Tomorrow morning I’m going to do a seed-starting demo and show off how to build a DIY seed-starting station using an IKEA shelving unit. The demo will be held at Molbak’s Nursery in Woodinville, Washington and it starts at 9:30. I’ll be on hand afterwards to answer all of your most pressing seed-starting questions. Can’t make it? Don’t worry. I’m going to put the seed starting station up at home this weekend so I can start those iceberg lettuce seedlings. I’m planning on taking step-by-step photos as I set it up and will post them with instructions next week.

Before I announce last week’s contest winner, I want to send out a huge thank you, a big round of applause, and a hug to everyone who generously offered up their gardening advice. Seriously, I am super excited to get outside and start gardening after reading all of your tips for forcing rhubarb, preventing slug damage, building the soil, and just appreciating the process of gardening, including all the stumbles that inevitably happen along the way.

I had a really hard time choosing just one winner, but I ended up selecting Mal’s advice (comment #17):

Share plants! You’ll keep your own garden from getting overstuffed to where you don’t even want to go out and work in it. You’ll learn how to take care of the plants from the people who have grown them successfully. You’ll grow plants you thought you wouldn’t like, you didn’t think would look good or were too expensive to try, just because someone gave them to you and you thought, “why not?” You’ll make friends, you’ll build relationships, you’ll network. Best of all, you will build a garden full of memories, your aunt’s hostas, your neighbor’s daylilies, your grandmother’s roses, your sister’s favorite tomatoes and it goes on and on.

I think that the best way to become a better gardener is to share your experience with others and learn from them, and Mal’s advice really summed this up. Hopefully she will have fun choosing five packets of seed from The Cook’s Garden and starting them indoors with her new Eco-Friendly Seed-Starting Kit from Burpee, who kindly provided this great prize. I’m just a little jealous that I don’t know Mal in person, because she will surely share some of the seedlings she starts!

I’m growing iceberg lettuce in my garden this spring.

I understand this sounds counterintuitive. Most people start gardening so they don’t have to eat iceberg lettuce. But I love a good wedge salad smothered with my grandmother’s Roquefort dressing. So I’m challenging myself to see if I can grow iceberg lettuce that actually tastes good.

Here’s my plan: After a bit of research I bought a packet of ‘Red Iceburg’ seed from Territorial Seed Company, which they describe as “a regal alternative to the rather ordinary green iceberg types.” I want to start the seeds indoors this weekend and then set the transplants out in a couple of weeks, spacing them about 12 inches apart so the heads have plenty of room to mature. Too much nitrogen in the soil can lead to soft, spongy lettuce leaves that attract aphids. To avoid this problem, I’m just going to dig in an inch of compost and a dusting of organic granulated fertilizer before planting. Providing consistent water helps prevent tip burn, but I suspect it is also the key to crisp, succulent heads. As long as I can keep the slugs at bay, I should have my first harvest by the end of April!

Don’t forget, today is your last chance to enter the contest to with the seed-starting station and seed from Burpee and The Cook’s Garden. Just click here and leave a comment with your best garden advice!

Crunchy, with just a bit of a bite, these pickled carrots make for a super tasty and healthy afternoon nibble. And they look especially pretty piled up on a bright white dish. I love the pickled carrots and jalapenos that our local taco truck serves up, so for this month’s Tigress Can Jam*, I decided to try and do something similar. I found a pickled carrot recipe that called for peppers in my Small Batch Preserving cookbook. I fiddled with the original recipe a bit by adding in half a habanero pepper for spice and switched up the regular oregano for the more pungent Mexican oregano.

My only regret? I should have packed more carrots into the jars!

Spicy Pickled Carrots

Adapted from Small Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard

You’ll need:

¼ cup sweet red pepper, finely chopped

½ small habanero pepper, finely chopped

1 tablespoon Mexican oregano

¼ tsp chile flakes

2 large cloves of garlic, sliced into quarters

1 pound carrots, cut into three-inch matchsticks

1 ½ cups white vinegar

1/3 cup water

½ cup cane sugar

1 teaspoon pickling salt

Instructions:

Bring a canner full of water to a boil. Sterilize two pint-sized jars by boiling them for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, mix the red pepper, habanero, Mexican oregano, and chile flakes together.

Combine the vinegar, water, sugar, and salt in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Remove the hot jars from the canner. Divide the pepper mixture and garlic between the two jars. Tightly pack each jar with carrots, making sure to leave ½ inch between the top of the carrots and the rim of the jar. Pour the hot vinegar over the carrots, leaving ½ inch of head space. Wipe the rims of the jars, top them with lids, and screw on the rings.

Process the jars for 15 minutes (start timing after the water in the canner returns to a boil).

* I am participating in the 12-month-long Tigress Can Jam challenge. Each month I (and over 100 other bloggers) will be canning a specific vegetable or fruit. Last month the challenge was citrus. I made a really fabulous Honey Lemon Jelly and I can’t wait to find out what is in store for March!

Sunset has plans for my dream raised garden bed on their website. The roomy 4-foot by 8-foot bed is constructed of naturally rot-resistant wood, is lined with hardware cloth to keep out burrowing creatures, and it has a built-in hoop house. Swoon.

You can get plans for this raised bed and watch a step-by-step slide show of the construction process right here.

The contest is now closed. Thanks everyone for entering! Check back on Thursday, February 25th to find out the winner.

The best gardening advice I ever received was this: Don’t worry so much, there is always next year. These words were uttered by Joyce, the chain-smoking, plant-loving manager of the nursery I worked at in high school. Joyce taught me how to propagate plants by seed and transplant seedlings. During my years at the nursery I started and cared for whole greenhouses of tomatoes and annual flowers with her guidance. Now, whenever something fails in my garden, I think about Joyce and her roll-with-the-blows philosophy of gardening.

I know that there is tons of gardening wisdom out there, and I think it would be fun to collect it all in one place. So, I’m holding a contest! To enter, all you need to do is post your best gardening advice in the comments selection below. The contest will close next Tuesday, February 23rd at midnight Pacific Standard Time. I’ll choose my favorite piece of advice and announce it—and the winner—on February 25th.

Burpee is kindly offering up a great prize package, including their eco-friendly seed-starting kit and five packets of seed of the winner’s choice from The Cook’s Garden seed company. The seed-starting kit is really cool, it has compostable fiber containers, a compostable water catchment tray that is made of bamboo, wooden plant markers, and organic fertilizer (you can check it out right here). The winner will surely have a hard time choosing their seeds, because The Cook’s Garden has an awesome selection of vegetable varieties, including some of my favorites like ‘Romanesco’ broccoli, ‘Parmex’ carrot, and ‘Chioggia’ beets.

Okay, start commenting! I can’t wait to see the advice come rolling in.

In 1903 nearly 7000 different apple varieties were grown in orchards across the United States. Over the next few decades historic, regional varieties were abandoned in favor of those with high yields, uniform size, and good shipping qualities. Old orchards were ripped out and planted with modern varieties. By 1983, 86.2% of the apple varieties grown at the turn of the 20th century were extinct. Gone. Never to be grown or tasted again.

Luckily, we haven’t lost all of the apples our ancestors grew. Monticello’s Center for Historic Plants offers several heirloom apple varieties grown by Thomas Jefferson in his Virginia orchard. I’m most interested in ‘Hewes’ crabapple.

Jefferson’s entire north orchard was devoted to this apple, which apparently produces a “delicious cinnamon flavored cider”. The tree is pretty enough to be grown as an ornamental and grows to a modest 12 to 15 feet in height.

‘Albemarle’ or ‘Newtown Pippin’ is a green skinned apple with a sweet yellow flesh and a flavor that is said to improve with storage (the apple is pictured at the top of the post, its blossom is pictured above). This variety was favored by Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who imported barrels of the apples to England in 1759.

Jefferson also planted 32 ‘Esopus Spitzenburg’ apple trees in his orchard. Prized as a dessert apple, the green fruit is blushed with red and is apparently thought to be one of the best tasting apples ever.

If only I had a bigger yard…for now if I want to plant more apple trees I will have to learn how to espalier!

Monticello begins shipping apple trees on February 23rd. The trees are $35 each and grafted onto MM-111 rootstock, which is valued for its drought tolerance and adaptability to a range of soils. You can order them online at Monticello’s online store. Like all apples, these varieties need to be planted in a spot with full sun.

Lately I’ve been thinking of how to use more recycled materials in the vegetable garden, so when I stumbled across these plant tags made from silver spoons, I was completely smitten. The vegetable, herb, and insect drawings are done by hand using archival ink and sealed onto vintage silver-plated flatware with a moisture and UV-resistant finish. A super cute way to mark herbs in the kitchen garden, don’t you think?

Each individual plant marker runs between $6.00 and $13.00 depending on the size of the spoon, knife, or fork used.

If you want to butter someone up, these butter knives would make a fun last-minute valentine.

To check out the entire selection of silver spoon garden markers or to place a custom order, visit daisychestnut’s shop on Etsy!

No matter how much I plan, I always end up with extra seed at the end of the season. But just because seed is a year or two old, doesn’t necessarily mean it is bad. Sometimes I just sow seed the and cross my fingers, hoping for germination, but lately I’ve taken to testing my more precious varieties for viability before I try my hand growing them in the garden.

Below you’ll find a little video of demonstrating how to test seeds for viability. The video was produced by Demand Media and is the first in a series of five that I filmed last year. I’ll be putting the others up over the next few weeks. Enjoy! And start testing those seeds! Spring will be here before we know it.

The Northwest Flower and Garden Show is in Seattle and I’ll be there tomorrow through Sunday, so I hope you can stop by and say hi! The show is at the Washington State Convention Center on 7th and Pike in Downtown Seattle. Be sure to bring your pocketbook, because there is always a ton of great seed for sale, as well as bareroot berries and shrubs.

Here’s my schedule:

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Seed ordering season has arrived. Hooray! To celebrate I’m going to be talking all about seeds for the rest of this week. To start things off I have a great guest post from my friend Bill Thorness. Bill has been growing organic vegetables in Seattle for decades and recently released a gem of a book, Edible Heirlooms: Heritage Vegetables for Maritime Gardens. This little book is really a treasure for gardeners in the Pacific Northwest because it lays out which heirloom varieties perform best in our climate. It’s packed with historical tidbits and illustrated with lovely drawings by Bill’s wife, Susie. Even if you don’t live in our corner of the earth, Bill’s book will introduce you to a long list of heirloom vegetables that are worth trying! ~ Willi

Edible Heirlooms

‘Lacinato’ (aka Dinosaur) kale

There are many wonderful members of the Brassica genus that have thrived in our gardens over the years, but this one is a true star. Perhaps I like it best because it stands like a little palm tree throughout the winter when the rest of the garden is resting under a thick blanket of mulch. Start seeds in mid-summer for an overwintered crop that will feed you regularly from December through May. Harvest by breaking off the blue-grey leaves closest to the ground, which enhances the palm tree effect. I love it best stir-fried with garlic and olive oil, but ‘Lacinato’ is also good chopped into a white bean stew or a squash soup. For an appetizer treat, chop it, toss with oil and spices, spread it on a cookie sheet, and bake at 350 degrees F, stirring frequently until crispy.

‘Black Coco’ bean

Dinner would be much poorer without beans. They provide a meaty vegetarian staple throughout the year, from fresh steamed green bean pods in summer to long-simmered plump bean seeds sustaining us in winter. A French heirloom, this medium-sized bush bean produces scads of pods that are great fresh, lightly steamed as snap beans, with a broad, round, pale green pod containing a half dozen large, swelling seeds. But if you take a summer vacation and come back to overgrown plants, you can just let them mature and dry them, and the result is a delectable black bean for Mexican refritos.

‘Spanish Roja’ garlic

Also known as ‘Greek’ or ‘Greek Blue’, this garlic was brought by immigrants to the Portland, Oregon area in the late 1800s and has long been a Northwest favorite. To me, it’s the perfect garlic. First, it is beautiful—the papery cover of its cloves are tinged with dark pink. Second, it is versatile. I use it in stir-fry dishes when I want to lightly cook my fresh garden produce. I learned something about its use last fall: I called in to The Splendid Table radio program and asked the wonderful host Lynne Rossetto Kasper how to trial different garlics, then used her advice to test five varieties. To my surprise, Spanish Roja did not come out well in the raw taste-test, so I stopped using it in salad dressings. However, it performed admirably in sautés, roasted in foil, and slipped under the skin of a roasting chicken. Here’s my report on the test. Garlic is normally planted in late fall and harvested in mid-summer, but can be planted in spring for a September harvest.

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I thought I’d wrap up my experience with Hunger Action Week with a report card and and a link to a delicious, inexpensive recipe I should have made: potato leek soup.

First, the report card: I give myself an A for Awareness and a C- for staying within the parameters of the challenge.

My first mistake was not including Jon in the menu planning process. He has a lot of experience eating on a budget from his bachelor days, and offered to help, but I didn’t want to cede control of the kitchen. Instead, I planned out our menus for the week and focused on choosing recipes that had plenty of vegetables, used whole grains, represented a variety of culinary traditions, and were inexpensive. The only problem? I forgot to think about how much time they would take to cook and how we actually live.

For instance, our mornings are always hectic, with Jon running to the door to catch the bus at the last moment. On Sunday evening, I had the grand idea of making a huge pot of quinoa flavored with orange zest, nuts, and dried cranberries. My idea was we would just reheat it in the morning. A good plan in theory, except that you can’t just grab a bowl of quinoa and go. So I ended up eating breakfast at home and poor Jon either skipped or scrounged up something at work. I should have made muffins. That way Jon could have left the house with something homemade in hand.

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