Matt’s Adventures in Northwest Gardening

Yes people, it is technically 6-8 weeks before our last frost of the season. That is scheduled this year around March 23 according to the Farmer’s Almanac. So, yes, it is time to start those tiny little seeds indoors and let them start to grow.

Unfortunately it was VERY cold out today, so I opted for the indoor planting scenario. When my darling wife Jen found out what I was doing, she had a few choice comments about whether it was really a good idea to use potting soil and water over a white carpet. I could see her point, but man alive, it was nippy out. So below, you can see some of the tools of my craft. The potting soil is from McLendon Hardware, and my seed packets are from Territorial Seeds.

At least that is what my Mom told me once. So, taking her at her word, I think that we should all take a moment and think about planting peas this year. I have invested in some inoculant for my peas - this is a powder you apply to your peas that is filled with Rhizobium bacteria - which helps it better fix nitrogen into the plant, and yield a larger bounty of delicious peas.

As a side note, it is not technically President’s Day - it is officially called “Washington’s Birthday“.

Here is a neat bit of American history most of us didn’t learn in 10th grade US History.

Back in the mid 19th Century, Europeans began to get all excited over what was literally Bat Sh*t. Apparently, they realized how potent this substance was for fertilizing crops. Immediately, the Big Players of the time went in search the valuable and rich deposits of this guano and attempted to acquire as many little islands full of this stuff as they could find. In strictly strategic terms, it would not be prudent to yield this resource (not to mention the land being acquired) to other nations of the world, when the USA itself could play in that same game!

So, in response to this came the Guano Island Act of 1856. The first bit of it says:

Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.

In the end, we got something close to 100 islands all over the world, many of which we still claim today. It began, in reality, as the United States’ first dramatic motions toward non-continental American expansionism.

This is still an active law on the books, U.S. Code, Title 48, Chapter 8, Sections 1411–1419. So, If you were just moseying along in a boat somewhere in international free waters, and notice the there is a preponderance of bats, and a cave for them to poop in, do your civic duty and claim that sucker for Uncle Sam. K? Cool.

This site has a pretty decent run down on the basic history of this act and how it came about. I also posted here about Guano and its high nitrogen as a fertilizer. The only other thing I remember about Bat Guano was Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Yep, high comedy that goes for the bat-toilet-humor crowd.

I bought a straw bale on Saturday at the aforementioned Reber Ranch in Kent. It was a little more than I expected, mainly because they only had one size available for purchase this weekend. It was $8 for the bale, which I paid and added to my costs for the project.

Usually at this place, you take your semi-truck and get a couple hundred bales of hay for your farm or whatever. I drove my little pickup and handed over my ticket for the one bale, which was promptly loaded on the back of my truck, and away we went.

The bale weighs 90 pounds. I have no idea if this will be a sufficient amount of straw for my project, but we’ll find out. Below is a picture of the bale in my truck on the way home. We left a pretty neat trail of little straw pieces from Kent to our house, I think.

Here is an image of our Bleeding Heart plant. It has started to break through the soil already. It grows about three feet tall and has hundreds of little heart-shaped flowers that bloom all summer long. This is a red variety, though we planted unsuccessfully a white one last year as well.

Here in the Northwest we do have the native Pacific Bleeding Heart, but our plant is the common domesticated Dicentra spectabilis - with much rounder and bigger flowers.

This is a close-up on the little shoots.

Here is another image of Jen’s pruning handwork/swath of destruction .

As you can see, its a bit wet out out there - that is the plum tree, I think. Not much to report here, just something to use for comparison later.

For Valentine’s Day, I decided not to buy Jen a dozen roses, ’cause, well, I just don’t do that kind of thing; if I did, she’d probably assume I did something wrong and was trying to make up for it. Also, there were reports that the flowers grown and sent on Valentines day were actually bad for the environment, and I am not about to have that on my conscience.

Knowing that I had to come up with something, I did some almost-serious thinking; I decided that in keeping with the theme of my blog here, I would buy her a new little planter pot and some seeds. So I bought her a nice little blue terra cotta pot as well as some very good smelling sweet peas. I had hoped that she could plant them and then take the whole thing to work to watch grow all year. When I got home, I looked at the back of the packet, and it said “grows 6 feet”- oops. Maybe she can erect some sort of cubicle sized trellis.

Here is the before mentioned box of lettuce. As you can see, it has sprouted now, beating not only the frost and freeze but also the fact that they are more-than-two year old seeds.

When you buy mixed green in those little tubs at Costco or wherever, they are apparently chopped down using a laser cutter, so as to avoid bruising the lettuce. I think we’ll just use the regular kitchen shears for harvesting methods.

We have a few dozen of these wood boxes around the house. Hopefully at some point I can figure out a rotation with planting to ensure that we have year-round patio-fresh lettuce.

This past weekend, while I was no doubt taking a nap, my wife Jen decided that it was right time to prune the fruit trees. I walked outside in the late afternoon to find her teetering in the middle of an old apple tree with what looked like the remnants of a massacre at its base. Branches, sticks, small logs littered at the foot of most of the trees in my backyard.

What madness hath she wrought on these poor trees!

You can see some of her handiwork in that picture. She had just finished giving the two on the left a buzzcut.

The trees that we inherited had, at one time, been trained. But much like our lawn, they had been on the former owners’ back burner of projects. So the darned old things, wanting to grow every year, focus their energy into thin branches that shoot straight up from the tree - these are called, and I am not kidding, suckers. These small branches will suck the energy of the plant into growing these multiple, literally fruitless shoots, and not spend that same energy on making quality apples or pears.

The best time to prune, I gather, is late in the winter, a practice called dormant pruning. In late fall, the trees build up energy stores to aid the plant through the winter. When you remove the little sucker branches from the tree, that stored energy is still in the plant. So, when it starts back up in the spring, it will be able to focus its energy more effectively, encourage planned growth and hopefully setting the stage for more fruit from the tree. Get it?

Jen readily admitted she had no idea what she was doing, chomping and cutting mostly by intuition and assumption. She may have killed the trees, but at least she took action, right?

I am sure she did enough reading on it and just decided to put a little mid-winter doubt into our backyard equation. We looked at some of the neighbors trees and they are similar in shape to what we ended up with.

More or less.

When we bought this house, the back yard was the jewel of the purchase. It is big and open and sunny, great for parties and just sitting around and reading.

But it was permeated with insidious weeds.

The battle for a green lush lawn v one choked with weeds is a grueling war of attrition. The minute you yield an inch to the weeds, it can take months or years to win back what you previously controlled. The former owners of this house started out with one child - by the time they sold it, they were at number three. Consequently, their attention necessarily changed from working on the yard and garden to their children.

By the middle of my first summer here the whole yard was covered with evil dandelions, covered with clover and thick with moss. I set to eradicate the dandelions quickly with the use of Round Up and other nasty chemicals. The moss, however, I told myself, was not an issue, since it looked green and didn’t grow very much.

After some research into how to reclaim my yard, I learned that moss is one of the factors that can choke out a compromise a lawn. Eventully this may increase room for weeds to squeeze their way into you yard. Grass lawns are like a thick carpet: it forms a dense thatch between which few weeds can grow. Thus, the healthier the lawn, the fewer weeds can succeed.

Entering my third summer here, I have decided that it is time to declare war on the moss, and reclaim this back yard. I bought new seed/fertilizer spreader and some Moss Out fertilizer.

This is the fertlizer. I bought three bags, enough for 15,000 square feet.

Here is a close up of the lawn and the moss. You have to admit is is pretty.


Here is a picture of my new spreader.