a few dozen miles from where it was caught falls far short of bizarre. Unlike the petrochemicals flowing year-round from the other end of the globe, this fertilizer was an unexpected gift. That smell my family couldn't stand will feed flowers some day. Shrimp stripes will echo in maple bark.





 

Influx Off

Gardening is good. Almost always, especially if it begins in a backyard and ends on a family table. 

But then, I am curmudgeonly (ever since I was a kid--age ain't got much to do with it), and can find fault with most anything. And so it is that I cringe when I surf the gardening and urban homesteading sites that proliferate like dandelions, because so many of them rely on quick fixes that undercut the soul of a gardener and the soil of the earth. The blogs I'm drawn to resist chemical assaults and may even proclaim organicity, but it is possible to disobey and disgust Mother Nature without raping her. 


High on the list of such actions is the Raised Bed Full of Trucked in "Soil" Syndrome. I've gardened in volcanic cinder rendered near-lifeless by city-scaping, in Virginia clay stripped of topsoil and driven over for good measure, and in glacial sand that can't hold nutrients or water any more than Monsanto can get a grip on the importance of diversity in evolution. As my last post admits, I am not pure, and there have been occasional bags of compost and other inputs into my gardens (that Honolulu cinder got on the road to soil when I'd go steal bags of clippings from rich people who had yards and then compost them, but I like to think that's more of a Robin Hood action than buying bagged steer-shit). 


But here in Olympia, which many would consider an epicenter of groovy organicism, there is this fascination with raised beds full of fake soil. Slap up a frame (I see photos sometimes of chemical treated wood used for this, ick), and fill it with alleged compost. Even if the material is not full of nitrogen-leaching wood products or feedlot chemicalized cowshit, it ain't soil. It may be the best compost ever, fluffy and black, rich as a Romney, but it has nothing to do with the soil in your yard.


In bags or trucks, it is a big fake input, not borne of the stuff in your yard. And often as not, people put some kind of barrier between their yard and the new stuff, attempting segregation as if the microbia of their own yard are somehow dangerous and inferior. Although mixing and incorporation into soil development is inevitable in the long run, your earthworms and fungi must think the new stuff tastes weird. 


The box o' compost may produce a great crop or two, but it is also a destabilizing force. It may be so rich in nitrogen that it feeds foliage at the expense of strength and structure. It may turn your raised bed into a symphylans corral. It may come laden with weed-seed, or it may just play host to the thistle and dandelion that ride the wind to your domain. 


Much slower to augment slowly from your own leaf-fallen, grass-clipped, storm-dropped organics. Much slower to plant and plow under legumes or cultivate shrooms. Much slower to exercise the patience Solomon (no link, you either know whereof I speak or you don't) advises and keep the additives to a minimum lest pests be fruitful and multiply. Much slower to grow soil before you grow your ideal grocery list.


But in the end, this slow, influx-starved process proves more resilient, more healthy, more durable. Soil is not the stuff you add, it is the multi-layered organism that grows over the land. It is earth's skin; like your skin, it is healthiest when you do what is good for the body, not when you add chemicals (organically derived or not). The best topsoil is on intimate terms with the subsoil, formed from its minerals and the poop of a thousand worms, a million hyphae, a trillion bacteria, all flowing up and down and all around. Taking off in the worm-grit of a robin's craw and returning in the chickadee's droppings, but not arriving by the ton in a truck.


Soil well grown, plus an acceptance of what works in your yard and what does not, is the solution to the long-term gardener. In Honolulu, a decade of growing cane and ti and banana produced the leaf-mulch that changed cinder with a few skinny cockroaches into black loam full of worms. In Virginia, a couple years of woodpile followed by grass and leaf compost (and yes, hours of back-breaking cultivation) turned compacted clay into reasonable topsoil. In Olympia, cook-out ashes (from alder cut in my yard) and various other home-grown biomass--and of course, the miracle of wild strawberries--seems to be working. Based on past performance, the fact that this yard's soil is much-improved must mean I am about to move, to take on some new deadscape...oh well. The joy is in growing.

Cutouts, Or the Sunken Raised Bed

 

In that interim between freezing and foliating, I tend to engage in a campaign of expanding cultivated area. Out comes the flat-bladed spade, and back go the grassy margins. Beds expand, the ground still wet and soft enough to dig and shake soil from grass-roots, dandelions readily separated from matrix. Then, I rake the dirt into a raised bed, which usually rises no higher than the surrounding grass, the persistent mockingly unproductive remnant. There are no wooden or masonry edges, just a low ziggurat slouching in a cutout of the lawn.

The bed is soil mixed up bottom to top so any remaining weeds lay dispersed and unrooted, easy to pluck out later. Seeds in, weeds out, so goes the next few days. The weeding continues: pluckings of non-productive obviocracy, cullings of non-crops, ferreting out of sneakerweeds. The seeds sprout and flourish. 

Sandy soil makes this easy. No clay-clung weed-root balls propagating. Easy extraction. 

My hope is that unimpeded root-foods will grow large here, that cultivars will flourish into the weed-freed spaces. We'll see...Even the weeds that may emerge are better eating than the pathetic lawn that preceded them...

Occupy Our Food Supply - Herbs First

Beginning the cure.

I admit it, I'm more of a slowcial media person than a twitterbug, and so it is that I'm only finding out late on the day itself that February 27th is Occupy Our Food Supply day, when we stand up to Monsanto, Cargill, ADM and the very few others who control most of the seed and crops. And, I guess I should mention, the vast market in chemicals that most food growers use.

So what can one blogger do? Coincidentally, I planted 8 more blueberry bushes today, but it'll be a while before production outstrips the capacity for the kids to eat them before they make it into pies, much less the freezer. I could write about problems with the food system, but plenty of people have done that. I might even conjure up a pipeline of dreams about living off the agribusiness grid, about a self-feeding urban greenstead, but who am I kidding, I still use stores.

Or I could just talk about the one part of my life in which I exercise food autonomy: herbs. People with space might've gone for a staple-ish staff of life, some storable starch on the potato to quinoa continuum. Canning mavens may've favored veggies or fruit sufficient to put up a year's supply. And of course, there are the chicken yarders, beginning and ending with the egg. 


But me, I likes me some spice, some flavoring. And, I am kinda lazy. So at this point, all the self-sufficiency I can point to is on the herban front. I buy no garlic, no oregano, no thyme, no mint, no chives. It's a small success, but I grow enough of these to eat all I want (and I want a lot, profligate herber that I am).


There are some things that would be hard to grow here in Olympia--tropical exotica, and some years even a decent chile--but for those this town is lucky enough to have Buck's spice shop, where you can get just about anything you can think of, from local alder-smoked salt to finely tuned curries, not to mention some fine conversation. They do mail order, but I'm lucky enough to be able to walk in, sniff around til I find what I want, and buy however much or little my taste-buds desire. If you read my blogs, you know I'm no shiller or plugger, but in this case it makes sense to send readers to this finest of spice ladies. 

Are the agri-giants are quaking in their boots, knowing that I grow my own herbs and buy spices from a freedom-fooder? Probably not, but my autonomy is mine, not a foil to their hegemony. Small a step as it is, growing my own herbs is a move away from McCormick monotony and corporate subjectitude. I'm  getting closer to doing the same with growing tomatoes (weather permitting, I should get there this year), and will keep buying as much as I can of everything else from local farmers. Maybe I'll even get off my ass and start making my own salt this year, something that hasn't happened in the years since I stopped working in Kona. 


Life will continue to taste good, and the big boys will get an iota less. I may not be an important voice, Pollanating the culture, making corporations Shiva, but I do what I can, and for me, that begins with aiming my money where it benefits farmers most, and starting on the road to self-sufficiency with some tasty flavors.