The Last Fruit of the Season
With no fresh fruit around, we honor the humble medlar, the last fruit of the season.
Winter is a Garden Season
Hardly bereft of beauty, the winter garden is filled with subtle pleasures.
Thinking about Rain Barrels
Better than nothing, a single rain barrel isn’t very effective for Seattle’s weather pattern.
Green Roofs for Rabbit Hutches
Instead of 24 square feet of tar, we’re growing strawberries on top of the rabbit hutch.
Trapping Potatoes the Easy Way!
Tricky and conniving, potatoes can take over nearly anywhere you lay them. Hungry feeders, they sap your soil! Those pesky tubers! I’d be the first to admit though, if you dig them up while they least expect it and rush them to the oven or grill, they’re unlike anything you’ll taste in the store, full [...]
Closing: Weyerhaeuser’s Bonsai Garden
Changes are if you’ve come to Seattle to visit me, I’ve suggested that we go visit the Weyerhaeuser Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection. It’s a regional treasure and I can’t think of any place like it in the country. The rationale part of my brain recognizes the irony that this collection of priceless, small manicured trees [...]
Stretching Our Edible Garden: Mushrooms!
We have a dirty little patch of ground behind our garden shed where we stack extra lumber from our projects and keep the recycling bin out of sight. It’s not a large space, but I got thinking, Isn’t there something we could do that’s more interesting and productive? Ah! MycoMadness! We’re sprouting mushrooms. This year, [...]
Starting Starts for Summer
Ah, these little seeds may well be late. Weeks ago we converted our old dining table into seed table as the seed table went downstairs and the seed room was converted over to a future foster kid’s room. Until today, that table was a mess of Victor’s “experiments”, my untended (and dying) Coleus starts, and [...]
Early Spring in the Kitchen Garden
It’s snowing again today. It looks like we’re in for another cool week, but the kitchen garden is finally planted for Spring. Uncovering the kale and arugula, I’ve moved the cloche to help get the new set of seeds growing: carrots, favas, beets, lettuce, radishes. While that little extra bit of warmth will help, it’s [...]
Same as it ever was…same as it
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautifulWife. And you may ask yourself, “Well…how did I get here?” They say it’s the last year of the Northwest Flower and Garden Show, one of the largest exhibits of its type in the country. With our mild maritime climate, we can grow most [...]
Winter Garden in Bloom
Feeling stir crazy with a major project I needed to wrap up, I decided that a bit of fresh air and a walk would do me good. Just starting our second year, we’ve got a few hellabores in our garden, which we’re getting to see bloom for the first time. This got me thinking about [...]
Garden Pride: Is it a Sin?
Starting with nothing but square yard lined with arborvitae, we headed toward our July wedding and summer BBQ season with a vision: flowering madness and food to eat. Despite our March snow and cold June, with the help of professionally grown starts, we’re now able to sit back and watch the hummingbirds, bees, and all [...]
New Garden Textures
On the small scale, our first year garden is a great success. With a wink, I tell Victor, I’m working on many tableau, which is about all we can do as we wait for the anchoring plants to grow in.
Oh! Possom…
“What are we going to do with them?” asked Vic when we got back from our mini-moon to find two baby possoms in the bottom of our yard waste can. “We could drown them.” It seems that we’ve been too successful in our transformation of our yard into an edible paradise. We’ve birds moving in, [...]
In Which We Welcome Nana and Ori
No small goldfish bone of contention, my desire to have fish again in the garden was not getting the go-ahead by Victor. Of course, my last koi pot became a sashimi bar for the racoons before the very last fish met his doom frozen solid during an unusually bitter winter. Vic’s knowledge of these events [...]
Darwin’s Garden
Given the similarities between England and Seattle’s climate, I don’t know why I was surprised that our garden will look a lot like Darwin’s when it’s done. Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure at the New York Botanical Garden includes a recreation of his garden in the Conservatory, a small collection of period botanical guides and [...]