Plan Now for a Late-Summer Pea Harvest!

Here in the Pacific Northwest we say, “Plant your peas by President’s Day,” and though I wander about pontificating this wisdom, I never quite manage to follow it.  As usual, I’m late with my pea planting this year, but now that I’m finally getting to it, I wanted to let …

Upcycled Burlap Bags in the Garden (and Farewell to Grass)

Last year we expanded our vegetable garden three-fold by converting grass into raised beds.  My plan for last autumn was to sheet mulch the last row of grass that receives any sun, making it ready for spring planting.  Sheet mulching is the  great, labor-saving method of converting any grassy-weedy area …

Coffee Chaff Chicken Coop Litter: Creative Upcycling for the Urban Farmer

My friend David Ruggiero is working on a new project called “Upcycling Northwest.”  Upcycling, of course, is the in-word for smarter/better recycling, making use of the energy in the initial production of something, rather than using more energy to break it down into raw materials–or, as David puts it, finding …

Seed Saving for the Faint of Heart

It’s the end of the harvest season, and although a great deal of my mind and energy is turned to enjoying the fruits of this year’s produce (today I’m canning applesauce and freezing pureed sugar pie pumpkin) already I find myself dreaming of the spring garden.  Part of this impulse, …

A New Way to Freeze Cherry Tomatoes: Tasty Herb-roasted Bites

We’ve had a great  tomato year–about as good as it gets in Seattle.  A hot summer, and warmth into the beginning of October (last year the green tomatoes practically withered on the vine in early August).  But autumn is truly with us now, and as I pick tomatoes this Harvest …

Mammoth Sunflowers/Homegrown Birdfeeder

We planted several Mammoth Sunflowers in our garden this year.  Clearly, they don’t call them “mammoth” for nothin’, though this is the only one that grew to truly mutant proporations.  It’s gorgeous–I want a whole forest of them.  And once again we stand in awe of that perennial gardening miracle: …

Heirloom Tomato Tart

It’s the peak of tomato season in Seattle–the plants are covered with the most beautiful shades of green, orange, yellow, red, and burgundy.  We are canning tomatoes, drying tomatoes, making salsa, carrying baskets of tomatoes to neighbors, concocting tomato recipes, and of course eating cherry tomatoes like they’re potato chips.  …

Permaculture Happens: Adapting the Three Sisters

While puttering in the garden the other day, I noticed that a couple of the Kentucky Blue Pole beans has escaped their proper pole, and were vining about the mammoth sunflower planted next to them. I leaned over to gently unwrap the beans, and return them to the bamboo teepee …

Stubble Planting: Hidden Worlds and No-till Gardens

I’ve been perusing a beautiful new book by Barbara Pleasant, The Complete Compost Gardening Guide. Pleasant invites us into the rich underworld of our backyard soil, asking us to see it as a living food web, rather than a simple input-output system.  In one of my favorite sections, she discusses …

Lazy Seattle Tomato Farming and The First Tomato: Don’t Pick it!

My favorite farmer’s market tomato grower is Billy of Billy’s Organic Farm in Tonasket. He assured me that his San Marzano start–an Italian, open-pollinated heirloom plum tomato–would bear a ripened tomato by the 4th of July.  He was right!  Here’s our first fruit on June 30th. BUT.  Though we were …