Sow many seeds, so little time

This week, one of the sunniest February weeks I can remember, was my school's mid-winter break. I could not have asked for better weather and as you've probably already guessed, I played outside in my yard all week. Since I had so much free time, I was able to start my lettuce bed under the cloche outside and was able to start my pepper and tomato seeds inside. I even planted the heirloom seeds I saved last year! This is the earliest I have ever started spinach and lettuce outside, but the cloche is doing an amazing job warming up the soil – the soil thermometer registered 60 degrees in that bed! Those little seeds will germinate in no time.


Recently, several people, who are planning on growing vegetables for the first time, asked me for seed suggestions and gardening tips. So, in today's post, I'm going back to the basics and will share a few things I've learned about growing veggies.


Despite getting tons of seed catalogs each year with beautiful photos of unique and exotic varieties, I select seeds of vegetables I like to eat. The beets always look beautiful, but I don't like to eat them so they never make it into my garden.


When I choose seeds, I also consider what will grow well in our climate because I want to set myself up for success. We have long cool springs, so it's a good idea to choose vegetables that do well in cool weather, like kale, lettuce, spinach, chard, and peas.


If you're just getting started, I would suggest planting a salad garden. Lettuce is pretty easy to grow from seed and can provide you with a continual harvest – just pick off the outer leaves and they'll keep on growing back! If you plant several of the beautiful and delicious varieties, you can have an amazing mixed green salad. I buy most of my seeds from the local seed company, Territorial Seeds. Last year, I grew Jericho, Deer Tongue, and Merlot lettuce from Territorial. This year, I'm growing the same varieties plus the Cascade Lettuce Mix that I got for free from the Cascade Harvest Coalition at the Flower and Garden Show. There is nothing better than a salad, just picked fresh from your garden.


Lettuce seeds are really small, so plant them carefully. In a nut shell, seeds need water and warmth to germinate. Since lettuce seeds are so tiny and could get washed away with a watering can, I water the soil thoroughly before sowing my seeds. Then, I make a little indentation in the soil, pour some seeds into my hand, grab a pinch of seeds, and put them in the little spot I created. I carefully cover them with a little soil (not too deep!) and give it a little press to ensure that I got good soil to seed contact.


I also have to plug the Nasturtiums. I LOVE these beautiful edible flowers and grow them every year. I can't tell you how lovely it was last year to watch huge bumble bees squeeze themselves inside the big red and orange blooms. Plus, you can harvest the flowers and put them in the salad you just harvested. It's important to pick out a variety that is compact, since they have the potential to trail like crazy. I love the Empress of India variety. This year, I'm going to try the Black Velvet variety as well. It's important to note that in addition to attracting lovely beneficial pollinators, they also tend to attract aphids (in my case, little black aphids), so if that happens, just spray them off with a strong stream of water or pull them out and plant something new.


Finally, if you haven't done so already, plant some peas. According to my Seattle Tilth Maritime NW Garden Guide, it's tradition in our area to sow peas by Presidents' Day. Peas are easy to plant, fun to guide up a trellis, thrive in cool weather, and will provide you with a generous harvest. The Maritime NW Garden Guide, a planning calendar for year-round organic gardening, is worth the money, by the way. It is designed for gardeners in our area and gives recommendations as to what to plant and where (i.e. sow outdoors, sow indoors, sow outdoors under a cloche) for every month of the year.


Starting seeds indoors merits a post of its own. It's not terribly complicated, but requires some special materials and a little extra planning. So, if you're not ready to dive into indoor seed starting this year, but still want to try growing some delicious heirloom tomatoes or some other interesting vegetable, you're in luck. There are two amazing plant sales coming up that will have tons of fabulous starts (young plants) for your garden. The Master Gardener Foundation Plant Sale will be on Saturday and Sunday, May 1 and 2. After King County cut the funding for the Master Gardener program, the Master Gardener Foundation took over and made it possible for the program to continue. Without the MG Foundation, I wouldn't be in the program right now! The MG plant sale is one of their biggest fund raisers, so you can buy the vegetable starts you want to grow and support an amazing community gardening program. Seattle Tilth is also having an Early Spring Edible Plant Sale on Saturday, March 20.

A garden journal can be a handy tool for keeping track of your garden experiments. Jot down what and when you plant and note later if it worked or not. Your notes can help you make decisions when you're planning your garden next year. Remember, practice makes perfect. Pardon the pun, but it's best to just dig in, plant some seeds, and have fun with it. You'll probably have more success than you expect. Happy planting!

All in a day's work

When I started making plans to start my seeds indoors again and decided to sterilize (bake) the seed starting medium I already had on hand, visions of this scene popped in my head – an old fifties ad with a put-together woman in pumps and an apron, single-handedly managing to keep a clean house, cook a balanced meal for her family, and prepare soil for the seeds she'll cultivate for her family's future meals. An ad that convinces housewives everywhere that sterilizing their own soil is a snap. You can have dinner on the stove and your soil in the oven and both will be ready in a jiffy!

Actually, it was a pretty easy process and since I'm trying to use as many sustainable gardening practices as possible, re-using soil I already have makes a lot of sense. Using sterile soil is critical for healthy seedlings. Most garden supply stores or nurseries sell sterile seed-starting medium, so if you're starting out with that, you're already good to go.

To sterilize used seed-starting medium:

1. Spread the soil on a baking sheet. The soil should be moist, but not too wet. I moistened the soil and mixed it around a bit to make sure that it was moist throughout and not just on the surface.

2. Cover the baking sheet with foil and put in a preheated oven set at 200 degrees. I have an oven thermometer in my oven so I was sure that my oven wasn't hotter than what I set it at. Gauging temperature during this process is pretty important because over-heating the soil can produce plant toxins.

Here is the slightly tricky part. According to my Master Gardener handbook, the goal is to get the soil to a temperature of 140 degrees and keep it there for thirty minutes. In other resources, I read that it should be 180 degrees, but no higher than 200 degrees. I set the timer for 10 minutes, then pulled it out and checked the soil temperature by inserting a meat thermometer in the center of the pan, right through the foil. I found that I had to do this several times before the soil temperature registered 140 degrees. Once I got the soil to 140 degrees, I set the time for 30 minutes. When I checked the temperature after 30 minutes, it was registering 170 degrees, but since it was still below the 200 degree range, I think I'm OK.

3. After 30 minutes at 140 degrees, take the pan out of the oven and let it cool. Keep the foil in place – the smell of fresh baked soil is not nearly as appetizing as bread. Trust me on this.

4. Finally, make sure you sterilize the container you're going to use as well. I used a very diluted bleach and water solution to clean out the flat that I use to start my seeds.

That's all there is to it. Just a few simple steps and you're on your way to a bountiful harvest. Now isn't that swell?

Making Room

When Jake walked in yesterday evening, I greeted him with an enthusiastic squeal, "The chicks are coming!" The chick delivery schedules are out at several local feed stores, which means it's almost time – this is happening for real. For over a year now, I've said that I would get my chicks in March and now I have a real, prospective date: March 17. Of course, when I called the Grange to ask some questions, the woman told me that it's first come, first serve and that people line up, waiting to get their chicks. I don't think I can justify calling in "sick" and getting a substitute to go get my chicks, so I'm just going to have to hope that by the time school ends that day, there will still be three healthy chicks for me. I've got my hopes up for one Buff Orpington, one Rhode Island Red, and one Americauna (for the fun green-colored eggs). Seeing as how they're expecting a delivery of 300 chicks of each of those breeds, I think I'll probably be OK.

In the meantime, it's time to make some room. Last weekend, I went through the process of moving one of three garden beds from the space where we're going to put the coop, to the lawn, just above the first garden bed terrace. In my Master Gardener class, I learned that it is not a good idea to till the soil when it is really wet because it can damage the soil structure, but I had to make the sacrifice in order to make some room.

I dug out all of the soil in the raised bed and made countless trips with the wheelbarrow to a large tarp on the lawn. Then, I found the spot on the lawn where I wanted to put the new bed and turned over the sod to ensure that it would smother the grass and not start growing up into my veggies. It probably would have died off without this step, but after hearing about my friends' experience trying to control the grass taking over their raised beds, I wasn't taking any chances.

Finally, I put the frame over the new spot, lined the bottom of the bed with landscape fabric, and filled it up with all the soil that I had transferred to the tarp. Now, all it needs is some early spring peas, which I plan to plant on Tuesday, some lettuce and spinach seeds, and a spring cloche.

Today, for Valentine's Day, Jake and I are going to work on designing our coop. Last year at this time, he was building me a retaining wall and now we're moving on to a bigger project. I know I am a lucky girl. When I told my sister what we were doing for Valentine's day, she said, "Birds of a feather flock together." I couldn't have said it better myself!

The NW Flower and Garden Show: Where Garden Junkies Convene

Today, right smack in downtown Seattle in the immense convention center, I got my first taste of spring. A fellow gardener in my Master Gardener cohort described it perfectly when she said you walk in to the NW Flower and Garden Show and the smell of soil immediately meets your nose. She wasn't kidding. And when it did, I felt like I'd made it home.

Needless to say, the show was amazing. I went by myself and was perfectly content, wandering around in garden bliss for the entire day. Here are some highlights:

Turns out, I have a thing for rusty garden art. You might have noticed the rusty flowers I have "growing" in my garden already. Well, the booth of Home and Garden Art of Ballard was just too much to bear. I've been looking for a rooster to accompany my future hens and I found one today. I also managed to snag an amazing metal sign. Pictures of these new additions to my garden will be coming soon.

The Seattle Tilth and NW Bloom display garden was stunning – complete with a chicken coop and a goat! These cold frames were the highlight though. Cold frames keep crops like lettuce warm during the colder fall and winter months so you can have fresh veggies all year long. I loved the chartreuse-painted reclaimed window that they used for its lid - and a wagon wheel hatch to boot!

Seattle Urban Farm Company had an amazing vegetable garden display in an old truck. Wild strawberries grew vertically out of the side of the truck. Stalks of corn filled the bed. To top it off, there was a chicken coop along side the old truck with a couple of beautiful hens inside. Their nesting boxes were in the cab of the truck.

Speaking of reclaimed materials, I discovered that Re Store offers classes on how to transform new finds into treasures. I also attended an amazingly entertaining seminar by one of the co-authors of the book, The Salvage Studio. I haven't actually gotten my hands on the book yet, but judging by the pictures I saw and awesome ideas I gleamed during the presentation, it would definitely be worth purchasing.

Also, the recycled bottle rain chain (created by Bedrock, the company that keeps me stocked with all the tumbled stained glass for my mosaics) was amazingly beautiful. If I hadn't just purchased a metal rooster, I just might have splurged on the chain to funnel rain water into the new rain barrel I'm going to install next week.

Finally, I stumbled upon the Cascade Harvest Coalition, an organization dedicated to connecting farmers and the community, thus supporting the local food system. They gave me this super cool farm guide with all the user-friendly information I could want about tons of local farms in our state, from CSAs to U-pick farms.

In the end, I left with some 4 inch pots of sage, some metal accessories for my garden, lots of new information, and inspiration to make my garden as beautiful as it can be. I think it's safe to say that I will be a repeat visitor to the show in the years to come.

Planning Makes Perfect

Yesterday, while listening to Amy Ockerlander – a Garden Hotline Educator from Seattle Tilth – talk about mulch and the other delights of organic gardening, I quietly tore a sheet of paper out of my Master Gardener spiral notebook. It started out innocently enough – a list of things to do that occurred to me while listening to the lecture. But before I knew it, I had a vision of a wild flower garden in my head and a list of tasks I'd need to do to bring it to fruition.

You don't have to tell me twice how lucky I am to have a canvas of a yard to whip into a masterpiece with all my new knowledge. If there were more hours of daylight right now, I think I'd barely see the inside of my house. Sure I've done a lot to it already and a blank canvas it is not. But the beauty of gardening is that it is an ever-evolving process. "Empty" spaces can be filled and tired places can be reinvented. And that is exactly what the side of my house is – tired and in need of some botanical TLC.

The plan that got scribbled out over the course of an afternoon lecture is to turn that worn-out, uneven strip of grass into a beautiful corridor of perennial wild flowers that leads to my garden and beacons beneficial pollinators. I've been pining over seed packets of lovely echinacae and chamomile flowers, knowing that I'd need to find a more permanent place to plant them. But instead of rushing out to buy those seeds as my impulses are so urging me to do, I am going to use this season to lay the foundation by having Jake put in a new paver path and by building the soil in my future wild flower beds.

This brings me to sheet mulching, the Master Gardener gem of the week and catalyst for the plan that keeps on growing. I am going to use the sheet mulching technique to smother the grass, carve out bed space, and build the soil – no shovel required. Apparently, all I need to do is put wet cardboard down on the surface I am going to prepare and then cover that with whatever organic material I have (fallen leaves, straw, sawdust). Then, it breaks down over time, helping add nutrients to the soil, while also smothering out grass and weeds in the process. I guess if I start the process in the fall, I'll have beds by spring with almost no labor. All I need to do is be patient, but I can hardly wait!

And if that wasn't enough, all my seeds came in the mail last week. It's just about seed starting time and I've got lots of yummy vegetables in the works. I'm going to try and start a salsa garden hoop house (a plastic cloche over the bed throughout the summer) with tomatillos, red bell peppers, jalapenos, tomatoes, and cilantro. I bought lots of new heirloom seeds from Seed Savers, with the hope of being able to save seeds from twice as many vegetables as last year. I am most excited about the Trail of Tears black beans that I'm going to grow this year. I discovered them at the farmers' market last year. Can you imagine eating a pot of beans with salsa, all grown in your own backyard? My mouth is watering just thinking about it!

Roasted Butternut Squash and Black Bean Soup

It's been the year of the soup around here. Jake will probably tell you I'm obsessed. I've made just about as many soup recipes this year as I have bread because what goes better with a fresh and rustic, crusty loaf of bread then a delicious bowl of soup? Not much, I've found. So today, I came up with my own concoction – a spin on one of my favorite things: butternut squash.

I've had lots of inspiration. Heidi Swanson's Adzuki Butternut Squash Soup is probably my all-time favorite soup. I decided to start my soup in the same fashion since I thought the spices would go really well with black beans, something different than the all-too-popular cumin. Willi, of Diggin' Food, introduced me to the butternut squash and black bean combo with her recipe for Butternut Squash Tacos. Then, if that wasn't enough, I stumbled upon a recipe for Black Bean and Pumpkin Soup on Smitten Kitchen and it was over. My local, in-season (no tomatoes), vegetarian creamy squash soup was born.

I made the beans for this soup the day before. I have recently rediscovered my crock pot and don't know why I've been neglecting the poor thing all this time. It seems like more work than just cracking open a can, but honestly, the whole process probably took me the same amount of hands-on time. Let the beans soak while you're sleeping and then throw the beans in the pot in the morning and cover generously with water. Don't add salt – it will harden the beans. Add salt at the very end. Put the crock pot on low and come home to a fresh pot of beans. It's fantastic!

Roasted Butternut Squash and Black Bean Soup

The only thing that could have made this soup better would be toasted pumpkin seeds sprinkled on top. Just put a handful of raw pumpkin seeds (the little green ones you see in the bulk section of natural foods markets) in a dry skillet over medium heat and stir. The seeds will start darkening and will begin to pop with they are toasted. Watch them carefully! They can go from olive green to charcoal in just a few minutes. I sprinkle them on just about any creamy vegetable soup, but especially orange ones like squash and carrot.

Makes about 7 cups

1 medium butternut squash (about 1 1/2 to 2 pounds)

2 cups of black beans, cooked and drained

1 medium onion, large dice

3 cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 salt

3 cups vegetable stock

~2 tablespoons of olive oil, plus some for brushing

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Meanwhile, cut the butternut squash in half, lengthwise, and scoop out the seeds.* Brush the skinless sides of the squash with olive oil, place them face down on a cookie sheet, and put them in the hot oven for about 30 minutes, or until a fork inserted into the thickest part meets no resistance. Once the squash is tender, remove the skins and puree the "meat" until smooth.

2. In a stockpot, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the coriander and cinnamon to the oil and stir for a minute or two, then add the onion. Stir the onions around to coat them with the spices and let cook for about ten minutes.

3. Next, add the garlic, squash puree, stock, beans, and salt and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to low and simmer to meld all the flavors.

4. Puree half of the soup until smooth and return the puree to the pot. Serve sprinkled with toasted pumpkin seeds and enjoy.

*I have to end this post with one final plug for home-made stock. Simply combine 2 onions (cut into large chunks), 3 smashed cloves of garlic, a couple sprigs of thyme, 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, the seeds and pulp from the inside of the squash you just cut, and 2 quarts of water. Let simmer for 30 minutes while the squash is roasting. When it's done, just strain it and you'll have an amazingly delicious stock for your soup. You'll even have two pints left over! Just fill a mason jar (leave some head room so your jar doesn't crack) and freeze. You'll be so happy you did.

Abundance

You've heard me say it before, but I just have to say it again: we are SO lucky to be able to go to our amazing farmers' market year round, right in the heart of Seattle. I keep thinking about the part of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, when author Barbara Kingsolver talked about going to her farmers' market in early spring, braving the elements with a few other hard-core patrons for some baby lettuce and green onions.

Even though I'm at the market every Sunday, I am still delighted every time I see the incredible abundance. There is stall after stall brimming with vibrantly colorful winter vegetables like kale, rutabagas, beets, and carrots. Don't get me started on the beautiful leeks and winter apples.

I think even as I begin to grow more and more of my own food (I've got a new 30 square foot bed in my plans for my front yard vegetable garden), I'll still go to our farmers' market. If not for vegetables, for the camaraderie – a place where foodies and garden lovers commune.

And while I don't particularly love pushing myself through crowds of people, I am grateful that so many Seattlites see the value of this gem – a plethora of fresh, local vegetables in the dead of winter. It is an opportunity that I know that many of my friends and family members in other chilly parts of the country would love to take advantage of.

Now on a different note, I wanted to share a link to a website I discovered during my Master Gardener class yesterday. It's called Hortsense and is a resource with easy-to-access information, with color pictures, of our area's most common plant diseases and pests. The menu bar on the left side of the site will take you to all the different options.

The really nice thing about this site is that it gives you a variety of non-chemical solutions to try before using a pesticide. I learned some pretty disturbing information yesterday about how people misuse pesticides and the scary thing is, most of the time, the original problem with the plant wasn't even caused by a pest! It is so important to really understand what is going on in your backyard ecosystem and recognize that there are many creative and non-chemical solutions to very common and pesky garden problems. My new goal is to learn about one plant disease and one pest per month. After all, a girl can never have too many New Year's resolutions.