Sustainable Crown Hill is putting on a Sheet Mulching and Lasagna Gardening Workshop.  These are methods for converting lawn and other areas into the healthy soil and garden space the easy way.  This workshop is for both people wanting to learn and those who are ‘old hands’.   Bring your curiosity, questions, and experience to share.  Using layers of different materials including cardboard, straw, manure, burlap, and even feathers, we will put into practice what we’ve learned help to covert a lawn to future garden space.

Please wear  garden clothes and sturdy shoes.  Work or garden gloves will be a plus.
For directions and information contact Kit at
tehama@speakeasy.net or 206.706.7663 evenings and weekends

First strawberries of the season

Woohoo! The first strawberries of the season are now maturing in our yards thanks to the heat of the last few weeks. We can soon expect to see Washington state berries in our local supermarkets and farmer’s markets. The imported California strawberries have suffered long enough on their journey up here and are far from their prime by the time they reach our mouths.  Strawberries lose flavor pretty quickly after picking, so the ones from your garden can’t be beat. Though usually smaller than the monster berries from the supermarket, the flavor of those freshly picked from your garden trump all.

Strawberries are pretty easy to grow from bare root starts available in February and March, and may even show up as volunteers in your yard like the plant these berries were found on. They can be grown in containers too. So put this plant on your list for next year. If you know someone with strawberries in their garden, you can also pick up plants from their runners.

Snail (Helix aspersa on Hosta leaf)

Caught this not so little snail (25 mm high, 35 mm diameter) in the garden this morning rapidly devouring a Hosta leaf. Looks like the snail found all over California brought to this continent for eating purposes.

I wasn’t aware we had them here in Seattle. A quick trip to the “Identification Guide to Land Snails and Slugs of Western Washington” (http://academic.evergreen.edu/projects/ants/TESCBiota/mollusc/key/webkey.htm) and following the dichotomous key I ended up at Helix aspersa (http://academic.evergreen.edu/projects/ants/TESCBiota/mollusc/key/hel_asp/hel_asp.htm). Indeed it is a European intruder.

Hey that was fun, following a branching (dichotomous) key answering one question at each step to arrive at a definitive ID.

Couple of questions here: 1) Are you seeing these voracious land molluscs in your yards? and 2) Ecological/Organic control methods?

I recall as a young lad in the Silicon Valley getting 50 cents a bucket for collecting them by hand, and there was a never ending supply. We then poured rock salt into the bucket to keep the snails from ending up back in the yard.

The Sustainable Crown Hill meeting is coming up this Sunday.  Bert will be giving his 2nd talk on permaculture starting at 3 PM, around 5:30 or 6 we will break for our potluck, and then start the meeting.

Location:
Heidi and Bert’s house
9524 – 1/2 12th Ave NW
(on the paved alley off 12th south of 96th St)

Please send any agenda items to me, Carol Kennedy.

See you this Sunday,

Carol K.

I recently learned of another way to enjoy potatoes that doesn’t involve eating or growing them. A friend shared the following suggested exercise for seniors to build muscle strength in the arms and shoulders.

The original article suggested doing it three times a week. It’s so easy, I thought I’d pass it on.

Begin by standing on a comfortable surface where you have plenty of room at each side. With a 5-pound potato sack in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can. Try to reach a full minute, then relax. Each day, you’ll find that you can hold this position for just a bit longer.

After a couple of weeks, move up to 10-pound potato sacks. Then use 50-pound potato sacks, and eventually try to get to where you can lift a 100-pound potato sack in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute.

After you feel confident at that level, put a potato in each of the sacks.

And if you’re looking for music to memorialize the death of the PI,  former Seattle-ite Heidi Muller has this finely crafted contribution “Goodnight PI” to mark the passage.

In Seattle, we often wait quite a while for that first “real” tomato from the garden while our friends in California, Eastern Washington, and climes warmer have been enjoying fresh, homegrown tomatoes since early June. And cherry tomatoes really don’t count — try slicing cherry tomatoes for a sandwich . This year’s first tomato was plucked from the garden on August 8th. Finally, we can have truly local tomatoes when they are the sweetest and far better than even the Eastern Washington tomatoes available so far at “local” farmers markets. We have enough plants to can the surplus fruit we cannot eat as quickly as it ripens. There is nothing like opening a jar of homegrown tomatoes in the doldrums of February to cook into a marvelously sweet pasta sauce.

This year’s exercise in growing tomatoes began at the Central Market in Shoreline, the weekend before Memorial Day where eight very large “starts” were purchased at four plants for ten dollars. There were even already a couple of small tomatoes already on the plants. Perhaps one year, I will grow my own starts from seed. I bought 2 each of Taxi, Early Girl, “Roma”, and “Black”. The Taxi plants are determinate, while the others are indeterminate cultivars. The plants did not move out to the garden for a week, as the evening temperatures were still less than fifty degrees. Upon planting in the garden we were treated to what must have been the coldest month of June on record. The bumblebees and honeybees crawled over the flowers extracting nectar and pollen hitch-hiking along in the “combs” of bristles on their legs. It wasn’t until a number of successive warm days in July that the plants succeeded in their march toward the top of their wire cages, and soon set much fruit.

As we tended and watered the plants, the green fruit elongated and widened, and we kept checking for the slightest blush of color in the green tomatoes. Our (im)patience was finally rewarded last weekend as one of the Taxi’s lost its deep green color, yielding a light blush of yellow (the Taxi cultivar produces taxi-cab yellow, smallish fruit of about 2 to 2-1/2 inches). A few days later the intensity of yellow color deepened, and the tomato was snatched to be admired on our kitchen window sill as it ripened a day or two, rather than consumed by a member of our local herd of marauding raccoons.

Our (im)patience continues to be rewarded. This morning a three inch Early Girl was noticed with decidedly pink coloring, and a few “Blacks” and “Romas” will no doubt follow suit.

Happy urban gardening!

1. If you have fruit you won’t be using, let me know and when it will be ripe.
2. If you know a neighbor who has a tree that they might be willing to donate from, go ask them and then let me know.
3. If you’d like to join in on a picking session one weekday evening or weekend day in the next few months – you guessed it – let me know!

1. Put together a list of trees that need to be picked.
2. When one or more trees is ready to be picked I’ll send out a call to everyone that has said they’d be willing to pick to show up at a certain time and place if they’re able.
3. Make sure we’ve got the tools and supplies we need to pick, package, and deliver everything to the food bank.

This year’s veggie garden includes pole beans, tomatoes (taxi, early girl, roma, black varieties), basil, strawberries, garlic, elephant garlic, and lots of volunteer pumpkins from the cold compost pile. We also have sage and rosemary to round out the herb production. Our pole apple we planted this year is beset with aphids (http://www.backyardnature.net/aphid_lc.htm) on the terminal tender leaves, but the predacious lady bugs have arrived to hopefully quash the green interlopers.

With eight tomato plants and lots of fruit already set, we’re looking forward to many weeks of fresh tomatoes for us, and a few canning sessions to put some aside for the long wait until the first tomatoes of next season (we still have one jar left from last year’s seventeen).