Last week I got to spend the morning atop Noble Rot, a fabulous Portland wine bar with an extensive rooftop garden. I don’t have time to post a full tour today, but I wanted to give you a sneak peek of some really pretty edible plant combinations I saw up there. The head gardener, Marc Boucher-Colbert, intensively plants many of the garden’s beds with herbs and salad greens. I was struck by both the contrast in color and texture of ‘Purple’ bok choy and ‘Delfino’ cilantro, which has delicate feathery leaves like dill. Isn’t it just gorgeous?

Another bed sported alternating strips of a chartreuse mizuna and ‘Ruby Streaks’ mustard greens, one of my favorite salad greens. It bolts pretty quickly, even in cool weather, but its flower buds taste delicious stir fried!

Even though I prefer green lettuces, I always grow a few ruffly red varieties because they look phenomenal next to green plants. Marc planted these lettuces next to rows of chives and I loved how the spiky green chives looked next to the low red lettuces.

If you’ve got some pretty edible plant combinations in your own garden, I’d love to see some photos! Please just email them to me, or if the photos are up on your own blog you can leave a link in the comments.

It has been cold and wet in Portland this spring—perfect slug weather. Slugs mowed down my spinach seedlings, made lacework of my cauliflower leaves, and have nibbled on my radishes. They are a fact of life in the Northwest, but they are thankfully easy to control with Sluggo, an organic iron phosphate bait. You just have to remember to apply it! When slugs ingest Sluggo, it doesn’t poison them, instead it makes them loose their appetite and they die of starvation. It is perhaps not the best way to go, but it is better than being cut in half with scissors, which is how my grandmother dispatches them.

I definitely do not recommend using conventional chemical slug baits, especially ones that contain metaldehyde, which is a dangerous neurotoxin that also happens to be very attractive to small mammals, especially dogs. I found this description of the effect of metaldehyde on slugs on the Great Vista Chemicals website, which touts the benefits of metaldehyde baits, “It doesn’t kill the pest directly but it paralyzes them and causes them to froth and loose large amounts of water.” Lovely. Just the type of product I want to use in my vegetable garden. Or not.

Earlier this week I wrote about my slug problem and several organic ways to control them over at Re-Nest, where I will be writing a weekly gardening advice column called The Gardener. I’ll start posting a link to the column here on Monday after it goes live on Re-Nest so you can follow along, if you like.

Our new house came with the perfect excuse for buying a hammock: a lovely old tree and a sturdy post situated near by. I chose a colorful striped hammock because it brightens up the dark corner (and it was only $15). I found some really cool pink and yellow solar Chinese lanterns at IKEA and we’re planning on hanging them like ornaments from the branches of the tree. Our little relaxation spot will be complete as soon as I find a little table to set pitchers of Arnold Palmers on.  I love working in my garden, but I have to say that admiring it from the hammock is pretty fun too.

I hope you all enjoy the weekend! I’ll be back next week with a tour of an awesome rooftop garden, advice for dealing with evil slugs, and photos of a super plant support system made from welded wire mesh.

The other night I reached into our crisper drawer to pull out some store bought arugula and found that it had turned slimy overnight. So Jon stepped out into the garden and clipped a couple of leaves off each one of our small lettuce plants, which include ‘Red Sails’, a mystery green lettuce, and ‘Breen’ romaine. This first harvest provided just enough leaves for a small dinner salad. I dressed the lettuce with a simple white wine vinaigrette and Jon added shavings of Parmesan cheese and candied hazelnuts. We paired the salad up with some asparagus soup ate it out on our patio table. Such a nice way to enjoy our first meal outdoors this year!

Goats are the perfect subject for the May desktop calendar because it is weed season. My friends Peter and Chloe rented goats to tidy up their overgrown backyard a few years ago and I saw for myself that goats love to nosh on blackberries, quack grass and lots of other pernicious weeds. They chowed through the whole backyard in less than a week and looked very cute while they cleaned.

To help celebrate spring, Anne Bryant (who is the creative force behind the calendars) is giving away two sets of her Modern Homesteading note card collections. The cards come packaged in a cute drawstring bag and feature all 12 of this year’s calendar illustrations, plus stickers and envelopes. To enter the give away, pop on over to Anne’s website and leave a comment on this post by May 13th.

To put this month’s calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image. Happy May Day!

1024 x 768

1600 x 1200

1920 x 1200