The Cheery Girls of Spring

A little cheer for those still in the depths of winter. We've enjoyed an early spring here, though our forecast is calling for a bit of a chill this coming week. I used that excuse to pick and pic a few flowers.

I know Meg Ryan told Tom Hanks that daisies are the friendliest flower but I humbly disagree. Daffodils are clearly the friendliest flower of all, welcoming us gently back to spring.


I guess if you're going to be one of the first flowers of spring you really need to be bright and bold to ensure the pollinators find you through the gloom....


This giant Camelia lives under a few fir trees on the edge of our yard and I swear it's a monster! I am not quite sure where it begins and where it ends but it does have beautiful glossy leaves and a purely Hawaiian palate in the earliest of spring. Makes me want to tuck one behind my ear and drink a Mai Tai.

Happy Sunday,

Amanda

The Big Project

Hubby and I have been busy over the last several weekends planning and preparing our new vegetable (and fruit!) garden. We are clearing most of a 50x50 spot, excluding a corner that sports a few big cherry trees. My parents owned our house before we bought it from them, and they used to keep a garden in this location when I was a teenager. It is fun to be recovering the family garden!

We got the sketch together, marked the corners with orange paint (whee!) and got a little help taking the grass out. We've both been working long hours this spring and we figured there would be more than enough work even after the sod was gone. So far, this appears to have been a good call! We had the gardener put the piles of sod aside for composting, seems like it should compost quite quickly.

After studying up on row design, we ended up choosing 4 foot wide rows with 2 foot aisles between. These apparently have a few advantages - light soil because you don't walk on the bed surface, warm soil from the raised mound in the spring, some shading of the soil in the summer due to the dense planting without so many rows in between. Plus heck, they just look cool. We also included 4 foot paths for major thoroughfares, and plenty of area for the dog to run around the perimeter.

We staked a few beds out and started loosening the soil. It was fairly compact where it had been lawn before. First we loosened the soil with shovel and pitchfork, next we decided to sift the dirt with a sifter we'd made for the compost. That took much longer than we expected, but the soil did end up light and lovely. We had the neighbor's loyal golden retrievers for company. Sorry about the sunspot, but this one was the best angle...(We forget about the sun here in the winter, we see it so rarely!)
In addition to sifting the beds, we also sifted the compost. We plan on planting in a few of these beds quite quickly (onions next weekend!) so we didn't want too much hot/unfinished compost. The lumpy bits (on the left) get returned to the big compost pile for a little more work. 2 beds down, 6 + to go.

Should be quite an adventure! Now we're puzzling on a deer fence...

Ready, Set, Starts!

With our unseasonably warm temperatures, we're throwing caution to the wind - and a few seeds too. This weekend we cleaned out our pair of 6x8 raised beds, added aged compost from the pile (enriched heavily with free coffee grounds from Starbucks), and filled them spring veggie seeds. Summer veggies are bound for the new garden spot we're clearing, but that's another story for another day.

We direct sowed:
Veronica Hybrid Broccoli
Burpee's Golden Beets
Chiogga Beets
French Breakfast Radish (a lovely gift from a christmas elf!)
5 Color Silverbeet Swiss Chard
Dragon Carrots
French Market Carrots (oh la la it's getting French in here)
Nantes Half Long Carrots

Flat Leaf Parsley (much better than curly leaf and grows better too)
Cascade Harvest Mix Lettuce (free from Puget Sound Fresh @ NWFGS)

Note the liberal use of bamboo stakes. Later wrapped with jute twine for cat discouragement technique. So far so good.

We tried something slightly different with the Sugar and Snow Peas - we sprouted them between wet paper towels after an overnight soak in warm water. Can't say yet if this makes them come up faster - but it does have a satisfying sense of growthiness about it...observe!Since I had the camera, I snapped a few snowdrops from that day...
Have you planted yet?

Amanda

Reading List from the NWFGS

Ravenna Gardens Display Garden

I treated myself to a day off on Friday to take a spin around the Northwest Flower and Garden show. Among the amazing show gardens, plants, roots, shoots, seeds, greenhouses, coldframes, tools, trinkets, baubles, snacks and As Seen on TV fun there was a large amount of information available from garden groups and nurseries. I was so impressed by the volunteers and professionals that devoted their time and expertise to the show.

Here are a few of the gems that got me excited - a virtual "show homework list" for myself.

Local
Cascade Harvest Coalition is a nonprofit organization dedicated to connecting local farmers and consumers. Coming out with a cookbook soon.

Edible Seattle I had a lovely chat with editor Jill Lightner about growing your own and local food. Loved the articles in the free issue!

Fruit Trees
Western Washington Fruit Organization is a volunteer organization that shared lots of great information. They are holding a field day in March in Mount Vernon.

Seattle Tree Fruit Society shared a sample apple maggot barriers. They have a monthly meetings and informative website.

Plant Amnesty had informative guides for sale that had a quirky writing style. They are holding an event at Sky Nursery in Shoreline on February 20th.

Nurseries
Raintree Nursery had their experts on hand and they were ever so helpful. I got a hot tip on a good fig for our area, the Desert King. Not to mention the coupon...

Specialty Nurseries Association of Western Washington publishes an amazing list of local nurseries! There are more nearby than I ever would have guessed.

I hope you find some of it useful as well!

Amanda

Yardis Catharsis

What do you on a long holiday weekend? At our house - prune some more! After completing 2.7 Apple trees and a very small cherry tree our brush pile is the size of a Chevy Van. In spite of sore muscles, the work is cathartic and everything looks so much tidier and brighter you start to wonder why you didn't do it in the fall (you mean besides the fact that it was dark and raining?...ok true...).

Did I mention you can do cool stuff with the branches? You can force blossoms indoors and have a lovely indoor bouquet. Chunks of thicker apple and cherry branches are amazing in the bbq after they've been dried for a year. We keep our dried wood stash in the Dogloo on the right of this pic. The dog never really took to it, anyway!

This tree is a late apple of dubious origins. Perhaps a King?They're a lot smaller without all the water sprouts!
(I did mention we're hacks, right?)

You'd be amazed at the moss and other lil things you'd see....While perched on a precarious ladder in an old tree...

Fungus among us

Here's hoping you and yours enjoyed each other, as for us, we'll be sleeping well!

Sweet Dreams,

Amanda

Chorez!

Today we took advantage of the relatively warm and dry afternoon and did a wee bit o' pruning! We're no pruning experts but every spring we make an attempt to prune our 5 apple trees, 4 Cherries, 2 plums, as well as the other general spring cleanup required by the herbs and flowers. It is a lot of work!

As a teenager I asked my Dad why he spent so much time pruning them every spring. Wouldn't it be better to leave them au naturale? Apparently not! He explained fruit trees are dependent on humans and need pruning or they'll just grow themselves to death! Or something like that? (Hey, I wasn't the greatest listener at that age!) Pruning is also good because it helps you and the sun to be able to reach the fruit.

Hacker's toolkit! Dexter eat your heart out.

Today we pruned one of the two Gravenstein trees on the property. Gravensteins are delicious apples that make amazing pies! If you are looking for a good heirloom apple, they may be for you! This tree had huge water sprouts (good pruning guide) and needed shape improvement so we did a heavy pruning on it. At our house, a light pruning involves taking off the water sprouts and cleaning off dead branches. Heavy pruning more seriously altering the shape. A heavy pruning sometimes leaves you wondering if you went too far but then the leaves come out and the blossoms burst open and all is right with the world again. While we were at it we trimmed the crazy lilac (behind apple on right) behind it and the removed blown over blue spruce(? behind apple on left) that was growing up in its business.

Gravenstein Before

After - hey air and sunshine!

Afterwards it was amazing how much more light was in the yard (from the removed spruce). The greenhouse (out of view, stage right) will benefit from the additional lighting as well, I suspect.

And as if rewarding us for all the hard work, Mother Nature outdid Santa Claus and left us a little present under the apple tree. A little clump of snowdrops just breaking through the soil! Oh green, we've missed you!

Sweet Dreams,

Amanda

Jelly Jelly Bo Belly

While the normal order of things is to make jelly before Christmas, our schedule scoffed at the notion. We used the quiet weekend after Christmas to sneak in a bit of jelly making before Santa managed to deliver his final presents to all the girls n boys. We harvested our own grape juice earlier this summer, arduously hand processing it before a kind reader pointed out we were doing it the hard way. Presto-changeo we switched to an inexpensive steam juicer and the next thing we knew we'd put away over 30 quarts of the purple stuff.

Apparently canning grape juice prior to making jelly is a good thing, as it allows you to remove any crystals that may form and mar your jelly. No crystals formed in our juice, but better safe than sorry I guess. We followed the Old Fashioned juice recipe from my Kerr canning book. 4 Cups of Juice, 3 cups of sugar, boil boil boil for 25 minutes or until gel stage is hit. I picked this recipe because it had the greatest juice-to-sugar ratio and didn't use added pectin, just the natural pectin in the juice itself. Challenge: gel stage was pretty tough to judge. It wasn't a temperature per se as a state of being. The goal was to have jelly "sheeting off a cold spoon" or if you put a teaspoon of jelly on a jar lid in the freezer for 1 minute it was supposed to be fully set and wrinkle when you pushed on the edge.

Bubble bubble, toil and trouble

Bad news: this method led to a slightly candied jelly with a ribbony consistency. Maybe next time we'll have to try the pectin method. Luckily, there's more juice (har har).

Newspaper stops the stickiness

Good news: amazing on shortbread. I used Martha's basic shortbread recipe. This is a very reliable shortbread recipe - I have made the green tea variation many times for presents.

Dribble

Wish us luck on round 2!

Amanda