Get ‘em in the ground! Hurry!

• Peas
• Beets
• Radishes

Note: These three are ridiculously easy to get going right now. Add some compost or organic fertilizer to your soil. Till it a little (stick a shovel or garden fork in and turn it over a bit). Add some peat moss if the soil is too heavy. Then plant (according to instructions of course).

Start ‘em inside. It’s easier!

• Lettuce
• Salad greens
• Kale
• Chard
• Onions

Note: Also ridiculously easy to grow. Get them started inside in little pots or soil blocks (soil mashed together like you would with a sand castle at the beach). Once sprouting, place under lights or a bright window. Harden them off outside, in a sheltered place near the house, even bringing them in at night for a few nights. Then once hardy, plant them outside. Make sure to sprinkle slug bait or another anti-slug method so they don’t munch on your lovelies.

Keep in mind…picture summer

• Basil (inside)
• Tomatoes (inside)
• Cilantro

Note: These will need additional lights, easiest on a timer, 14 hours per day. They will need to be up-potted (transferred to a bigger pot) when outgrowing the first one. Don’t you dare think about putting them outside until end of May. And REALLY baby them with the hardening off period. They will respond with early tomatoes if you can show some restraint in unleashing them to the big bad (cold) world out there.

Good luck!

With a little planning and some information, you can save money and conserve the seed packet for the entire season, on up to 3-4 years. My method gets you starting seeds indoors because the temperature remains fairly stable and most seeds germinate well in household temperatures.

Let’s start with a few basics first:

1) Seeds need a moist environment to germinate. No-brainer, right? Not too moist though – they can’t be soaking in water, so make sure most of the water is soaked up and not lingering in the tray. Sometimes soil can take a little while to soak up all the water, so wait a few minutes before thinking about dumping out extra water. One way to keep your soil moist and prevent from drying out, which is often the cause of seeds failing to germinate, is to cover the soil. You can use plastic wrap, ziploc or other clear bags, or special covers.

2) The type of soil used to start seeds needs to be light. You can buy a seed starting mix, but this is essentially peat moss, vermiculite and perlite. Actually most soil mixes contain these three items, with other heavier soils making up a small percentage of the mix. Perlite is the little white “rocks” you see in soil bags. It is a sterile mineral that is mined, heated until it “pops” like popcorn, and is toxic to breathe in (so no huffing that freshly opened bag of perlite).  Vermiculite is also a mineral, close to mica (remember your geology classes?), and is mined largely outside the US. Peat moss what happens when sphagnum moss is finely shredded. All of these are not really sustainable or eco-friendly. But these are what MANY nurseries use when growing plants. Almost all the veggie starts you buy will have been grown in these mixes. I’ve looked into alternatives, but you definitely pay the price (fired clay pellets, bricks of shredded coconut shells).

3) Once seeds have germinated, the moisture content of the soil needs to go down. Remove any covers you placed over the seeds and allow the soil to dry out a bit. However, keep a close watch to make sure the soil doesn’t completely dry out.

4) Light: Once seedlings have germinated, they need light. You can look into a grow light (see below for pricing) or place the seeds in a VERY bright window, preferrably south facing. If the seedlings get too leggy (tall and spindly), they don’t have enough light and may not do well in the longrun.

Stay tuned for some specifics on the equipment you’ll need. And find out how to make those little blocks of soil.

For example, most solanums (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) need heated soil to germinate. So, in the PNW, if you wait until the soil is hot enough for these plants to germinate, they wont have enough time to mature before the cold weather sets in during fall. This is why these plants are bought as starts instead of seeds.

However, other plants, such as greens, carrots, onions, kale, herbs…the list goes on and on…are so simple to start from seed, it makes much more sense financially to go this route. You can have fresh lettuce, salad greens, onions in storage, and basil coming out your ears, for pennies on the dollar. Take a look at the amount you spend on produce each trip to the store. If you took out some of the things you could grow from seed, would you have more money for other yummy foods? Or would you be able to start putting that money elsewhere?

Lettuce seed packet: $3.00

Number of seeds per packet (Territorial Seed Co.): 800

Number of lettuce heads from a single seed packet, accounting for thinning and some die-off: 75

Usual seed life: 3 years

Savings in 3 years with one seed packet ($1.99 for organic lettuce, 25 heads per year, one head every other week): $150

Price per lettuce head: $0.04

Now try this calculation for other vegetables you buy. How often do you use these? Would you eat them more often if you could afford it? If you had more money, would you purchase a variety of organic fruits regularly? Or maybe go out to dinner more often?

• Onions
• Shallots
• Carrots
• Kale
• Chard
• Spinach
• Beets (fresh and pickled)
• Radishes
• Heirloom tomatoes (fresh and canned)
• Bell Peppers
• Hot Peppers (fresh and dried)
• Green beans
• Cucumber
• Zucchini
• Winter Squash
• Broccoli
• Cabbage
• Peas
• Cauliflower
• Eggplant
• Leek
• Melon
• Herbs (basil, parsley, thyme, etc)
• Root crops (turnips, rutabagas, parsnips)
• Scallions/Green Onions

Okay, I understand, this list is overwhelming. Can you pick three things you eat a TON of? Or three things you wish you could buy regularly?

Granted, seed starting does take more work. But once you make it a weekly or every-other-week habit, it gets a lot easier. I’ve been able to get seeds started in my grow area in 20 minutes. The payoff will come by the bushel! Not to mention how fresh produce tastes! 

Next week I will detail how I start seeds – stay tuned!

ediful@yahoo.com

Well, another year is finished. The vegetables are pulled up or under cold frames. The cover crops are planted and are (hopefully) still alive after our hard freeze last week. To another winter of perusing gardening books, seed catalogs and nursery pickings. Thank you to all who supported Ediful Garden Consulting over the past year. Stay tuned for some discounted garden consulting rates and regular blogs about when to do what. I’m hoping to get much more information out there this year on a more regular basis. Hope everyone has happy holidays and a restful dormant period.

Tara

As Territorial Seed Company says, “Winter Gardening Means Summer Planting”, and so it is that time of year to get some fall and winter crops in the ground. Since this summer has been especially cool, you can still get some fall crops in the ground that usually should go in during July at the latest. Here’s a rough schedule to follow:

Must be planted ASAP: beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, kale, chard, parsnips, rutabagas.

Can be planted through the end of August: green onions, shallot seeds, spinach, turnips.

Can wait until fall (September/October): arugula, garlic, shallot bulbs, snow peas, lettuce, mustard greens, radishes.

Some of the plants above do better over the winter with a cold frame for protection from frost. Other plants benefit from a light covering of straw to prevent freezing. With all the fall crops, they will often taste much sweeter after a frost or two, which promotes increased sugars in the plant (beets, greens, kale and others are key ones that come to mind.

Contact me for a garden consultation to get you started growing!

   Since this spring and winter have been relatively mild, with very few dips into the cold weather, the aphids have had a chance to splurge. Early on I began seeing a few aphids here and there on my roses, hostas and hellebore. Why they like the hellebore, I have no idea, but they seem to hit those plants every time. I had done a pretty good job of managing the annoying little bugs for a while, checking in on all the plants occasionally on my surveys of the yard (you know, the one at the end of the day with a drink in hand). Eventually I decided to get a bag of ladybugs from a local nursery, about an $8 investment, and spread them onto the roses one evening after dark, making sure they had water on the leaves to drink from.

   Often when I spread ladybugs I will notice them for only a little while and then they all seem to disappear. This time, several of them seemed to be having romantic dinners, eating the nectar on the peony buds. I learned later nectar is a preferred food of adult ladybugs. These guys were totally getting it on all over my peonies. Shocking!

This little guy is muching on an aphid.

A short while later, we discovered that our big evergreen clematis covering a trellis along the front of the house had become absolutely infested with aphids. My husband actually alerted me to it when he noticed bugs on his shoulder after brushing by the vine on the way to the front door (he’s tall, so he hits a lot of things I don’t particularly notice). Pretty gross. I was all ready to do some major spraying (not pesticides, but water, to shoot the bugs off) when I noticed peculiar little yellowish-orange eggs, about the size of the tip of a pencil, in groups of 10 or so, on some of the undersides of the leaves. After trimming the plant back from around the door, I assured Derek these eggs were the makings of a natural pest remedy.

It was pretty amazing watching them hatch and start crawling all over the little vines. Today I’ve noticed a few larvae starting their transformation into ladybugs. There are no more aphids on the evergreen clematis today. None. Zero. I’d say that’s a pretty good reason not to use pesticides.

Larvae turning into a ladybug

  The telltale sign of beneficial bugs eating your aphids are little tiny white “shells” almost like dandruff, where aphids used to be. We still have a few aphids in the yard in certain places and I’ve carefully transported a few larvae to these areas. However, I’m starting to get a little more lax about the aphid situation. I figure the ladybugs are on to a very good food source in my little urban habitat and they probably wont be leaving soon. And now I am hoping to encourage lots of promiscuity anywhere the ladybugs want to get it on.

Arugula (top) and Endive (bottom)

“It’s sourced from China?!?” said a woman in the bulk food section of New Seasons, rather loudly. “Well I didn’t need it anyway!” as she huffed off. I’d grown accustomed to looking at where the fresh produce was from, but not the bulk bins! Jeez! As I scanned the rows it kind of shocked me.  Black beans from China. Quinoa from Bolivia.

Now I understand some things we just can’t or don’t grow well here. But come on. Black beans? It’s unbelievable we don’t grow more foods within our borders. Blueberries and asparagus from South America? We have this craving as a society for any food from anywhere whenever we want it. Peppers and tomatoes in the middle of winter. Winter squash in summer. Is it really so hard to change our eating habits so that we eat with the seasons?

Spinach

We’re fortunate in the PNW to live close to California, the incredibly bountiful location where produce comes from before we can grow it here. But even changing our buying habits from purchasing greens from California to buying them from farmers markets, or even better, growing it ourselves can be a small change that everyone can make. If you have a pot and some soil, it literally takes less than a minute to plant seeds.

Lettuce and green onions

Even if you just grow lettuce, you’re getting started. Plus you’ll get fresh greens (and the satisfaction of doing it yourself) for pennies compared to the store-bought stuff. In this economy I know there are lots of people who wouldn’t mind saving some coin.

Things you plant die unexpectedly. You don’t know what is and isn’t a weed. You can grow a few tomatoes, but are interested in growing more. You just want a space to relax in.  How about fresh flowers from the garden every week instead of doling out $20 for a bouquet? Anybody can garden. I am passionate about giving people the inspiration and nudge to get going.  As far as hiring a person for your garden, I am an extremely cost effective alternative to formally trained landscape designers. Plus it isn’t a one-time only option. This is meant to be a collaborative process that can happen slowly over time. My goal? To get you growing, whether its food or flowers or a landscape.

What does Ediful mean? Ediful is a combination of edible and beautiful.  I can provide non-edible garden designs just as easily as edible ones and am available for any education about edible gardening if you aren’t sure.

Check out my products and the rest of my website and contact me when you are ready. My blog starts below. Oh, and you can keep track of my blog posts by finding me on facebook.

Thanks,

Tara

ediful@yahoo.com

Portland:

• Eastmoreland Garden Club SE Bybee Blvd and 27th Ave. Perennials, herbs, natives, tomato starts. Sunday 10-2.
• Rhododendron Show/Sale SE 28th Ave 1 block North of Woodstock. $3 admission. Saturday 9-6 and Sunday 9-5.
• Chinese Classical Garden 239 NW Everett St. Peony sale May 8-31.
• Community Transition Center 6801 SE 60th Ave. Hanging baskets, vegetables, annuals. Thursday and Friday 8:30-3.
• Portlandia African Violet Club Jantzen Beach Super Center. Standards, miniatures, trailing violets. Sunday at 10.

Vancouver:

• Master Garderner Foundation of Clark Co. WSU Research and Extension Unit. 1919 NE 78th St. Vegetables, annuals, berries, shrubs. Saturday 9-4 and Sunday 10-3.

Clackamas County:

• Annie Ross House 2300 SE Harrison St, Milwaukie. Perennials, annuals and hanging baskets. Saturday at 8:30am.
• West Linn Lions Bolton Primary School 5933 Holmes St, West Linn. Fuschia baskets, geraniums, gerbera daisies. Saturday at 8am.
• Milwaukie Garden Club 12201 SE Linwood Ave, Milwaukie. Sunday 10-4.

Washington County:

• Cedar Mill Garden Club NW Cornell Rd @ 119th Ave. Perennials, natives, herbs, vine maples and shrubs. Friday and Saturday 9-5.
• Glencoe High School 2700 NW Glencoe Rd, Hillsboro. Apples, hanging baskets, vegetables. Thursday 8-6:30, Friday 8-4 and Saturday 8-1:30.