Category Archives: Bed preparation

The -New- Garden Plan — by Peter Heffelfinger

By Peter Heffelfinger

posted June 14, 2022
We’re happy to welcome back long-time gardener and blogger Peter Heffelfinger!

For 2022 I am changing my overall garden strategy, reducing my large-scale production workload a bit and relying more on an expanded kitchen garden close to the house for quick year-round access to leafy greens, hardy alliums, and herbs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Purple Artichokes with beehives in the background

At the main garden, a few miles away from the house, I’m increasing the basic crops that I rely on: potatoes, onions, leeks, as well as early and late varieties of cabbages and broccoli. I’m also adding to the existing perennial beds of asparagus and artichokes as well as the hardy Portuguese flat-leaf kale that lasts several years.

As much as I like having them in the winter, I’ve decided to forego Brussels Sprouts since they inevitably harbor aphid infestations over the summer and appear again during warm spells in the winter. It’s easier to grow fall-planted January King winter cabbages for a brassica less impacted by insects and sweetened by frost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GARLIC

Since my usual garlic plot near Edison was flooded last fall I planted about #800 cloves of selected hardneck varieties in one large raised bed at my Campbell Lake site. I’m hoping the garlic will not be affected by the white root rot that I had there a decade ago. It’s looking healthy so far, and is benefiting from the steady rain and cool spring weather.

Last year the summer drought arrived a month early and my garlic was parched in the heavy clay soil of the Flats, with a loss of 30% of the crop. Over the years I’ve built up a collection of hardneck varieties including Music, Deja Vue, Korean Red, Russian Red, and recently added an unnamed purple-skinned variety from a nearby gardener.

At the big garden, I’m reducing my usual large plantings of Oriental snow and sugar snap peas, as well as cucumbers, since I had a surplus of frozen peas and pickles from last year. A few bulb fennel and snow pea starts went in early, but I’m leaving the snap peas, pole beans, zucchini, corn, and winter squash plantings to my garden partner. I’ll rely on the local farmers market for small items like radishes, Japanese white turnips, radicchio, and bok choy, and the food co-op for carrots and celery.

 

Portuguese flat leaved kale

At the house, which is too shady for main crop vegetables, I have pots and large containers of arugula, parsley, lettuces, regular and garlic chives, bulb fennel for greens, rosemary, winter savory, several thymes, a culinary bay bush, and a perennial bed of Greek oregano. The slugs got to my first cilantro starts, so I’ll try again. I also transplanted some of the perennial kale into a bed on a trial basis, and have a few snow peas in large tubs with a wire fencing to hopefully ward off the deer that come through each day.

I’m also trying to grow potatoes (Purple) in a few large tubs lined up against a south facing wall. My nearby bed of horseradish was set back by the cold winter; I’m hoping it will recover for some home-grown wasabi-like heat this fall.

The Hoop House

Hoop house with peppers and tomatoes

The 40×20 hoop house at the main garden has been moved to new ground, with a more efficient system of raising the sides for ventilation after last summer’s heat wave. I have Sungold and Sweet Million cherry tomatoes, plus an assortment of Romas for sauce, heirloom varieties of Beefsteak and Old German Striped, a Borghese Italian for traditional sun drying, and a new Japanese slicing variety Momotaro. There’s a Yellow Pear as well as Juliet, a larger grape-type cherry tomato that is also good for drying.

My hoop house pepper collection includes the standard green/red sweets, plus Anaheim, Padron, Shishito, Early Habanero, Bull’s Horn and Green Marconi for roasting, Italian Sweet Yellow, as well as a Hungarian Black, a Yellow Cayenne and several hot Asian varieties. Finally, there’s a single tomatillo for salsa and a stand of early basil for both pesto and to adorn the first ripe tomato slices.

Ants & Aphids

While I knew that ants and aphids have a symbiotic relationship, with ants harvesting the nectar that the aphids secrete as they suck out the juices of young plants, my garden had never really been impacted by it until now. I first noticed single ants on my young pepper plant leaves, but saw no real damage other than a suspicious sprinkling of tiny white flakes on the upper surfaces. I found the ant colonies next to punky wood in the greenhouse sills, removed as much as I could of the nests, and placed ant traps by the peppers. But the ants persisted, some moving their activity to the cucumber bed, while the scout ants were still showing up on the pepper plants.

Then I found the aphids: patches of young aphids on the undersides of the large lower leaves, and sprinklings of new activity on the upper buds and new leaves. I had to carefully spray the underside of each leaf with a mild solution of dish detergent and water as well as douse the buds at the top. I also rubbed off any soaped aphids as best I could without damaging the leaves. The soap dissolves the exoskeleton of the aphids. Hopefully I caught the infestation in time, and will spray again to make sure.

The hoop house was moved this spring to an area of the garden where I had previously grown Brussels Sprouts, as well as overwintering kale, which would have allowed the aphid population to build up over several seasons. Lesson learned.

 

The Atmospheric River

The heavy rainfalls so far this year have certainly been good for the trees and the mountain snow pack. It’s a reminder that we do live in a temperate rain forest.

Early potatoes

I bought all my seed potatoes early on, including Chieftain Red for new potatoes, Yukon Gold, Cal White, and a Clearwater Russet. But I could only plant one or two rows at a time, waiting for the rare sunny day when the soil was dry enough to work. The first section benefited from the all the rain, with just enough dry breaks to prevent the seed potatoes from rotting out. Given the intense irrigation from the skies, it has been a race to keep the zooming plants adequately hilled up. The second and third sections of potatoes will hopefully benefit from the latest river from the sky. Sometimes you catch the wave, and hopefully the wave will recede by July.

Peter H.

Julia’s last pre-partum post!

by Julia Frisbie

posted May 24, 2022

It’s been a wonderful week in the garden. This post is shorter than usual because I spent all my free time outside digging rather than inside typing. Here’s what I’ve been working on:

  • Preparing beds by mounding up the soil, and adding mulch to the trenches between beds to create paths
  • Transplanting ALLLLLLL the tomatoes and the summer squash, plus the first successions of corn and cucumbers
  • Transplanting tender flowers like marigolds and sunflowers
  • Direct sowing the first beans (after several hours of pre-soaking in warm water)
  • Starting seeds for my second successions of corn, cucumbers, and herbs
  • Hand watering while I continue to work on this year’s drip irrigation layout
  • Pulling/digging/torching weeds
  • Pulling tent caterpillars off the apple tree (before drowning them and feeding them to the ducks… this is a delicacy)
  • Building a bean tipi (otherwise known by my star-wars-loving kiddo as “the Jedi Temple”) and other trellises
  • Watching the red russian kale finish flowering and start setting its seed pods
  • Watching the songbirds collect fallen duck down with which to line their nests
  • Watching the fringe cups (Tellima grandiflora) come into their full glory at Ship Harbor
  • Watching my “Desert King” fig tree finally put out its first leaves of the season

I’m not sure how many more posts I will be able to share with you this summer, because I am nine months pregnant, with all “optional” things soon to be swept off my plate. However, gardening is NOT optional. It’s life-giving. There will still be a garden. So if you want to know how it’s growing, you’ll just have to come visit.

Editor’s note:
Transition Fidalgo and, we’re sure, all of Julia’s readers, are grateful to her for so enthusiastically sharing her garden adventures with us. While she pulls away from posting for a while, we’d like to invite others to send articles about their gardens to us at info@transitionfidalgo.org. May we all continue to grow together!

Late April: Harvesting, Planting, Working on– by Julia Frisbie

by Julia Frisbie

posted April 26, 2022

We just had a glorious sunny weekend, and I spent almost all of it in the garden. There’s always a lot going on in late April. Rather than doing a deep dive on any particular subject, today I’ll share a birds-eye view of what I’ve been harvesting, planting, and working on.

 

HARVESTING: Eggs, asparagus, rhubarb, kale florets, dandelion, raspberry leaves

Every bird in the garden is now laying eggs like crazy, inspired by increasing day-length to amass clutches in creative hidey-holes where they might be able to brood. The result is that every day in April, we get to go on an Easter Egg hunt in the chicken and duck yard. We feast on egg-heavy recipes– frittata, custard, egg salad– and give thanks.

Fresh, raw asparagus is so sumptuous that I never seem to amass enough of it for cooking. Whatever makes it into the kitchen usually gets sliced thinly and added to a salad. It’s unbelievably sweet!

As for rhubarb, the early growth is the tenderest of the year. I harvest just one or two early stalks from each of my rhubarb plants anytime after they’re longer than a foot and thicker than my thumb. It’s not enough for pie at this point, so I make rhubarb scones.

 

Our red russian kale feeds us year-round, and this is the season for each individual plant’s final offerings before going to seed. In April, the kale mamas get ready to flower, and I cut some of the flower stalks before the buds open and prepare them like broccoli (usually by roasting them in a 400 degree oven for just a few minutes until bright green). As long as the individual plant seems healthy and strong, I cut the central flower stalk in order to encourage lateral branching from the base of the plant, which creates both a longer harvest of florets and a larger eventual harvest of seed. This is also the time of year when I completely remove any less vigorous individuals from my backyard kale population so that their pollen doesn’t get added to the mix and influence the next generation.

Dandelions! I don’t grow them on purpose, but here they are, and I’m not sorry. The humans in the household have yet to develop a taste for them. (Please share your recipes in the comment section; I am always game to try again!) I leave lots for the bees as a source of early pollen, but each day in the spring I try to pull at least one dandelion plant up, rip it into small pieces, float it in clean water, and offer it to my ducks. This “dandelion soup” is extremely nutritious, and as we round the bend into the later half of their mating and egg laying season, their bodies are hungry for it. It’s the equivalent of a daily multivitamin, and they relish it.

My raspberry plants have now sent up hundreds of babies in all the wrong places. With help from friends, I’ve sent dozens off to new homes, but I still have a surplus. I harvest some for greenery in spring bouquets with daffodils and tulips, and cut the rest for red raspberry leaf tea. (If you’ve seen me in person recently, you might have some idea why it’s my new beverage of choice!)

 

PLANTING: Tender annuals under cover, Peas, leafy greens, and the first dahlias

Two weeks ago at the farmer’s market we did a soil blocking demonstration, and I started a tray of corn, a tray of cucumbers, a tray of tomatoes, a tray of herbs, and a tray of tender annual flowers. They’re on my heated propagation table right now, and almost everyone has germinated! Only my cucumbers failed to show up to the party, probably because the seed was packed in 2017, so after five years under mediocre storage conditions, it must have come to the end of its viable life. No problem; there’s still plenty of time. This weekend I started another tray of cucumbers with fresh seed to make up for it.

As regular readers will know, so far I’ve only direct-sown peas and leafy greens. (I did put in a row of Olympia spinach according to the instructions that Anna Torgeson left as a comment on the post about planting salad– thank you, Anna!) If you haven’t done yours yet, it’s not too late. At this point I’m hand watering lots of pea and salad seedlings because I haven’t gotten the drip irrigation set up for the year yet.

I planted the first dahlia tubers this past weekend. Most spots are still too cold for this, but if you’re working with raised beds in a favorable microclimate, it might be time. The batch of tubers I did this weekend went into a fluffy, newly-prepared bed against the southern eaves of my neighbor’s house. I told her not to worry about watering them until they emerge from the soil line; otherwise, they might get too damp and rot underground. I’ll probably begin to plant my own dahlia tubers into raised mounds of soil next weekend.

 

WORKING ON: soil prep, paths, irrigation, trellises, pest control

The major task in April is bed prep. Any energy you can invest into good infrastructure in your garden at this stage will pay you back with compound interest later in the season.

The first thing, of course, is weeding. Although I often allow them to flourish in perennial beds, deep rooted perennial or biennial weeds have to be dug out of annual beds, because they’ve got so much energy stored in their roots that they will outcompete seedlings. For example, I’ve been digging out dozens and dozens of dock plants. They’re here to help with excess magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus in my soil, and help loosen compacted subsoil. I thank them as I dig them out of my annual beds. Every root I remove leaves behind a deep and narrow hole that will allow water to drain and air to penetrate the soil. I soothe my aching back by telling myself that the dock removal project serves the same purpose as broadforking and is probably almost as effective.

Once a bed is free of deep-rooted weeds, it’s time to deal with all the little tiny seedlings of annual weeds. Getting around to this in April rather than May means that most can be eliminated just by surface disturbance. As I rake the soil into low mounds according to Peter Heffelfinger’s instructions, I create enough disturbance to wipe out weeds that are at the baby-leaf stage. (Once this year’s beds are fully formed, I won’t rake anymore, so I’ll have to rely on timely flame weeding or untimely manual removal. I’ll do that until the soil is warm enough that I feel like I can add a layer of weed-suppressing arborist wood chip mulch without slowing down the tender annuals’ progress, and then I let my plants fend for themselves for the rest of the season.)

A lot of what I’m doing when I form my garden beds is simply moving topsoil from the areas where I plan to have paths into the areas where I plan to have annual garden beds. In other words, I’m digging out the paths in order to build up the beds. But I don’t want to leave bare subsoil in the paths, because that’s an invitation to more weeds, and it also gets compacted by foot traffic and won’t drain well… in other words, not very cozy. So I add a two- to four-inch layer of arborist mulch into the paths I’ve dug out between garden beds. The channels of mulch act like mini-swales which soak up rainwater like sponges and then slowly release it to the beds adjacent.

Above: the bed is on the right, and the woodchipped path through the perennials is to the left.

After I’ve got beds (and paths) formed, it’s a good time for me to double check my drip irrigation lines, because I’ve just uncovered them with all that weeding and raking. I can fine-tune the system later (usually during Mother’s Day weekend when I’ve requested the gift of unpaid garden labor from my family), so at this stage I just want to make sure that I can see the lines and they’re in the right neighborhood.

Once beds are formed and irrigation lines are visible, we drive in t-posts at each end of any bed that will need a trellis this season. You can use loads of different stuff to make trellises, and different plants have different preferences. For climbing peas and beans, I use hortonova netting because their little tendrils seem to appreciate having thin stuff to grab. For tomatoes and cucumbers, I string some wire between two t-posts and then wind individual vines up to the wire on lengths of twine using a string trellis method.

A few years ago, April and May were months when I hunted slugs and snails at dawn and dusk, collecting and dispatching about a pint of them per day, because otherwise they would eat up all my seedlings. Now, all I do is throw a rogue one or two to the ducks when I come across it. Good job, ducks. Thank you for taking this disgusting chore off my to-do list.

That’s a snapshot of late April in my garden. Leave a comment and tell me what you’re harvesting, planting, and working on in your garden right now! I’m eager to know!

How to Build a Heated Propagation Table

By Julia Frisbie

posted March 1, 2022

I used to start heat-loving seeds on my kitchen counter in soil blocks under shop lights, but when covid hit, that same countertop became my husband’s background for zoom church. He’s the pastor, so we can’t have him backlit. My seed-starting habit needed a new location.

We didn’t have room for a greenhouse, so we built an outdoor heated propagation bench instead. Think of it like a tabletop greenhouse. I got the idea from my market gardener friends Tony and JP of Green Heart Gardens in Portland, Oregon, who start all the seeds for their CSA in a similar setup. It works great for them and for me. If you’ve outgrown your indoor grow-light setup, but can’t commit to a greenhouse, it might work for you, too.

STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Measure your seedling trays and decide how big of a table you need! Design it to fit the dimensions of the trays you plan to use. For example, my 3 by 4 foot tabletop can accommodate up to six standard 10” x 20” trays at a time. Tony and JP built a much bigger table because they needed to start way more plants at a time.
  2. Build a table that’s strong enough to hold hundreds of pounds of weight forever. Tony and JP used a sheet of plywood set on top of concrete blocks. I put hefty legs on a shipping pallet.
  3. Build up the edges of the table 4-6 inches, so that the top of the table becomes a shallow box like a raised bed. This shallow box will eventually contain all the following stuff:
  4. Cut a piece of rigid foam insulation to the exact dimensions of the inside of your tabletop box, remove about one square inch from each of the corners to allow for drainage, and cram it in there. This keeps the heat where the plants can use it.
  5. Staple a heavy-duty plastic liner to the inside of the box so that moisture doesn’t sit directly on the foam, and then cut drainage holes through the plastic in all four corners of the table (directly over the cutaway parts of the foam) so that water can escape out the corners of the table and onto the ground.
  6. Put pea gravel into the lined box, 1-2 inches deep. It will act as a heat sink. Tony and JP used sand instead of gravel at first, but it was too dense and held too much water; their seedlings’ roots grew straight through the bottoms of the trays and into the sand. Now they use gravel, because it holds heat but not water, which encourages plant roots to air-prune themselves instead. That gets them off to a better start when it’s time to transplant.
  7. Cut a piece of hardware cloth to the dimensions of the inside of the box. Zip tie a heating cable to it (following the spacing instructions that came with the cable) so that the entire area will be heated.There’s a sweet spot for germinating tender annuals right around 77 degrees; most horticultural heating cables are pre-set to maintain this temperature as long as their heating probe is positioned correctly. Lay the hardware cloth and heating cable into the box, and zip tie the heating probe into place.
  8. Put another layer of pea gravel on top of the cables, 1-2 inches deep. This will increase the thermal mass of the growing area, and allow the radiant heat from the cables to be evenly distributed to the entire tabletop.
  9. Attach flexible PVC hoops to the outside of the tabletop.
  10. Optional: zip tie irrigation tubing to the underside of the hoops. Place emitters where they will create a fine mist over the entire tabletop. If you’ll be home for the entire seed-starting season and you prefer to water by hand, you don’t need to bother with this. (I like to water my seedlings from the bottom by dipping them into trays of dirty duck water and letting them wick it up.)
  11. Clip or tie clear plastic over the hoops. BE CAREFUL to vent this plastic cover on sunny days, or else your plants will cook. Later in the season you might even leave the ends open all the time, or switch it out for a fabric frost blanket.
  12. Plug in the heating cable, stick a timer on the irrigation tubing, and you’re ready to start your seeds!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stacking functions: I also use my propagation table to dry herbs once the weather warms up. Here are some nettles for tea, alongside trays of cucumbers, tomatoes, and squash. In summer and fall, I unplug the heating cable, but I still use this hot/dry spot to dry down seed pods.

How NOT to grow a garden

by Jack Hartt

posted August 26, 2021

Our regular Fidalgo Grows blog writer, Julia Frisbie, is focusing on her day job and other responsibilities this week. And other real gardeners are busy doing their gardening work.

I’m not a real gardener or real busy; so here’s the view from my garden, just over a year old now. Don’t read this for advice. It’s more of a “what not to do” story. But still, my garden feeds me, sometimes. And it’s alive. And sustainable, somewhat. So, for an amateurish, honest, and honestly embarrassing alternative post, I bring to you: my garden.

Siting:

First, I made sure the site was open to the sunshine. That left me only one choice for where to put it. If you only have one choice, that is where it goes. Mine faces the southwest to get the heat of the day but not the early morning sunshine. That way I get to deal with soil that is always dry and plants that have fog sitting on them until well past noon.

And my yard is a place where deer roam or sleep all night and leave their round fertilizer pellets everywhere. This told me two things: I can have free fertilizer any time I wish, and I won’t have any edible vegetables to harvest because that will be their fee for leaving me some fertilizer. Or I can I build a fence. That way, they will come and drool outside the fence, and fertilize outside the fence, but let me harvest my vegetables. Unless I forget to latch the gate one night. Then I got their fertilizer inside my fence. And yes, they took some vegetables as a door prize.

And my site is sloped quite steeply, a pretty good slope so I can start a couple stream beds when I water the garden. Every garden should have a good stream bed or two to demonstrate soil erosion.

Below: the only place my yard has for a garden, just before we started digging.

Digging:

I had a friend help me build the garden out of soil that is mostly rock, gravel, and sand, the remnants of the ice age, the construction age, and perhaps a drunken rage from previous owners or renters because we found fragments of beer bottles, beer caps, a spoon, a wheel from a chair, and potato chip bags. We found these things because this garden space is below the deck of the house, which makes for a great place to throw things out of sight, out of mind.

We dug and double dug this questionable soil to put the crab grass a foot below the ground, and we then moved the rocks out of the garden and into the flower bed, and the glacial till became the home soil for my vegetables. Of course I added good soil before planting veggies! No, I say that, but I didn’t, the first year. Amazing what glacial till will grow. Along with what I planted, I also grew dandelions, daphne, stinky bob, crab grass, and some things that made me wonder if I should just start a weed demonstration plot instead.

I put a trail through the garden in the shape of a heart, and covered it with cardboard and then sawdust to give me a weed-free pathway through the space.

If you are picturing a spacious, fill-the-backyard garden plot, change your picture. I only had eight feet by twelve feet to work with. It’s small. It’s tidy, sometimes. It’s all I have.

Below: the layout as it was early this spring, with broccoli from last year, and lettuce coming up.

 

 

 

Planting:

My friend shared some of her leftover seeds from the year before, and I also went to the local hardware store and grabbed some of what they had off the rack. So I had peas and beans and pumpkins and lettuce, kale and some zucchini and broccoli and things. I also had some strawberry plants from my previous house. I also bought two tomato plants; can’t remember their names but they sounded tasty. It was a trick getting them home in the bike bag on my bike rack. This was the first covid year, remember, so there wasn’t a lot else going on around town. And I wasn’t excited about going to the store very often. So these would hopefully become my vegetable garden for the summer.

Caring:

And then I would water once in a while. I would stand on the deck and just rain down a gentle shower across my little fenced farmlet. And I would weed even less often because every once in a while I would feel guilty if I didn’t. Really, the amount of time I put into the garden could easily be measured in minutes per week. I hesitate to label this paragraph as “care”. It was benign neglect more accurately.

And things grew. And grew. It grew veggies! I had a garden!

Harvesting:

How did the garden do? Well, not bad, considering. Most gardeners would laugh, or snicker, or shake their heads, but hey, I got dozens of heads of broccoli, which are still producing this second year; several dozen pea pods; lots of beans and kale but I found out I don’t like beans or kale much; five tomatoes (one plant didn’t do very well, and one looked like a Christmas tree with five green, then red, ornaments); five strawberries (they didn’t like being under the deck); and several large zucchini that I did the neighborly thing with and gave away. And five pumpkins that became ornaments for Halloween. Oh, and lettuce. They did great. The neighbors said I had a green thumb. It was my turn to laugh!

The amazing thing about this embarrassment of a garden – it gave me food, real food, healthy food, right outside my door, below my deck, local and fresh. At dinner time I would go down into the garden, cut some lettuce, grab a few pea pods, ignore the beans and kale, cut some fresh broccoli, smile at the tomatoes, pick a couple weeds, not in that order, hopefully latch the gate closed behind me even though my hands were overflowing with abundance, and go back inside and create a salad. Right out of my garden. It was revolutionary.

Below: the daily harvest in early summer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I showed my grandkids, and it gave them a place to browse when they were hungry. Except they couldn’t find any cookies, crackers, or candy, so they had to adapt.

Ongoing:

Yes, I added some compost into the soil this winter. I finally did.

And I replanted this spring with some free starts from Transition Fidalgo & Friends and a few more seeds from the hardware store. Once again I had dinner salads right out my back door, below the deck. But no beans this year, by choice. And very few strawberries again. And potatoes that I didn’t plant; that was odd. Where did they come from? And the broccoli kept right on producing all winter and into the spring and is still producing this week.

It’s not much. But it’s what I have. Local, fresh, and flavorful. Small but satisfying.

Reading Peter and now Julia’s blog posts the past couple years, I am inspired to plant a cover crop soon, to go along with the fall lettuce I just planted, and some more peas that just emerged from the soil for a late summer crop. And find more compost to add.

I have a lot to learn. And this blog (when written by real gardeners) keeps me inspired to keep on growing. And please welcome Julia and our other real gardeners back next week when they share the kind of blog post that helps us to grow healthy and sustainable gardens. The kind I hope most of you have in your yard.

A Garden Homemaker: Lupine

by Julia Frisbie

posted June 27, 2021

It’s lupine season! This plant will always remind me of the happy summer weeks I spent in the mountains of northeastern Oregon as a child. I love seeing her by the roadside. I held her purple/blue spires in my arms on my wedding day. I’ve slipped her seed pods into my pockets for years, and like Ms. Rumphius in a favorite children’s book, scattered them when we found a place to call our own.

Like all legumes, she works with a symbiotic bacteria to fix nitrogen in the soil, enough to meet her own needs and also share with neighbors. She has a long taproot that breaks up compacted earth. She can collect moisture from the air, with leaves shaped like tiny hands that cradle a single dewdrop in their palms. She makes a huge mass of greenery each year, only to lay it all down on the ground after the first frost, protecting soil from winter runoff and feeding the microbial community below. Her nectar feeds bees and her seeds feed birds.

In other words, she is a homemaker, showing up to disrupted or neglected soil and creating beauty and fertility. She can make something from almost nothing.

I’ve invited lupine to my yard as an early succession plant. Right after I mulched over most of the lawn in our front yard, I scattered lupine seeds. For several years, a long hedge of lupine has lived alongside what’s left of the grass:

As I add longer-lived plants to the landscape, I’m gradually pruning/removing the lupine to make space. Many perennials take years to get established and come into their own, and lupine fills out the garden around them while they bide their time. Lupine self-sows readily, but she’s easy enough to remove, so as long as I’m paying attention she doesn’t choke other plants out. Here’s a first-year peony growing in the shelter of lupine:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I often call on lupine as a companion plant for young trees. Planting a nitrogen-fixer in the same hole as a baby tree is something my partner learned while volunteering at the Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island. I dig up the lupine, taproot and all, and plop it right in there among the roots of the sapling. Abundant nitrogen allows the sapling to make lots of new greenery (and, I think, helps it feel less lonely and more at home). Here’s a little plum tree hiding from deer among the lupine:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can sow lupine any time of year, but my favorite way is to take my cue from the plant herself, and spread her seeds right after they pop from her wonderful fuzzy seed pods in July. I cut the seed heads when they get dry and begin to rattle, and then I pile them into a washtub basin and invite my four-year-old to thresh them by jumping up and down on the pods until the seeds are released. Then we winnow by pouring seeds back and forth between buckets in the middle of our street on a windy day. This ritual yields a quart of seed from our couple dozen plants. If you’d like some for your garden, I’d be delighted to give them to you. That’s part of how I respond with reciprocity to lupine: by finding good homes for her seeds. They’ll be part of Transition Fidalgo’s seed bank. Email info@transitionfidalgo.org to get connected!

Monoculture lawns to Polyculture garden beds

By Julia Frisbie

posted May 6, 2021

We buried our lawn five years ago under a layer of cardboard and then compost, planted a living mulch the first season, and have been mulching with arborist chips and rotating poultry through it, and growing a happy riot of annuals and perennials in it ever since. You can see the difference in this picture between our backyard soil (front right) and the soil in the adjacent easement (back left), but now after a soil test we have quantitative data. Using this data to estimate how much carbon we’ve sequestered was the most fun I’ve had with math in months!

We sent in two soil tests to the University of Massachusetts, with the city easement functioning as a control because it’s all in grass, and our yard was all in grass before we moved in five years ago. (It would have been better if I’d tested the same spot 5 years ago, but I didn’t, so the easement is our best point of reference for a comparison.) The backyard had 22.4% soil organic matter (measured by LOI, or “lost on incineration”… basically, how much of its mass can burn up) and the easement soil had 10.6%. So the backyard’s soil is 11.8 percentage points higher than our control plot.

I based my calculations on research by R. Lal of Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center. His article “Abating climate change and feeding the world through soil carbon sequestration” was published 2013 in an anthology called Soil as World Heritage. Lal estimates that 21 tons of carbon are sequestered per additional 1% of soil organic matter per hectare.

Our backyard measures 74 feet x 40 feet, which is 2,960 square feet. There are 107,639 square feet in one hectare, so our backyard = 0.0275 hectares. Multiply 21 tons by 0.0275 = 0.5775 tons of carbon sequestered in our yard per added 1% of organic matter. Multiply that by our 11.8, and we get 6.8145 tons (x 2,000 = 13,629 pounds) of carbon sequestered within our backyard in the past 5 years.

For reference, a mature tree absorbs about 48 pounds of carbon per year (Source: European Environment Agency), so our backyard activity has sequestered about 284 tree-years of carbon. Also for reference, nearly 20 pounds of carbon dioxide are produced from burning one gallon of non-ethanol gasoline (source: US Energy Information Administration), so our backyard activity has offset about 681.45 gallons of gasoline. (With a 12 gallon tank, that’s 57 fill-ups.)

On the one hand, it’s a drop in the bucket. On the other… in this little place… it makes a world of difference. And it’s profoundly do-able for anyone who wants to sequester carbon in their yard. A movement for “Climate Victory Gardens” has published some helpful ideas for backyard-scale carbon sequestration.

Gabe Brown is a second-generation rancher in North Dakota, and since 1991, he’s seen an increase in soil organic matter from 1.9% to 6.1%. In his excellent book Dirt to Soil, he identifies five principles for soil health that he uses to manage his 5,000 acres:

  1. Limit disturbance. Tillage releases soil carbon into the atmosphere and causes topsoil to erode away. Don’t do it. Chemical disturbances such as synthetic fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides also qualify as a type of disturbance.
  2. Keep the soil covered. Bare soil is an emergency. Covering your soil prevents erosion and provides habitat for microorganisms.
  3. Diversity. Grow as many different types of plants (and host as many different types of animals!) as you possibly can. Brown sows cover crop mixes with up to 70 different species!
  4. Living Roots. Include perennials and cover crops in your garden plans so that there are living roots in the soil for as much of the year as possible.
  5. Integrated animals. Intermittent predation by animals stimulates flushes of plant growth which pulse more carbon into the soil. Gabe uses cattle to rotationally graze his cover-cropped acres.

In conversation with these principles is emerging research from ecologists on the Intermittent Disturbance Hypothesis. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her less-well-known book Gathering Moss, explains “diversity of species is highest when the disturbance occurs at an interval between the extremes. Ecologists have shown that in the complete absence of disturbance, superior competitors… slowly encroach upon other species and eliminate them by competitive dominance. Where disturbance is very frequent, only the very hardiest species can survive the tumult. But in between, at intermediate frequency, there seems to be a balance that permits a great variety of species to flourish.” As more research is published on regenerative agriculture practices, I bet we’ll learn that the disturbance caused by Gabe Brown’s cattle herd moving across the landscape actually supports the increased diversity of each acre they graze.

What I like about Brown is that he comes from a pretty standard (extractive, damaging) American farming perspective, and ends up becoming a champion of regenerative agriculture. We can do the same in our yards. We can convert monoculture lawns to polyculture garden beds, keep soil covered, plan for living roots in the soil year-round, provide gentle intermittent disturbance with animals, and cultivate maximum diversity.

Below, you can see many of these principles at work in my backyard: I’ve got plastic mulch I scavenged at The Predecessors under my zucchinis. I’ve removed the mulch from under my cabbages, kale, and tomatoes, and undersown a diverse cover crop mix, which is just beginning to germinate. Nearby in a temporary enclosure, the chickens are busy making compost and appropriate-scale disturbance in a bed that’s about ready to turn over to the next crop. Flowers peek out around the edges. Carbon sequestration is a joy!


Julia Frisbie has been gardening in Coast Salish territory for six growing seasons, and is thankful to learn from plants, animals, and people who have been here much longer. She’s grateful to her mom, Anne Kayser, for cultivating her curiosity, and also to Robin Wall Kimmerer for writing the book Braiding Sweetgrass, which transformed her relationship with the more-than-human world. Follow Julia’s micro-farm on Facebook, Instagram, and/or TikTok.

Potatoes, Making Beds, and Snails and Slugs

by Peter Heffelfinger

posted April 5, 2021

Potato Planting

With the unsettled weather of late, my low-lying, lakeside garden plot is still a bit too wet to plant potatoes. The winter ground cover of annual rye has been tilled twice during the sunny days in between the bouts of rain. Once the soil is somewhat drier, and the last of the rye has decomposed, the tubers can go in. To avoid having to cut large potato sets into smaller pieces, I try to select egg-sized starts. I think of laying the small ovals into the deep furrow, and carefully covering them up with soil, as a post-Easter hiding-the-eggs ritual.

Later on, the harvest of all the full-sized spuds is a delayed treasure hunt. The hope is to dig up good-sized potatoes with as little disease as possible, either black scab on the outer skin or soft brown rot inside.

Planting Potatoes (Video Guide) - BBC Gardeners' World ...

Given our relatively mild, wet winters, potato diseases tend to linger on in the soil. To prevent buildup of disease, it’s especially important to plant disease-free seed, to rotate plantings each year, and to promptly remove any potentially diseased seedlings that may sprout from unharvested tubers, missed by the potato fork in the fall. Potatoes are the one carbohydrate reliably grown in the home garden, so guard the crop each year against the spread of disease.

 

Remaking the Beds

One of the few dry spots in the spring garden are the raised beds of the over-wintered leeks. Once the last of the alliums are harvested, the soil on the high mounds dries out quickly and can be worked up easily with a fork. The soft, white leek roots will dissolve easily back into the soil, maintaining the airy tilth of the ground. Since I grow various brassicas year-round, I have to make sure there are beds opening up that were not previously planted with any member of the cabbage family. Thus, my leek beds become the first place for starts of early cabbage and broccoli. At the opposite end of the cycle, the last of the over-wintered cabbages are just being used up. The cut stalks left in the ground are pushing out small side sprouts that are perfect for stir-fries, late additions to soups, or eaten fresh.

Brassicas are easily grown in each season, but they do require protection from insects in the spring. The cabbage root maggot fly appears early in the year and it will decimate seedlings. The only protection is to cover the plants completely with floating row material such as Agribon, carefully sealing all the edges on the ground with boards, metal fence posts, or soil. The plants must be kept isolated from the small fly, which lays its eggs near the stalk of any young brassica. The maggots then migrate through the soil to feed on the soft roots, causing seemingly healthy six-inch starts to suddenly keel over.

Factsheet - Brassica club root (283)

As the brassicas grow under the protective tent, the white material can be supported by metal or plastic hoops and secured in the wind by clamps. You can water plants through the row cover, but you will need to lift the cover to remove weeds, which thrive under the slightly warmer temperatures under the small hoop house. Once the brassica plant is full-sized, and the stalk is thick, the plant is relatively safe and the cover can be taken off.

But, the next insect soon appears, the white cabbage butterfly, dancing over the leaves, looking for a mate. As long as the throng of butterflies is not too thick, I don’t mind a small number of green caterpillars that will show up later on. If it’s a problem, keep the maturing plants under the row cover until it is time to harvest.

Actually, it’s quite a thrill to finally remove the row cover and reveal mature, healthy broccolis or cabbages underneath. Almost like magic.

 

Snails and Slugs

Snails and slugs are an important part of the natural composting cycle in nature. Think of them as digesters of the plant or organic material that accumulates on the ground. In the garden, however, if you have too many, they can become a problem. They’re especially attracted to young vegetable starts, so it’s important to start removing the initial spring buildup of these creatures. I find the easiest method is to lay boards by the side of the garden beds, or near any particularly wet spot. After their nighttime forays, the snails and slugs will hide out under the boards during the day. Flip the boards over, remove or squish the critters and replace the flat traps for the next accumulation. Also, keep an eye out for any nest of small, pea-sized, translucent slug eggs in your garden soil, most likely in an undisturbed spot, hidden just under the surface. Squish again, to prevent a new wave. With the advent of dry summer weather, the population of slugs and snails diminishes.

Pin by Sandy Camp on Yard | Snail, Photo, Ipm

But it’s wise to keep the numbers in check all season long.

Snails will also gather on the large stalks of over-wintering cabbage, kale and Brussels sprouts, hidden by the thick layer of leaves and protected by their hard shells. My understanding is that the local population, which arrived here as an invasive species a few decades ago, are Asian land snails, not the edible variety consumed in Europe. Nor are they the small, but tasty Turk’s Head snails served along with sushi in Japan. A flock of free-range ducks would gladly eat the snails in your garden, but that involves another level of animal husbandry.

Note: I use Sluggo pellets in small amounts only when necessary to protect small starts during very wet weather. Any paste or liquid snail bait can be fatal to birds, who pick up the chemical on their feet.

Spring Weather

By Peter Heffelfinger

posted March 22, 2021

With the recent clear, cool nights and sunny days, spring has arrived several weeks early. The key difference is the relative absence of sustained rainfall. We’ve had a few sudden downpours, and even a bit of sleety hail, but not the sodden, extended weather that is expected around the spring equinox in the Pacific Maritime Northwest. The usual signs of spring are here: the red flowering currant bush is blooming and the Lenten hellebores are in full display, with the overwintering hummingbirds buzzing around both sets of blossoms. And, atop the highest fir tree the local pair of bald eagles have been making incessant calls to each other, as if to get the nesting season started early.

Last year at this time the ground was too soggy to plant potatoes, which didn’t go into the garden until April 17th. This year, the ground at my South Fidalgo garden is fluffy and workable, and the winter rye cover crop is being tilled in; the potatoes will be planted in a week or so, as soon as the rye roots and leaves decompose a bit. With the start of daylight saving, the garden weather clock seems to have moved ahead as well. The jump start may seem a boon to gardeners, hoping to get things in the ground soon, but the real message is the early drop off of the winter rains. The summer drought seems to be creeping in ahead of time.

Out on the Flats, where I have a large plot of garlic, the dry weather has caused the clay soil of the Valley to harden into a solid cake. Last year I applied a layer of woody compost to both deter the weeds and lighten up the ground, but the garlic crop suffered with a high percentage of moldy bulbs, approaching 30% in some beds. So, this winter I kept the beds bare, applying the usual mid-February fertilizer to jump start the garlic growth in the cool winter soil. (Note: I just use my standard, all-round organic fertilizer mix, not the blood meal or high nitrogen application often recommended.)

Of course, the ever present weed seeds also appreciated the sudden nutritional boost, forming a thick carpet of shot weed and other common occupiers of open soil. I’ve had to spend long hours using my stainless steel Japanese hand weeder, with a very sharp cutting edge and an offset blade, to cut through both the hard surface of clay as well as the already tough weed roots. Unfortunately, unless I am very careful, the sharp blade occasionally nicks off a soft garlic shoot. Hopefully the few plants sacrificed now will be less in number than the many that had to be thrown away last summer. Thankfully the mold last year was just common botrytis, not the feared white root rot that permanently affects garlic plots. Ultimately the cleaned garlic from last summer stored well, with the cloves just now starting to sprout or turn soft.

To preserve the remaining surplus of stored garlic I peel the good cloves, process them with a bit of olive oil and canning salt, and pack the rough mixture into pint jars for freezing. The mix can also be safely stored for a few months in the fridge, with the garlic bite turning very sweet. Be sure to keep a thin layer of oil on the surface to keep the garlic ‘refrigerator jam’ from drying out. You can also do a quick pickle of garlic. Whatever method you chose will serve to bridge the fresh garlic gap between now and the appearance of the first scapes in June.

I’ve also been making a traditional Spanish garlic soup: lots of sliced garlic sautéed with olive oil, paprika, cayenne and cumin, then mixed with chopped ham and chunks of day-old baguettes. Heat with stock or water, add whatever chopped spring green available and garnish with some newly-sprouted garlic chives. A proper spring tonic at the end of the garlic cycle.

Peas, Spring & Fall

For me, spring means fresh peas. It’s been many years since I grew traditional shelling or English peas. I now prefer Snap peas for quick eating or cooking in the shell, while my overall favorite is the Oriental Snow pea, particularly the variety Mammoth Melting Sugar. I find other varieties of snow peas to be not as large, sweet or tender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In order to avoid spotty germination in the cool soil of early March, I bought starts of Super Snap peas and transplanted them in a raised bed lined with cedar boards. I kept the plants covered with large pots for a few days to shield them from the sun and wind while they develop their root systems. After I removed the pots, and the peas were standing 4 inches tall, I unfortunately forgot to cover them with my usual low arch of chicken wire to fend off any rabbits that might make it through the outer fencing. When a large gate was left open one night, the pesky critters trooped in and neatly trimmed off the tops and most leaves of the peas. There’s always a chink in the armor. So, once again giving thanks to local nursery suppliers, I replanted with fresh starts, which should still provide a slightly delayed, mid-spring taste of fresh peas.

The Mammoth Melting snow peas, which I dote on for stir-fries, have not been available locally as starts for several years. So this spring I soaked the seed overnight and planted it in the relatively dry soil of the same raised bed as the Sugar Snaps. To support the 6-8 foot tall pea plants of both varieties I’ll be using 4×8-foot cattle panels instead of makeshift arrangements of tall poles and twine. Not quite as homespun, but effective. I also bought extra snow pea seed for a late summer planting, which will supply a second crop, given the increasingly warm and dry autumn growing season. As the climate changes, fill the gaps.

Peter Heffelfinger

Starting Seeds in Soil Blocks

By Julia Frisbie

Posted March 18, 2021

In an effort to reduce my garden’s reliance on single-use plastics, I use a soil blocker instead of plastic 72-cell trays to start my seeds. This method was popularized by Eliot Coleman, and you can find lots of good information about it online. But the actual tool that you use to make the blocks ishttps://www.theseasonalhomestead.com/homemade-soil-blocking-mix/prohibitively expensive upfront if you just want to start a few trays of tender annuals. I have a stand-up 35-blocker because I’m a garden tool junkie, and it seems silly to keep it all to myself. You’re welcome to come use it on my front porch. Text me at 503-975-3778 and we’ll work it out. Bring your own trays and soil.

The benefits of soil blocks are:

  • Seedling roots run into air at the edges of the block rather than plastic, so they don’t wind around and around. They just stop growing (this is called “air pruning”) and wait to be plopped in the ground, which means they do better after transplanting.
  • You can fit more seedlings on a tray. For people with indoor setups, space on the heating mat and under the grow lights is often at a premium.
  • I can fill trays faster with my soil blocker than I could if I were hand-packing damp substrate into plastic 72-cell trays.
  • No more throwing away cracked and nasty 72-cell trays at the end of the season!

Here’s how it works:

  1. Dump substrate in a flat-bottomed bin. Some people use complicated recipes, but I just use the Black Gold potting mix with the orange label. Unfortunately, it comes encased in single-use plastic. Even the complicated recipes involve bagged ingredients like peat moss. A locally-sourced recipe that uses zero bagged ingredients would take a lot of experimentation. Sounds like a fun project for a retired master gardener, but I have a full time job and a four-year-old and escaped ducks running all over the neighborhood and a sink full of dirty dishes, so I’m not investing in research and development at this point.
  2. Add water, mixing as you go, until it’s slightly less wet than brownie batter, but wet enough that when you pick up a handful and squeeze, a little water runs out between your fingers.
  3. Push the soil blocker down into the substrate while doing a little twist-and-shimmy until you can hear and feel it scraping against the bottom of the bin.
  4. Lift it up and set it down into the tray where you want the blocks, and squeeze the two handles while gently lifting to release them.
  5. Repeat two more times, and you’ve got a full tray! My blocker makes blocks that measure 1.125” square, and 105 of them fit in a standard 1020 tray.

Newly planted seeds should never be allowed to dry out before they germinate. Soil blocks are best watered from below, since there’s no plastic holding them together. I pack my blocks into mesh-bottomed trays, and then I set them into a solid-bottomed tray with water in it for a few seconds, letting moisture wick up from below. I’ve also put soil blocks on aluminum pans and plastic lunch trays and poured water in from the sides, tilting the lunch tray so that every block has a chance to wick it up.

You don’t need soil blocks for everything. Many vegetables do just fine direct-seeded into your garden. Some even prefer it! Others– especially the ones with big starchy seeds– I like to pre-soak indoors and then plop directly into the ground. The ones I raise in the soil blocks are the real divas, the long-season veggies that can’t handle a frost. Here’s a simplified, non-exhaustive list of who gets what treatment in my garden:

TRANSPLANTS (VIA SOIL BLOCKS)

  • Nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants)
  • Cucumber family (cucumbers and melons)
  • Squash family (including zucchini and summer squash)
  • Sunflowers
  • Zinnias
  • Cosmos

PRE-SOAK

  • Peas
  • Beans
  • Corn
  • Nasturtiums

DIRECT SOW

  • Root veggies
  • Leafy greens
  • Herbs
  • Wildflowers

Another thing I think about when I start my seeds is whether or not each type of seed has a belly-button. The belly button is the point or the little mark where it was once attached to its mother plant. Think about the little mark on the middle of a bean, or the pointy end of a squash seed. If I can see a belly button, I plant it facing down or sideways, never facing up. That’s the place where the seed’s first rootlet will emerge from, and the rootlet has to find its way downward before it can push its cotyledons out of the soil. I learned this from the book Better Vegetable Gardens the Chinese Way by Chan and Gill, and from my seed-saving mentor Rowen White.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you’ve never started veggies inside before, it bears mentioning that setting them next to a window really doesn’t provide enough light. You need a fluorescent shop light, and you need to hang it so it’s inches (not feet) above the top of the plants, adjusting it upwards as they grow. And most of the veggie divas who need to start life indoors germinate fastest when the soil is around 77 degrees, so stick them and their light in a warm place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It also bears mentioning that indoor- or greenhouse-grown seedlings need to be “hardened off” before planting them out into the garden. Basically you carry them to and fro for a while. It’s a hassle. Actually, this whole seed-starting process is a huge hassle. But can I stop myself? No! Because springtime is too exciting!!! While unearthing supplies in the shed this afternoon, I caught myself humming, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year…”

Julia Frisbie has been gardening in Coast Salish territory for six growing seasons, and is thankful to learn from plants, animals, and people who have been here much longer. She’s grateful to her mom, Anne Kayser, for cultivating her curiosity, and also to Robin Wall Kimmerer for writing the book Braiding Sweetgrass, which transformed her relationship with the more-than-human world. Follow Julia’s micro-farm on Facebook, Instagram, and/or TikTok.