yearofplenty

View From Your Garden: Life is Good When You Can Keep a Garden

Here's a VFYG submission from Cat. You can read more about her garden at her blog Growing on the Swan Slough.

I was practically raised in the farmers market scene, coming along with my mom while she sold her homemade soap and home harvested honey when I was a kid. A few years later she started Flying Tomato Farm of Snohomish, WA with my stepdad and I really started to get interested in growing food. I'd keep coming along to market and would also help out a little here and there in the greenhouse, then I was hired on as a farmers market seller by an organic farmer in the Skagit. For the past six summers I've spent my weekends peddling all sorts of unique heirloom fruits and vegetables: orange and pink striped beets, numerous varieties of fingerling potatoes, super sweet shuksun strawberries, snap peas and english shellers, fava beans, rainbow carrots, mixed greens with edible flower petals, peacock kale, speckled troutsback romaine, purple tomatoes, jahrdale and cinderella pumpkins and far much more. I have found a passion for produce and feel fulfilled when I can grow, cook and enjoy it! 

This is the first year that I've really had the opportunity to get my very own garden going. It's been a very mild summer but I've done fairly well regardless. Right now I have all of the following growing in my garden: rhubarb, raspberries, blueberries, sugar snap peas, lacinato kale, brussel sprouts, french fingerlings, red thumb fingerlings, nordland potatoes,  yukon gold potatoes and peruvian purple potatoes, red runner beans, blue lake green beans, turnips, candy onions, red onions, yellow onions, three types of sunflowers, marigolds, sugar pie pumpkins, delicata winter squash, jack o'lantern pumpkins, Japanese red pumpkins, hops, and in the greenhouse I have pink brandywine tomatoes, evergreen tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, sweet 100 cherry tomatoes, basil, and agnes pickling cucumbers. Today, I harvested two wheelbarrows full of garlic! I had two spicy red hardneck varieties growing and elephant garlic. I feel soul-satisfied when I can get my hands into the dirt and raise my own crops to enjoy with loved ones at the dinner table. Life is certainly good when you can keep a garden!

Email me if you want to submit a pic and a paragraph about your garden.

View From Your Garden: Show Off Your Garden and Share What You Love About Gardening

I finally got everything planted today in the garden. I've never been this late but I've been hearing from others that the hot weather has never been this late either. Let's hope for a late fall freeze and a hot July and August. 

The last couple of years I've run a feature on the blog, View From Your Garden. If you'd like to have your garden featured, send a picture and description of your love of gardening to the email link listed to the right.

Community Gardens Sprouting on Rooftops in Hong Kong

CNN has the story of a growing, but still small urban farming movement in Hong Kong. 

For just $15 per month, Lam rents out toolbox-sized planter boxes to businessmen, elderly couples and families alike, and even runs horticulture classes. He uses imported soil from Germany to fill his planters and lets the humid, subtropical climate do the rest.

Fifteen dollars a month seems pretty steep but Hong Kong does have some of the highest property values in the world.

I thought this comment regarding resistance to gardening was interesting:

Outside of convincing politicians, Chau said Hong Kongers themselves have historically been resistant to the idea of farming as a suitable pastime.

"It is the lowest of our traditional caste system. In traditional Chinese culture, if you're good at nothing else, you work on the farm," Chau said. "Also, Hong Kong is a very money-minded place... land is also very expensive in Hong Kong, so people don't spend time worrying about growing their own food."

America has its own version of this caste system story. The consensus opinion on the growth of the US economy is that advances in farming freed people up from working on the farm so they could apply themselves to other more GDP-enhancing activities. This chart tells the story of the movement out of farm work in the U.S.:

China has its own version of this chart but relative to the American move away from the farm they are in 1850. This chart compares farm employment stats around the world and puts China at 47% in 1999.

In countries that have moved dramatically away from the farm there are efforts in place to reconnect with land and food. My sense is that this, in large part, is what drives the local food movement, the interest in farmers' markets, CSAs, and rooftop gardens - even in Hong Kong. It's a kind of farming-deficit disorder. It may be awhile before perceptions in China change around farming but they are already shifting dramatically in North America.

Midseason Garden Update: Mulching with Straw and Newspaper

For the first time we decided to mulch the pathways of our garden to make managing the weeds easier. We should have done this long ago. The technique is to put down a thick layer of newspapers and cover it with straw. It should kill whatever is growing in the path and for awhile keep new growth from popping up. Be sure to use straw, not hay. Hay is full of seeds.

Beware that wood chips, pine straw and other materials can change the acidity of the soil and if they get mixed in can "fix" the nitrogen in the soil, making it unavailable to the growing plants. This can be an issue with large amounts of non decomposed straw that get mixed in to the soil too, but to a lesser extent.

View from Your Garden - Urban Apiaries and a Roadside Chicken Tractor

I was driving down an urban street near Hamilton and Indiana on the north side of Spokane on Friday when I saw the chicken tractor pictured to the right stationed in a front yard next to the sidewalk.

I knocked on the door to find out the story behind the attractive design of the coop and was greeted by Will Olson, who showed me around the coop. The pyramid designed chicken tractor is his wife Cathy's project. They have three spring hatched hens; a Buff Orpington, Aracauna and Leghorn. These kind of tractors are designed to plop down on a section of lawn for awhile and then move to a new section after they've fertilized, but before they destroy the grass. Notice the handles on each end for lifting. More pictures of the coop after the jump.

The roost and nest are located above the caged area. Seems like a perfect set up for three birds in an urban setting. They are using the front yard because the dogs have already claimed the backyard.

After checking out the coop Will invited me to the backyard where I was surprised to find that he keeps bees in the adorable apiary pictured below.

I've heard about urban apiaries but this is my first time seeing one in action. He explained that you have to be certified by the state beekeepers association and must have a permit to keep hives in a residential area.

Last summer his bees produced 400 gallons of honey (he may have said lbs) which he sold at a makeshift stand up the corner from his house on Hamilton. He has sweetened the deal for his neighbors in a number ways including doubling the production of his next door neighbor's raspberry plants. 

You can find out more about Will's beekeeping efforts at his web site, Moose Meadow Apiaries.

Send me pictures of your garden/chicken coop/apiary (the list keeps growing) so I can feature it in the View from Your Garden series of posts.

View From Your Garden - North Carolina Veggies and Chickens

Below are pictures sent in by a reader from their central North Carolina garden. I have to say I'm a little jealous seeing that rich red soil and their row crops are already coming in nicely. Folks in southern climates sure do get a head start on those of us up north, but in more humid areas with long growing seasons they have more disease and pests to deal with. I notice in the picture that the basil is starting to go to seed with those long stalks at the top. One way to keep your basil producing tasty leaves all summer is to snip off the seed heads as they are forming. Some protection from the most intense heat of the sun also helps. I recommend inter-planting basil with tomatoes.

Nice job on the garden and coop Larry. Send me your pictures and garden descriptions as part of our View From Your Garden Series.

 

View From Your Garden - Chicken Tractor

Pictured above is a new Millwood area chicken tractor made from a discarded shipping crate. You can barely see it because of the shadows, but the crate is on wheels so it can be moved around, along with the PVC framed run. The birds can feed/mow and fertilize one section of grass and then do the same to the next section. If you don't move the run around their potent chicken poo will eventually kill the grass. They said it cost them around $300 with all of the hardware. They have two meat birds and some laying hens.

Send me pics of your chicken coop or tractor as part of the View from Your Garden Series.

View From Your Garden - Morning Star Farm & Pasture Fed Poultry

Morningstar Farm in Newman Lake sent along these pics as part of our View From Your Garden series. If you're looking for fresh healthy poultry that is grown and processed on the farm this is a great option. They describe their approach;

Our emphasis is pasture-based, cruelty-free farming and we raise our chickens in spacious pens where they can spend their days grazing on lush clover, alfalfa, grass, bugs, and all-natural grains. The pens are moved daily, insuring that the chickens always have a clean living space and a “salad bar” that is fresh every morning.

The key to our great tasting poultry is the grass. Chickens can derive as much as 30% of their nourishment from grass and it is this component, absent from the diet of most poultry today, which produces meat that is juicy, rich in flavor, and firm in texture.

A study at Virginia Tech comparing the fat content of pasture-raised chickens to that of grain-fed supermarket birds revealed that the pastured broilers are 70% lower in fat and are significantly higher in polyunsaturated (good) fat.

One twist on their approach to raising poultry is that they process the birds on the farm and you as the customer show up on the day they are processed to take home and either freeze them or use them fresh. They are taking orders for chickens to be picked up on the farm for later this summer. Call them up and find out more at 509-226-0489.

If you're familiar with Joel Salatin of Omnivore's Dilemma fame, they are following his approach. See below video to get an idea of what they do and how they do it.

View From Your Garden - Garlic Emerging at Cowgirl Co-op

Jill Smith from the Cowgirl Co-op in Greenbluff sent over this picture showing a few of their 500 plantings of garlic emerging from winter slumber. (It's best to plant your garlic in the Fall but you can put the cloves in the ground now and get a decent harvest in late summer. The heads of garlic won't be as large as if you plant them in the Fall.)

Go here to find out about the View from Your Garden Series. 

I'd love to include farms and farmers in the series. If you are a farmer and want to show us how your "garden" is coming along - send your pictures and a little bit of your story.

Show Off Your Garden in "View From Your Garden" Series

Someone over at the sister site at Down to Earth NW asked recently if the "View From Your Garden" Series is still on. Here's the proposal I made last Spring:

Andrew Sullivan the uber-blogger has a series on his site called “The View From Your Window” where he invites readers of the blog to send in pictures of their view from a window. It has become a staple of his blog and provides a fascinating perspective of people’s lives from around the world. I’d like to propose a much more humble version of this concept, called “The View From Your Garden.” I spent a good bit of blog space last year sharing about our journey of tearing up our lawn and putting in a vegetable garden. I’d like to open it up for the readers of Year of Plenty and the DTE series of blogs to submit photos of the view from your garden. Show us your veggies and flowers as they evolve through the growing season. Send your pictures via the "email me" link listed to the right.

Since Sullivan started his series it has evolved into a reader favorite on his site and has been made into a book. The picture that I submitted to his site as part of the series was even included in the book.

I had a decent response to the garden invitation last summer but I'm hoping that we can really ramp it up this summer and possibly even make it a daily feature. The reach of the blog has expanded quite a bit over the last year so I'm certainly open to gardens beyond the Inland Northwest region. In fact we've got another 2 months before our gardens start to take shape in our northern climate so those of you in the southern climes give us some inspiration by chiming in. If you're tearing out your lawn and putting in veggies send me a couple of pics to show the progression. I'd also love to hear the story of what compels you to garden but pictures and basic location of the garden (city, state) are also fine too.

Click through to see one of the fun submissions from last summer.

Picture: The view from Aylia's garden plot at the Pumpkin Patch community garden work day last Saturday.