Wow! I was overwhelmed with the response to last week’s DigginFood Birthday Giveaway of Diggit weeders. I have to admit I selfishly asked you to name your favorite vegetable varieties because I’m always on the hunt for new ones to try. You guys really delivered! ‘Anuenue’ lettuce, ‘German Strawberry’ tomato, ‘Metki Dark Green Serpent’ melon (love that name!!), and ‘Sparkler’ radishes are all now on my list.

I also came across several varieties that I just adore, too, including ‘Rouge Vif d’Etampes’ pumpkin, ‘Striped Roman’ sauce tomato, ‘Flashy Troutback’ lettuce, ground cherries, ‘Chioggia’ beets, and ‘Sylvetta’ arugula. It was such fun finding out what you are all growing.

I’ve decided to give Gaea (comment #5) the tools because her favorite variety came with such a good story. Gaea wrote that her family’s late neighbor, Peter, used to grow a “rich red, wrinkly, wonderfully flavorful and juicy” tomato and he would share them with his neighbors. Gaea saved seeds from this tomato and now grows them every year, even though Peter is now gone. They don’t know the true name of the tomato, so they call it ‘Peter’s Gift’.

I think leaving seeds behind is an amazing legacy and that Peter was so lucky that he gave seeds to someone who continues to save and grow them. Thanks to everyone who participated in the giveaway! I hope you all have fun growing your favorite varieties this summer and that you try something new, too!

The first weekend in May is an important weekend for gardening in Seattle because Seattle Tilth and the Master Gardener Foundation of King County both hold awesome plants sales. Tilth has an amazing selection of locally-grown organic vegetable starts and the Master Gardener plant sale features gorgeous perennials, many of which are raised by local Master Gardeners. Both sales are major fundraisers and the proceeds go to benefit gardening education. Plus, they are only 2.1 miles apart, which means there is really no excuse not to hit both!

I’m planning on buying perennials at the Master Gardener sale and most of my warm season crops at the Tilth sale (you can check out which vegetable and herb varieties they are offering online). Here’s my long shopping list:

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This year I am planning on freezing and canning a lot more of what I grow, as well as some food that I buy at the farmer’s market. My biggest problem with preserving (and gardening) is I often fail to label. So I end up with mystery bags of vegetables in the freezer and unidentified tomatoes in the garden. I’m planning on solving this perennial problem by printing these free freezer labels from Martha Stewart. All you have to do is write what is in the bag and circle the month and day the food was frozen. I think even I can handle that!

If you’ve haven’t done much freezing, I highly suggest checking out The National Center for Home Food Preservation website. They have great general guidelines for freezing (as well as canning, drying, pickling, and even curing and smoking!), plus specific instructions for pretty much every vegetable or fruit you can think of.

There are countless ways to trellis peas, but one of the best and least expensive techniques is to use tree and shrub trimmings as a support. These “pea sticks”, as they are called in England, work particularly well because peas love to twine their tendrils around twiggy growth.

My friend Mari cut her yellow twig dogwood down to the ground earlier this spring to encourage it to send up new shoots and kindly gave me the lovely chartreuse stems to use as pea sticks. They barely fit in the back of my car!

Pea sticks can simply be pushed into the ground behind a row of peas or gathered together into an informal obelisk. I chose the obelisk route since I’m growing my peas in large, galvanized containers.

Freshly cut dogwood stems root readily in damp soil. To prevent this, I allowed the ends to dry out for nearly three weeks before I used them. To build the obelisks, I stuck five or six stems into the  soil, cinched the tops down with twine, and sowed peas around the base. The peas are now nearly 3 inches tall and will soon be scrambling up the sticks. I’m planning on growing cucumbers up the obelisks when the peas stop producing in late-May.

Yesterday morning I made a small batch of orange rosemary jelly for the April installment of the Tigress Can Jam. My kitchen filled with a bright citrusy scent as the jelly began to bubble. I thought to myself, “I am really getting the hang of this whole canning thing.” Then I caught a whiff of something burning. So I gave the pot a quick stir. Everything was fine there. I checked the burner. Nope. Nothing was sizzling on it. Then I looked over to the other side of the stove. The top of my candy thermometer was melting all over the bright red burner.

Doh.

Despite that setback the jelly turned out very pretty. And tasty, too!

Today is DigginFood’s 2nd birthday! I’m not sure if blogs are supposed to have birthdays, but because I love any excuse for a party I’m celebrating with a giveaway of two Diggit Garden Tools. These great little tools are made right here in Seattle by a family-owned business. The way they got started is the best. Janice, a mom and head gardener in her family, was using an old army tent stake as a weeder, because it popped weeds out of the soil without disturbing the roots of her other plants. The stake hurt her hand though, so her engineer son made her a tool with a narrow, tapered, serrated blade and a cushy, brightly colored handle that is easy to spot in the garden. A little while later the Diggit Duck came along—it’s perfect for digging weeds out of crevices.

To enter the giveaway all you have to do is leave a comment in this post telling me your favorite vegetable variety and why you love it. A lot of you probably already know that my favorite vegetable variety of all time is ‘Satuski Madori’ cucumber. Over the summer I’m going to be snapping shots of my other top edibles (like the ‘Sunshine Blue’ blueberry pictured up top) and sharing them, along with some sneak peeks of great gardens, lots of fun projects, and recipes.

I can’t wait to read about your can’t-live-without varieties! I’ll announce the winner of the giveaway next Thursday. Happy Earth Day and Happy Gardening!

Just a few minutes ago something landed with a big thud on our front porch. I opened the door and found the best surprise: a little box from Nichols Garden Nursery. I knew that my sunchoke tubers were inside! They don’t look like much now, but these knobby little tubers will send up stalks topped with happy yellow flowers in late summer. Sunchokes (also known as Jerusalem Artichokes) are native to North America. The tubers have a delicious flavor that falls somewhere between a water chestnut and an artichoke and the flowers grow to nearly six feet tall.

They are the very definition of an ornamental edible. I’m planting mine right by the front door and sowing a mix of cosmos, zinnias, bacherlor buttons, and coreopsis at their feet. I just love that I’ll be able to enjoy the flowers all summer and then dig up something edible in fall. So fun!

At the beginning of March we dug up a big portion of our backyard to install more vegetable gardening space. The project is almost done (!) but in the interim we’ve tracked approximately five yards of soil into our house. I swear, all I do is sweep. Having a doormat outside the mudroom would really help (as would actually taking off my wellies and leaving them on the deck).

I’ve been on the hunt for a mat that is nice and thick and not made of rubber. These 100% coconut fiber mats from India Rose completely fit the bill.  Not only are they really cute and only $35, but you can compost them when they wear out!  My only problem is I can’t decide which one I like best.

The peas I sowed on March 24 sprouted over the weekend! I’m growing ‘Tom Thumb’ (a dwarf heirloom shelling pea), ‘Wando’ shelling pea, ‘Super Sugar Snap’, and ‘Golden Edible Podded’ (a snow pea with yellow pods and purple flowers). With the exception of ‘Wando’ all of the varieties are new to me, so I’m excited to see how both the pods and the shoots of each variety tastes.

I’ve been dreaming about pea shoot salads ever since I had a fabulous one at Franny’s in Brooklyn last spring. The delicate shoots were tossed with a simple lemon vinaigrette, a generous amount of Parmesan, sea salt, and freshly ground pepper.

With that salad in mind I purposely sowed my pea seeds very close together (about an inch apart). In couple of weeks, when the shoots are six inches tall or so, I’m going to thin out every other one and try to recreate the Franny’s salad. Can’t wait!

Our neighbor has a beautiful old apple tree that arches over the fence into our backyard. Yesterday, I stood underneath its branches and I could hear our honeybees buzzing from one apple blossom to the next as they gathered little bundles of pollen to take back to their hive. The pink flower buds began unfurling their petals last week, but the show is already coming to close. A fast moving rainstorm blew through overnight and our garden is now polka dotted with hundreds of pale pink petals. Luckily, I got out before the showers with my camera and played around with the macro lens my friend Matt is kindly letting me borrow. It was my first time using a macro, but I was pretty happy with the results! Enjoy!

Meet Gus and Daisy.

They are very adorable goats. They also happen to be hardworking members of the In Harmony Sustainable Landscapes team. In Harmony hired a herd of goats to come and eat their way through the Himalayan blackberry, thistle, bamboo, and bindweed that smothered the lot behind their offices a couple years ago. This was an awesome plan, because the weeds quickly disappeared, no RoundUp required. The only problem? The staff fell in love with Gus and Daisy. They couldn’t bear the thought of parting. So when the rest of the herd from Healing Hooves (a natural vegetation removal service) went home, this pair of cuties stayed behind.

It is, I suppose, a risk you undertake when hiring a herd of goats.

Gus and Daisy now live happily at the In Harmony office. Every morning, their caretaker, Karrie, leads them out of their pen and over to a movable corral where they happily munch to their hearts content on grass and weeds in the back lot. It’s a good life for Gus and Daisy and the folks at In Harmony don’t have to worry about mowing anymore!

If you’d like to get rid of a nasty weed problem, goats just might be the answer. Rent-A-Goat services are popping up all over the country. Here in Washington, you can get in touch with Healing Hooves, Rent-A-Ruminant, and The Goat Lady. Karrie highly recommends using goats to control weeds, but cautions that it is true: they will eat anything. Including plants like rhododendrons, laurel, and pieris, which are bad for them.

Gus and Daisy are so cute, I almost wish I had a huge weed problem in my yard so I could hire some goats! But I think I’ll just stick to visiting them on their home turf from time to time.

I found this awesome potting bench made out of recycled pallets on Twitter this morning (via Go Go Green Garden). Love it! So much better than the big jumble of pots and tools that I store in the corner of my vegetable garden.

It looks like it will be sunny this weekend in Seattle! On Saturday, we have a crew of fabulous friends coming over to help us finish up our big new vegetable garden area, so hopefully I’ll have pictures to share next week. I will also be at Molbak’s Spring Celebration Weekend event talking about fun garden projects for kids, garden party ideas, and DIY gifts you can make from the garden. My workshop is at 1:00 on the events stage. I hope you’ll come and learn how to build a sunflower playhouse, make herbal bath salts, and get tips for hosting a seed and plant exchange.

Happy Friday and enjoy the weekend!

So many vegetables and herbs, including arugula, broccoli rabe, pak choy, bok choy, mustard greens, basil, and lettuces, have the teeniest, tiniest seeds. I’m always surprised that they germinate. It just seems impossible that something so small could grow into a plant. I find sowing these seeds kind of nerve wracking because burying them too deeply is easy to do and results in spotty germination. So, over the past couple of summers I’ve developed a system that makes direct sowing tiny seeds easier. Here’s what I do:

1. Thoroughly weed the soil. Weeds compete for nutrients and can quickly crowd out small seedlings. If you’ve really had a big weed problem in the past try this before sowing: weed, rake the soil smooth, water the soil, wait two weeks, pull any new weeds that have come up—it’s a simple strategy, but it works wonders for reducing weeds.

2. After weeding, use a four-pronged cultivator or a rake to gently work the soil. Remove any rocks, clumps of soil, roots, or other debris and smooth out the soil until it is flat, smooth, and crumbly.

3. Water the soil. Seeds germinate best when they have good soil-to-seed contact and I’ve found that the seeds stick to the soil and stay in place better when it is damp.

4. Sow the seed. In order to evenly distribute small seed, it is often recommended to mix the seed with a bit of sand or potting mix. I’ve experimented with this technique and always come up with mixed results. So I have gone back to just trying to space the seeds as evenly as possible and then thinning out the plants after the seed germinates (the thinnings taste good, so don’t toss them!).

5. Water the seed in with a gentle stream of water from a watering can. This helps settle the seed into the soil. Don’t use a hose! The force of water from the hose can pick up the seed and you’ll end up with a big blob of seedlings in one end of the bed.

6. Finally, sift a light layer of potting soil over the seeds. Just barely cover them up. I use potting soil instead of garden soil because it is lightweight, weed free, and easy to evenly distribute over the seeds. I usually scoop up a handful of soil and then rub it between my hands so it falls in a fine layer over the seeds. Gently pat the top of the potting soil. Finish up by watering the seeds in again with the watering can.

It’s a good thing he is so cute. Because yesterday morning our dog, Domino, dug up a big bed planted with greens, stepped all over the newly germinated carrots, and kicked soil onto the freshly mulched path. Sigh.

I recently spotted spinach seedlings for sale, which is really kind of silly. Spinach grows readily from seed. So buying a four-inch pot with ten spinach seedlings in it just doesn’t make any sense when you could buy a packet of seed and sow a five-foot long row for the same price.

That said, the urge to get a head start is hard to resist and it can be kind of confusing to decide what to sow and what to plant out as a seedling, so I thought I’d share what I do in my garden.

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