By Peter Heffelfinger

posted November 23, 2022

With the advent of cold weather, the winter garden comes into its own.

Broccoli

Broccoli, Romanesco cauliflower, red and green cabbages, as well as Brussels sprouts, emerged a month ago from their summertime tunnel of floating row cover and have formed mature heads. An Italian variety of leaf broccoli, Spigariello Liscia, now a 4-foot tall bush resembling broccoli Raab, was also under row cover during the summer. I uncovered the Liscia along with the other brassicas, but the slender leaves at the top were slightly nipped by the recent cold, so it went back under its white fabric.

Romanesco and peppers

The semi-hardy Mizuna Japanese mustard, the fall turnip greens, as well as the White Icicle radishes, have been picked steadily for the past month; they now need covering as well against the nighttime temperatures hovering around 32F. Nearby, the slow-growing but very hardy mache is just beginning to spread, perhaps planted a bit late, but it will slowly expand during the warm spells.

Spigariello Liscia

For a successful winter garden, you have to plant the brassica starts in mid-summer, and protect them from the start with a secure row cover against the endemic cabbage root maggot fly and the fluttering, white cabbage butterflies. A few butterflies managed to sneak inside the cover this season, but given the large number of plants in a wide row 40 feet long the overall damage was limited.

With the extended summer drought I had to water heavily every 2-3 days to keep the plants thriving and to prevent bolting. In the closed, moist environment under the row cover, however, the potato bugs and the small grey slugs proliferated, but affected mostly the lower, ground-level foliage. As the intense summer growing season extended into early fall, the brassicas grew immense, tropical-sized leaves before maturing. Fortunately the garden relies on an artesian well drawing from the south side of the Mt.Erie/Whistle Lake drainage.

Semi-hardy Greens

The semi-hardy leafy greens need to be planted starting in mid-to-late August and into early September to attain a productive level of maturity before the cool weather sets in. With row cover protection, they grow slowly through the winter, offering a steady supply of leaves and roots. Essentially, the garden never really sleeps; you have tender greens all winter long in spite of the cold temperatures.

Other more hardy leafy crops include Winter Bloomsdale Spinach, which will survive handily even exposed to the snow, as well as Tah Tsai Tatsoi, an Oriental mustard that grows in a tight crown low to the soil. The fully hardy kales and collards also stand up to the cold on their own, and in very early spring form edible buds when not much else is producing in the garden.

Leeks

I rely on a bed of leeks for a steady winter supply of fresh alliums. This year the leeks were hit by orange rust during our extended warm spell in early autumn, but I kept removing the outer, more affected leaves to slow down the spread of the spores. The recent cold, which finally eliminated any lingering red fungal spots, is another advantage of winter gardening: less disease, particularly fungi, as well as fewer insects. Aphids, however, will always be a problem, emerging in winter warm spells to infest the tender growing tips of Brussels sprouts and other brassicas. Remove aphids quickly using a mild detergent spray before they spread to new spring seedlings.

Winter Cover Crops

The first cover crop, a mix of annual rye, clover, and Alaska peas, was sown in mid-September; it also needed lots of watering to sprout during the fall dry spell. Another late cover crop was sown in mid-November inside the hoop house, once the tomato, cucumber and pepper plants were removed. With the cold nights but relatively warm sunny days, the plastic cover will stay in place just long enough to sprout the rye. Once the cover crop is up, the plastic cover will be removed to expose the crop to the winter rain. It’s the hoop house’s final extension of the fall planting season.

cover crop

The Hoop House

Built in 2014 with heavy duty, nursery quality plastic, the hoop house cover has lasted at least 8 years, which was well worth the added investment. It is securely held in place by horizontal panels of wiggle-wire at the mid-point of the arched hoops along each side; exterior carpenter clamps as needed during windy days; and two 40-foot long plastic pipes on the bottom side edges that can be secured to the ground at night, and easily rolled up for ventilation during the day. The ends and doors are opened up during the day and closed at night to keep in the warmth. The plastic is removed in the winter to prevent storm damage and deterioration from exposure to UV light.

Overall, the plastic-covered hoop house is a relatively recent innovation that enables Northwest maritime gardeners to reliably ripen tomatoes, all kinds of sweet and hot peppers, tomatillos, as well as bumper crops of cukes. The hoop house protection enables slow-ripening peppers to be harvested late into October. The sweet peppers were roasted and then frozen in small packets, while most of the hot peppers were dried. The habaneros were made into a Louisiana-style hot sauce, kept in the fridge for immediate use. I’ve tried to grow melons several times, but not successfully; I leave them to the farmers’ market growers who are further inland and away from the cool evening onshore mists that roll in during the summers on Fidalgo Island.

Dehydration

After several years of using a small, simple dehydrator for cherry tomatoes, this fall I borrowed a large, ten-tray dehydrator with a fan, temperature control, and a timer. I was able to easily process 40 lb. boxes of pears and apples, all the varieties of hot peppers from the hoop house, as well as several trays of Juliet cherry tomatoes, a large, oval variety that dries well. I also tried other varieties of cherry tomatoes. Principe de Borghese, an Italian heirloom cherry tomato for sun-drying in warmer climes, produced much smaller and less abundant fruit. Yellow Pear cherry tomatoes were moderately sweet, but too small to dry. They do have firm skins that don’t split open when fully ripe, as is common with the popular Sungold and Sweet 100’s, and combine well with tomatillos for salsas and chili verde soup.

Juliet cherry tomatoes

Dried juliets

Dehydration preserves large amounts of fruit quickly without cooking, canning, or freezing. The Bartlett pears didn’t come out quite like the chewy commercial ones, but they were still very sweet, as were the dried apples. The dried cherry tomatoes will thicken up sauces and soups made later on from the already frozen quarts of regular tomatoes; the dried hot peppers will be ground as needed, or added whole to recipes. Overall, it was an efficient way of dealing with the cascade of fresh fruits in the fall. Plus, the freezer was already full. Note: turn the fruit over half way through to ensure even drying and put a few grains of rice in the bottom of each storage jar as a protective desiccant.

Ripened pears before slicing onto trays

Plums Next Year

Years ago as part of an oral history project, I interviewed Rosa Walrath, who had grown up on a San Juan Island Italian plum/prune farm back in the early days when the island orchards were the main source of fruit for Seattle. Her job as a child was tending the prunes on screens in the drying barns, turning them over for even drying and discarding the moldy ones. At the time, I was water bath canning jars of local Italian plums on a kitchen wood stove in an off the grid cabin; the plums turned out well, along with jars of peaches, apricots, and applesauce. Inspired by her story, I tried drying local Italian plums on screens over a small wood parlor stove, but with no success since it wasn’t consistently hot enough.

This year the plums are long gone, but I look forward to doing prunes next year in the automatic electric dehydrator that sits on the kitchen table, humming to itself and blinking off the extended hours. You do still have to turn the fruit by hand, though.

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Peter Heffelfinger

by Julia Frisbie

posted April 19, 2022

Last week I shared my “why” for saving seed: I do it because it deepens my relationships with the plants that feed my family, and becoming a midwife for their next generation is the most powerful act of reciprocity I can muster. Just in case that resonates with you, today I’d like to share a little bit about the “how.” 

Plants choose their families and usher in the new generation in many diverse and beautiful ways. (So, too, with humans, but plants manage it with a whole lot less judgment, which we’d do well to emulate. As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, “They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”) If you want to save seeds, you need to know who you’re working with and how they usually do things. 

So, if the first step is to love plants, the next step is to learn about them. I made the following flowchart about what questions to ask. Humans and the plants who provide us food and medicine have been doing this reciprocal seed-saving dance since time immemorial, so if this feels overwhelming, rest assured: the answers are out there! Google works great, but if you share my passion for reference books, here are some of my favorites on the topic: 

• Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ainsworth
• The Seed Garden published by Seed Savers Exchange
• Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Deppe

This sixth item is an especially interesting point to consider. Any breeding project is a process of selection over many generations. You can do this selection by hand– for example, by removing heads of lettuce that bolt early before their pollen is added to your lettuce gene pool, thus selecting over time for slower-bolting lettuce. If you breed for taste, you have to sample many individuals before deciding which ones to keep in the gene pool. (My friend Jay works for a seed company and gets paid to travel all over the place pulling up carrots and biting off the bottom part of the root! If they taste good, he puts the rest of the carrot back into the ground so that it can make seed.) It’s always a good policy to remove sick-looking plants, or plants displaying any undesirable characteristic, by hand. 

You can also select by simply creating the conditions that you want to breed towards, planting a bunch of individuals, and saving seeds only from the individuals who survive those conditions. To give a few examples of this strategy, I’m breeding towards dry bush beans that are happy playing in the shade at the feet of my tomatoes and dahlias, because it’s unlikely in my very small space that they’ll ever get their own dedicated plot. I’m also breeding towards drought-tolerant tomatoes, because my ancestors practiced dryland farming, and as we see more and more summer droughts I think it’s important to waste as little water as possible. (Plus, dryland tomatoes taste sweeter!) To do this, I leave the tomatoes off the drip irrigation system and only water them a little by hand when it seems like they might die otherwise. Both of these projects lead to lower yields in the short run, because I’m not creating ideal conditions for my beans or tomatoes. But they’ll lead to increased yields over the long run in the conditions I’m working with.

Of course, I’m always breeding towards resilience to suboptimal conditions, because… well… I’m not a perfect gardener! But I think that’s a superpower that all less-than-perfect gardeners should embrace. In this time of climate chaos, we need resilience more than perfect uniformity in our plants, our gardens, our bodies and minds, our families, and our communities. Because of their brilliant diversity, plants are the first healers to arrive on wounded soil and start the restoration process. “Bring me with you!” I want to say. “Let me sit at your feet and watch you work. I need to learn how.” This intimacy is captured within the word midwife, which has roots in Old English meaning with woman. Becoming a midwife to plants is a good way to spend time with them. As we learn how they live, we learn more about how we should live, too.

by Julia Frisbie

posted March 9, 2022
Also shared with the readers of the Anacortes American for the March 9, 2022 edition

Growing plants is like anything else: the more you learn and pay attention, the more complexity emerges. People have lived alongside food crops since time immemorial, and there are a lot of different ideas about how to do it. But it doesn’t HAVE to be complicated. This article describes how beginners can get started with a new garden.

First, choose a site that gets at least six hours of direct sunlight per day. More sunlight is better. If there are lots of deer in your neighborhood, you’ll need to fence your garden, because they like edible plants just as much as we do! Err on the side of making your garden too small rather than too big. It’s better to be itching for more than it is to get overwhelmed. The closer your garden is to your door, the easier it will be to notice and take care of. As Adrienne Marie Brown writes, “What we pay attention to grows.”

Next, prepare the soil. The islands of Puget Sound are what’s left after a glacier scraped the rest away, so we’re short on topsoil. For this reason, I recommend adding compost on top of the existing soil at your site rather than trying to till. You can mound it up if your site is large, or make a raised bed if your site is small. A fluffy, six-inch-deep layer of compost will turn almost any site into a garden.

Choose what to grow based on what you like to eat or look at. For example, I am in love with tomatoes and dahlias, so those two are the queens of my garden and everything else has to fit in around the edges. Some easy and delicious choices for beginners are peas and beans. Herbs are expensive in the grocery store, but most are easy to grow, so that’s a good way to get a lot of bang for your buck. You can either plant seeds or buy small plants called “starts” from a nursery. All seeds need moisture to germinate, but beyond that, their requirements are as diverse as the plants that made them; if in doubt, buy starts.

With our arid summers, we have to irrigate rather than relying on rain to water our gardens. In a small plot, you can water by hand. In a larger plot, it’s worth setting up drip irrigation. First thing in the morning is the best time to water your plants, because that’s when they begin photosynthesizing, and they need water for that process. It’s best to pull out weeds as soon as you notice them, and it’s easiest to do this when the soil is damp, so I like to do my weed patrol and my watering at the same time.

Fertilization depends. If you start in a place with very rich soil– for example, a spot where a chicken coop or a compost pile used to be– you might not need to fertilize during the growing season. But if you start on a place that used to be a lawn, you’ll need to fertilize. Sprinkling slow-release fertilizer pellets over the soil might be easiest, but I think plants absorb fertilizer best and fastest in liquid form. My favorite is a concentrated solution called “liquid fish” or “liquid kelp”, which I dilute with water and spray directly onto the plant leaves first thing in the morning. I keep backyard ducks, and a basin of dirty duck water dumped over the plants has a similar effect. Another low-cost nitrogen source is your own urine, which can be diluted 1:10 with water and poured over any plants whose leaves you don’t plan to eat. (My preschooler knows he’s always welcome to pee in the corn patch, because corn is an especially hungry plant.) When should you fertilize? With average soil, I aim for once every two weeks, or anytime my plants begin to look yellowish.

Finally, after all this preparing, planting, watering, and weeding, and fertilizing, it’s time to harvest and enjoy! You can get very creative with recipes, but my favorite way to eat homegrown veggies is raw, sun-warmed, and immediately after picking. A relationship between people and plants allows both partners to be fed. This type of reciprocity has lured wild plants closer to human settlements, and children into gardens, for millennia. We co-evolved to care for each other. The memory is right there, just under the surface, ready to germinate.

by Julia Frisbie

posted July 23, 2021

July is the best month to plant root vegetables. Why? Because winter is the best time to EAT them. Beets, rutabagas, turnips, parsnips, and carrots are all sweeter after a frost. If you plant them now, they’ll be nice and big when the weather turns cold. They hold up just fine in the ground over the winter months, allowing you to dig them up and eat them whenever you like.

To understand why, you need to understand how they live their lives. Many root veggies are biennial, making seeds during their second warm season. A would-be carrot mother wants to grow a nice big root during her first summer. This root is her bank account, full of energy stored as starch and sugar that she’s saving for later. When the first touch of frost hits her feathery leaves, she lets them wilt, pulling down every last bit of sugar into her root to serve as antifreeze. (That’s why the root tastes sweeter in winter!) The carrot mother bides her time until spring comes. Then, all at once, she spends down her bank balance in order to build a seed stalk. The sugar she’s stored in her root funds the next generation of carrots.

The carrots who accidentally overwintered in my garden have just flowered, and they look like this:

If July is a good enough time for carrot mothers to fling their progeny into the world, then it’s a good enough time for me. Another indication that it’s time to plant carrots is when their wild cousins, the Queen Anne’s Lace, are blooming in your neighborhood:

These wild relatives are the reason I buy my carrot seed every year rather than saving it from my garden; they’re the same species (Daucus carota) as domestic carrots, and are insect-pollinated, which means they’ll readily cross unless isolated from each other by half a mile. As in many cases, the wild genes for tough, white, hairy, strong-flavored roots are dominant, and will show up in subsequent generations of crossed seed.

As a side note, while I love foraging for wild foods, I leave wild carrots alone. Many plants in the umbelliferae family look alike, and some are extremely poisonous. Hemlock is an example of a toxic umbellifer that grows on Fidalgo island.

The carrots who have come to live among us have given up a lot of their wildness, and with it, their ability to grow in marginal conditions. Domestic carrots are tricky for several reasons:

• First of all, they need deep, loose soil. We have clay. So, I either grow them in my raised beds, or else I choose the old-fashioned (slightly less domesticated) chantenay varieties that can make do with heavy soil.
• Second, they germinate very slowly, and need to be kept moist the whole time. But they can’t be covered too deeply, or they won’t make it. Carrot seeds are tiny. They’re not provisioned for a grueling push of cotyledons through an inch of topsoil the way starchy beans and peas are. They need to be sown just under the surface, and then that surface needs to stay constantly moist until they’re up. But you can’t water them too violently, or they’ll wash away! And you can’t start them in soil blocks or pots where you might have more control over their conditions, because they strongly resent transplanting.
• Third, did I mention that they’re tiny?! It’s hard to get the spacing right when planting them by hand, and if they’re too crowded, then none of them will reach their true potential.
• Fourth, if you do get a good crop of winter carrots, you can bet every other creature would also like to eat them once they’re frost-sweetened. Deer will dig them up. Rodents will tunnel underneath and eat them from below. I built my raised beds behind a six foot privacy fence to thwart the deer, and stapled quarter inch hardware cloth across the bottom of the beds before filling them to thwart the rodents. Of course, the problem with raised beds is, they’re hard to keep moist.

Basically, domestic carrots wouldn’t succeed in the wild unless they were evenly scattered onto a bed of perfectly fine, loose humus, just close enough to the base of a waterfall where they were being constantly misted, and where no animals could find them. It’s almost laughable! But it’s not their fault. This is a direct result of our co-evolutionary dance: the carrots have agreed to be sweet, orange, and tender-crisp in return for our help with germination and growing conditions. Do we remember how to honor our part of the agreement, how to meet our responsibility toward the carrots?

Some years I have better results than others. I console myself during the bad carrot years by supporting our local professionals. Billy at Moondance Farm runs a winter CSA every year that is worth the price for the carrots alone; they’re as sweet as candy. You can also find frost-sweetened carrots at the winter markets. But listen, if we’re serious about food security, we ought to keep trying to grow them ourselves. We’re certainly not going to deepen our relationship with domestic carrots by outsourcing their care.

I’ve tried a lot of tricks to get around the germination difficulties. This is the protocol that’s worked best so far:

• Soak seed in water until white rootlets barely begin to emerge from the first few of them, which takes 4-5 days. This reduces the amount of time you’ll have to keep the bed perfectly moist. Here’s a picture of a germinated carrot seed under a microscope:

• While the seeds are soaking, get irrigation set up. A very fine mist needs to be delivered until the soil is well-saturated AT MINIMUM three times a day. A layer of agribon or shade cloth over the bed can prevent some moisture loss.
• When you see the first signs of germination, mix up a corn starch gel in a ratio of one tablespoon of cornstarch to one cup of water. Whisk it together on the stovetop until it just barely comes to a boil and starts to become translucent, and then stop stirring and let it cool completely.

• While the gel is cooling, water the heck out of the carrot bed, and make tiny trenches where you’ll put the seed.
• Gently mix the wet, barely-germinating seed into the cooled cornstarch gel.
• Put this mixture into some sort of delivery device. I use a squirt bottle, but a plastic bag would work if you snipped off one corner and squeezed it out. In the following photo, you can see seeds suspended in the gel. (You can also see that my gel has a reddish cast, because I added some cinnamon to it as a natural antifungal to try and prevent damping off.)

• Pipe the gel mix into your prepared rows, just like icing onto a cake. Having the seeds suspended in the gel makes it easier to get decent spacing. (You’ll still have to thin the seedlings, but it won’t be as difficult.) Here’s a happy row of seeds suspended in a line of gel:

And here’s a close up of one seed that I took with my pocket microscope after squirting it onto the soil. You can see that it’s at the perfect stage, just barely beginning to germinate. Note the white mycorrhizal threads surrounding it: that’s happy soil!

• Barely cover the row of seed with damp soil, and begin the misting regime.
• Once they have some leaves, thin them to 2-3 inch spacing and reduce your watering to once a day. Keep them well weeded until they’re as tall as your hand.

Even if you do all this, I can’t promise you’ll get perfect carrots. I can only promise you’ll gain a deeper understanding of what a carrot wants (and, potentially, your own insufficiencies in the provision of these desires).

Other winter root vegetables, such as beets, rutabagas, turnips, and parsnips, have never given me this type of trouble. Beets prefer a neutral ph and soil on Fidalgo Island tends to be a bit acidic, so they’re best grown in a raised bed with imported soil, or in a bed prepared with lime. They have big tough seeds that benefit from a warm bath overnight before sowing. Parsnip seed has a short shelf-life and needs to be sourced fresh every year. But I don’t pre-germinate and suspend any other type of seed in a cornstarch gel. I reserve this craziness for carrots alone.

If you consistently grow great carrots without much fuss and bother, please leave a comment and tell me your secrets.

By Peter Heffelfinger

posted April 21, 2021

Oftentimes it takes a commentator from far away to remind us of the Pacific Northwest’s unique place in the world of gardening. A recent New York Times article interviewed the founders of a specialty nursery, Issima, which breeds new cultivars of rare ornamentals. What caught my eye immediately was that the nursery is located in Little Compton, a tiny settlement at the far tip of Rhode Island’s easternmost peninsula, which juts out southward into the North Atlantic. Given its high percentage of coastline, bays, and access to the sea, Rhode Island aptly calls itself the Ocean State.

Before I migrated west, I lived for a year in Little Compton in a cottage near the outermost beach. After enduring many of Boston’s harsh winters, the climate of Rhode Island, only a short drive south, felt almost tropical in comparison. What would be heavy snow and freezing temperatures a bit further north were only squalls of rain and wind on the south coast. In late fall there were ripe quinces in the yard, and a flock of swans overwintered on the unfrozen salt ponds behind the sand dunes. In summer there were local tomatoes from a farm stand, fresh seafood at a small fish market, and of course a nearby fried clam shack. The climatological key was the warmth of the Gulf Stream, which hooks around the base of New England, creating a local pod of temperate warmth.

The owners of Issima detailed their careful, often years-long breeding program at their nursery sheltered by the maritime climate. One project involves Meadow Rue, or Thalictrum, a standard variety of which, “Queen of the Meadow,” has naturalized in my shady back yard, growing 5 to 6 feet tall each year. Issima, however, has created a new cultivar, “Super Tall,” topping out at 15 feet, which certainly would be just the right size at the base of my much taller Red Cedars and Doug firs.

But the link to the Maritime Northwest jumped out when Issima’s partners listed other favorite specialty nurseries, such as Far Reaches Farm in Port Townsend, which they cite as “arguably the best nursery in the country for cool-climate perennials.” Or, the “woodland treasures” at Keeping it Green Nursery in Stanwood; as well as Sequim Rare Plants for unusual succulents; and Windcliff Nursery in Indianola. Further afield, they mention Cistus Nursery in Portland for Mediterranean-climate plants and hardy tropicals. Suddenly you see our Northwest Maritime area in a new horticultural light, as an ideal locale for cultivating rare plants, as well as for cool-weather, coastal gardening in general.

On the northwestern side of the continent the Japanese Current keeps our weather mild, while the Olympic Mountains supply rain shadow protection to Fidalgo Island, the San Juans, and the northern part of Puget Sound. When it does snow locally, as it did this past winter with a sudden foot-deep accumulation, the drifts disappear almost as fast as they came in. In my small woodland meadow, the hellebores hardly noticed the thick blanket of white and a few weeks later produced their usual Lenten display.

Decades ago, when I first arrived in this more temperate corner of the country, I missed the four distinct seasons of New England, especially the fall foliage, as well as the hot, humid summers that pumped out fully ripe tomatoes. And even the blizzards, instead of the Northwest’s long season of winter rains. Now, looking back I realize that my short stay in the unique climatological niche of Rhode Island turned out to be a foretaste of the Maritime Pacific Northwest, complete with overwintering swans.

April 17, 2020

Welcome to Fidalgo Grows, where experienced local gardeners will help your garden be the best it can. We look forward to your comments and questions.  

We’re happy to begin the blog with Fidalgo’s own beloved Peter Heffelfinger, who has gardened in the Fidalgo Island/Skagit Valley area for over 40 years. A Master Gardener, he has taught classes for the Eat Your Yard program, the Know & Grow series at the WSU Extension, the Anacortes Senior College, and Christianson’s Nursery. A former garden writer for Fidalgo Magazine, his column currently appears in the Whatcom Watch newsletter.

Introduction to Four Season Vegetable Gardening  

by Peter Heffelfinger

Fidalgo Island has been rated by Seattle Tilth as the best site in the Maritime Northwest for growing vegetables year-round. With low rainfall due to the Olympic rain shadow, and cool temperatures moderated by the Salish Sea, one can plant a wide variety of crops starting in March and continuing on a monthly basis right through October. Early peas and lettuces in the spring; classic tomatoes, corn and beans for summer; hardy greens in the fall; and overwintering brassicas and leeks for harvest during the chill of winter. Not to forget potatoes, onions and winter squash for storage. And finally garlic, the fall-planted bulb that, like the tulips, appears in the spring. 

It is best to think of gardening here not as a one-time rush to get everything in at once, but rather a steady monthly rhythm of “what do I plant today to harvest during the next succeeding season?”  

Since the garden will be in use on a continual basis, it is important to rotate crops to avoid disease, maintain fertility with added organic matter and amendments, and sow winter cover crops to avoid erosion. Endemic pests and diseases come with our moderate climate, but there are strategies and tools to deal with them organically.

Climate change is now an added challenge that is expanding our main growing season at both ends, early and late. With warmer, drier summers and less winter snow-pack, water supply will be the critical issue.

All in all, gardening takes a watchful eye as well as flexibility when things go a bit awry. Given our fortunate locale, there’s always time to replant.