Matt’s Adventures in Northwest Gardening

At 5:45pm tonight when I was leaving work, the Sun had just set over the Olympics in an incredible orange and blue affair. Off in the distance to the East I could make out Mount Rainier and see the dark outlines of the Cascades against the just-past-dusk evening sky. I think this is the first time I have been able to see that much light at that time for months.

It is a wonderful sign, thinking that Spring is just around the corner. The Hyacinths are breaking through the bark dust in the back and there is new growth on the rose bushes. The ancient Rhododendrons out front are all sporting their spring buds ready to blow up their colorful blooms. Even our little Bonsai tree is trying to remember how to be alive.

A friend of mine in living in New York, a Western Washington native, quickly reminded me that it won’t last, and that it will rain again pretty soon. And I know that this is true. It is natural, however, for us Moss Backs to wear shorts and a hooded sweatshirt at the same time with no sense of irony.

But, that being said, I must say it still makes me happy to think that pretty soon, I will be both waking up and going to bed with the sun. Even though that means I will have to start mowing the damn lawn. I spose it is a fair trade.

I called the local feed store in Kent, WA - Reber Ranch. They sell bales of straw for $5.75, which I think is incredibly reasonable. I have no real frame of reference for the average cost, so I may be way off.

I was originally assuming that for my potato project, I would need to a bale of hay - my pseudo-cosmopolitan lifestyle (local crops are limited to llamas, jumbo jets & meth) led me to think that straw and hay were interchangeable terms. Well, turns out they are not so much: Straw is made from the stalks of long grains, where hay is really just cut up grass rolled up. You put straw on the floors where your horses stand, and you feed them hay.

I have also been made privy to an alternate above-ground potato growing system. This method uses a wood box, with removable slats for the sides. You start the potato at the bottom, and cover it with dirt up to the height of the first slat. Then, as it grows, you subsequently pile more and more dirt on it as it grows taller, forcing the plant to effectively keep pace with the dirt, and thus grow up into the box. Sounds a bit more complex, but it is still in the same idea of my initial straw-centric project.

I also got a book today on Lawns, since I have no idea how to grow anything except dandelions. More when I read it.

And yes, I have a local feed store. Don’t you?

Well, I learned that a mere roof overhang cannot stop my planter from freezing. I was going by an assumption based on what happens when you keep a car under cover vs in the open. I went outside this AM, and attempted to push my finger into the soil - but instead i dislodged a 1 inch brick of frozen soil that covered the whole top of the box.

Alas, sustained temperature of 28 °F will freeze a dampened planter regardless of where it is placed. I think I will next experiment with some sort of plastic frost cover over the top of the box, rather than rely on an overhang 7 feet above it.

Today’s word is Vermiculture. ((vûr’mi-kul”chur), n)

This is not the society of students dedicated rice noodles, but, actually a practical - & grody - way to quickly create rich garden compost using worms.

Vermiculture, also called Vermicompost, has been an accepted practice since only the 1940s. It’s current reputation and usage is attributed to a British scientist named Sir Albert Howard, who having read Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, started to study the results of using worms to create a more effective soil for agriculture. Howard - who is considered the forefather of modern organic farming - noticed that the application of chemical fertilizers & the near fanatical belief in animal and artificial manures was quickly killing off the worms. Maybe those worms underground were actually doing some good work.

Howard determined, “There is no better soil analyst than the lowly earthworm.”

So, to Harness the Earthworm through composting, the wikipedia article on Vermiculture notes:

• It improves the physical structure of the soil.
• It improves the biological properties of the soil (enrichment of micro-organisms, addition of growth hormones such as auxins and gibberellic acid, and addition of enzymes, such as phosphates, cellulase, etc.).
• It attracts deep-burrowing earthworms already present in the soil.

So, another gardening goal for this year is to create a successful worm composting system. Seattle Tilth not only offers the worms for sale, but also has a link to an easy how-to construction guide for a worm composting box.

Yup. Exciting, eh?

One of my gardening goals for this year is the creation an autonomous potato growing unit.

This is [theoretically] a single purpose, free standing garden, perhaps constructed from chicken wire or an old rubber garbage can and filled with straw, where I can plant potatoes and harvest them with great ease. You see, we presently have a separate garden that is laid out with wooden railroad ties that can leach nasty creosote into the ground and food grown there. In addition, an unknown number of years ago, a potato was tossed in there, causing new plants and hundreds of the little underground tubers to grow there every summer - no matter how thoroughly I attempt to dig them all up, more grow each year.

So to solve this, I will attempt to grow them above ground so that I can easily harvest them this fall.

This idea was inspired by a co-worker, whose parents use huge discarded semi-tuck tires filled with straw. Since I have no idea how to locate an old tire of that size, nor the desire to store something that large and useless during the winter, I am thinking that some chicken wire or chain link, rolled into a tube shape would reproduce the same effect.

Now Jen says, “But Matt, potatoes are cheap.” While this is definitely true, I would like to attempt this experiment to see:

a.) if growing my own potatoes is actually cost prohibitive &
b.) if home grown potatoes are better than those available in the local grocery store.

Next step: locate and price out a bale of straw.

So this is the first post of hopefully a full year of posts. My mission for this site is to chronicle the adventures and hazards I encounter while attempting to grow a successful garden in the

Pacific Northwest.Today, for example, I planted some 2 year old seeds into an old wooden apple crate, lined with some felt and filled with new and clean potting soil. It is the end of January - the ground was frozen this AM. I am going to attempt to grow some mesclun lettuce while the ground is not yet thawed. I would normally plan to include pictures - but my camera is D.E.D., so I am shipping it off to the Canon digital camera elves tomorrow to get fixed.

So Onward! To the next seed, to the next sprout, to the next soil test and to, hopefully, the next post.

-M