The Garden Gargantuan

OK, no stories cause there's too much going on. Instead, photo overview of happenings 'round the homestead. Click on each photo to see it enlarged.

Cherries!!! Another few weeks and they'll be ripe - but I'm snacking on them already.


Chicken who knows she's not supposed to be in the house...


Cucumber flowering against bottle wall


Tomatoes by bottle wall. Flowers on all and first fruit set on Stupice.


First melon plant attempt. First tendrils appear.


Garlic wanting to bloom


Garlic scapes for omelettes...yum!


Greta's double yolker with garlic scapes and kale made a perfect meal for the two of us


Beautiful fennel plant - my first year growing - yum roasted fennel...


Garden madness!


Trellising peas, tomatoes, squashes, beans! Without having to work so hard to combat gravity, plants really do grow faster.


Squashes galore. I'm growing a variety of winter and summer squashes this year. High hopes for summer grilling and winter soups.


First potato flowers! Plants have topped the 16" potato boxes and will now make tubers.



Wee art project - casting the maple shadow against the house.


First strawberries! Saved up enough for strawberry shortcake last night. So good, Scott didn't even miss the whipped cream I forgot to make. I planted two varieties (Tristar and Seascape) but of course forgot to mark which was which. Now I want to know cause one variety makes large strawberries, the other small.


Trellising beans with old twigs - Tiger's eyes that weren't supposed to vine! I also have bushy-looking squashes that were supposed to vine and aren't.



I hope to have more project postings soon. Besides the endless walkway project, we're working on arbours for the wee backyard, and a compost bin. More soon!

The Bottle Wall Project

Although equipped with a huge and elaborated front yard, the back yard of our house is tiny. One hop, one skip, and one jump from the back door and you’re in the alley. Not a lot of opportunity for quiet reflection in the rare and precious sun of a fall or winter afternoon - especially with the fleet yard of O’Neil plumbing just off portside. The only reason this matters is that in the off-season this western exposure gets the best sun on our property.



When we moved in last fall we were pretty sure we wanted to privatize this wee space. But how? Wooden fences can be expensive and might cast too much shade. Bamboo is expensive and would take too long to grow. Brainstorming renewable/recyclable ideas, I hit on a bottle wall.

Typically bottle walls are set in concrete or cob, but our needs were special. Because the wall would be along an alley in a less than model neighbourhood, we needed to be able to replace bottles if they were broken. We also needed the wall to have a minimal footprint. And we thought it might be really nice to have light shine through.


So we started accumulating bottles. I was thinking wine bottles, but Scott thought beer would be more appropriate along the alley. Plus he wanted to call the project ’99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall’. We ended up with a mixture of beer and wine.


Like the chickens and the garden and the composting fence in the front yard, the bottle wall is a conversation starter with neighbours. We like that. Some even drop bottles off for us. We’ve starting buying beer because of the beautiful bottles. And we bring home empties from parties and scavenge interesting bottles from the curb when we’re out on our bikes.

It’s hot back there now that it’s summer. Over several grueling afternoons last week, we dug down into the gravel and hardpan to make a hot plant bed. It is filled with tomatoes, and cucumbers that I hope will twine up the fence posts. We have also planted eggplant, melons, and basil in pots, and strawberries and flowers colour the corner of the house where we recently planted a combination plum tree.


From our redneck recliners, we will continue to drink our fence until it is full (feel free to drop to help!), later we'll put an arbour atop the fence, perhaps allow hops to crawl up the alley-side... Until then, we are enjoying the new sense of privacy as we sit in the warm sun in the early evening.


Most unexpected benefit? The wall hums when the wind blows through…

Attack of the Black Spot

When I first started planting this spring, I thought the 1-mm-ish black spots appearing on my plants were alive. I.e. fungus or other biological agent of destruction for my young seedlings. However, although they continue to appear on plants young and old, they do not grow. I also notice them now on unliving objects, such as my hose (in photo). Conclusion: atmospheric fallout. Of what? From where?

To be continued...

Chicken Proselytizers

(photo from the West Seattle Blog!)

On Sunday, Scott and I volunteered at the Sustainable West Seattle Festival. I think we were the only booth not staffed by a business or nonprofit - just the two of us with our chicken passion. I got a little worried when we arrived to the colourful banners at all the other tables, but we put up a hasty hand-drawn sign, replete with cartoon chicken, and the people came anyhow.

I gave the first talk at the Community Workshop tent. Scott thinks I had the best turn out of the day! I had prepared slides in case it was rainy and I had a small enough audience for my laptop, but the sun came out and a few minutes into my talk I had 30 or more listeners. I passed around handouts and talked for perhaps 25 minutes, with another 20 for Q&A. It was exhilarating to be able to talk about chickens to an interested audience - nothing but chickens for 45 minutes! I'd love to give this talk again, and if I do I will have more visuals!

Scott meantime manned the booth where we had a carton of fake nest box eggs, my eggmen, printed resource sheets, and a running slide show of our chicken photos on my laptop. We met lots of nice people, about an equal number of chicken owners and non-owners. Lots of questions we could answer and some we could not (Q: What to do about dominance hierarchy fights with new introducees? A: Nothing?, Q: How about raising ducks? A: Uhh, get a book from the library?).

Very excitingly, we started, and had great response to, a list for a West Seattle Tour of Chicken Coops. Seattle Tilth has an annual Coop Tour, but it is spread across the whole city and focuses on fancier setups. I was disappointed by it. I wanted to bike to coops in my area, meet neighbours, and see the variety of ways I might raise chickens. Well, West Seattle isn't even on the coop tour this year, so we'll just do our own in our own way. If you want to host or attend the tour this summer, leave me a note!!

Spring in Seattle...continued

The first asian pear blossom!

Spring has Marched through April to May, and the flower parade continues. I've never been into flowers, but as they appear for the first time to adorn our yard, I find that I love the splashes of impossible colour. They will stay.

Stunning azalea blossoms with potato boxes in background. Click on each photo to see it full-sized!





Obligate chicken shot - Greta & Rocky hanging on the straw bale

Starting a new vegetable garden

There are lots of ways to start a new vegetable garden; removing sod, rotting sod, bringing in new soil, and the ‘lasagna method’. I read about them all. And, in the end, I did them all. First though, I tried the easiest: the lasagna method. For a lasagna garden, you create a raised bed by layering organic matter that decomposes over the winter. By spring, you should be able to dig into the top mulch and plant directly into nice composted soil. Or so the story goes.

Upon the beautiful grass, I laid cardboard from our moving boxes, and followed that with layers of fall leaves, kitchen scraps, and some enriched soil from my inherited compost pile. Then I ran out of material. I covered the whole area with burlap bags from the local coffee joint, crossed my fingers, and waited until spring. March 1st, I ordered 4 yds of topsoil/compost and spread a good 4” on top of my half-baked version of a lasagna. Now THAT was looking nice! At the beginning of April, I decided it was time to plant.

The gardening method I am trying this year is the ‘WORD’ system (Wide rows, Organic methods, Raised beds, Deep soils in ‘The Vegetable Gardener’s BIBLE’). In addition to raising beds by adding the soil from dug paths between the wide beds, author Ed Smith recommends loosening the subsoil. When I tried this, my shovel found last fall’s sod still intact. Damn – I was going to have to remove the sod after all.



Much to the delight of the chickens, who nabbed every worm and grub I turned up, I started hand digging the partially-decomposed sod. Aie, my aching back! It wasn’t long before I agreed to Scott’s suggestion and borrowed neighbour Matt’s rototiller to finish the job. Hard work even then! I removed the hunks of decomposing sod that would chatter to the surface, and finally had nice, deep soils that were starting to look and feel like ‘garden’.



As per Ed’s Bible, I marked out rows 3-4’ wide with 1.5’ wide paths between them. Using guide lines, I dug the footpaths, placing the soil on top of the beds, then raked the beds flat. My garden area slopes south and west, so contouring would have been a good idea. But I laid out the rectangle before considering the incline, so when raking the beds flat I tried to compensate by leveling them somewhat. Finally, I laid down newspaper (4-6 layers) and straw on my footpaths, which hopefully will prevent any remaining sod from regrowing. Voila!


One lone spear of asparagus has emerged from the scrawny octopi that came labeled as asparagus crowns 3 weeks ago. Hopefully more will follow. I’ve planted peas, cabbages, carrots, kale, fennel, parsnips, and onions. Marigolds, nasturtiums, and dill were sown at the bed ends to encourage beneficial insects. And so it has begun! Every day a new adventure!

Newspaper Pots

The tomato seedlings needed transplanting. Their wee roots were poking out the bottom of the egg carton and the true leaves were having trouble growing. Books recommended transplanting to 4" pots around this time. But I didn't have any and didn't want to buy any. So I looked around for a solution that would be free and for which I had the materials. Newspaper pots! 'Eric in Japan' had been in the same situation and wrote a photo journal of how to make origami pots from newspaper. Love the internet, no? Eric made his from standard newspaper, so large flaps held the form. I used The Stranger, which is smaller than your standard daily, so I used paperclips to secure the flaps (staples would have been great, except I don't want to find them later in the garden).

It took me about 3 minutes to make each pot and my fingers got coated in nasty-feeling ink, but I made enough pots to transplant all my seedlings and to start some new ones. Best is, the pots can be planted right in the ground when it's time to plant them out. Yay!