Today over on Re-Nest I put together a sneak peek of Andrea Bellamy’s wonderful Vancouver, British Columbia gardens. Andrea writes on her blog Heavy Petal and is the author of the new book Sugar Snaps and Strawberries: Simple Solutions for Creating Your Own Small-Space Edible Garden. I feel so lucky to be friends with her and am thrilled to have the opportunity to show off her amazing gardens (she has 4 of them!). Perhaps the coolest thing Andrea has going on is the Lawns to Loaves project. She got together a group of gardeners and they took over an abandoned lot owned by the City of Vancouver and planted a wheat field. This fall they will harvest the wheat, thresh it, grind it with a bicycle-powered mill and then make pizza with the flour. Head on over to Re-Nest to see the full tour  and read Andrea’s tips on urban gardening!

On a lovely summer evening a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to tour the kitchen garden at The Pantry at Delancey—a new community kitchen space run by Brandi Henderson, Olaiya Land, and Brandon Pettit. Located just behind Delancey (the pizzeria that Pettit runs with his wife, the writer, Molly Wizenberg), the Pantry is really a gathering place, a kitchen, and a classroom all in one. It has an incredible lineup of classes scheduled for this fall (think Badass Bartending, Homemade Halloween Candy, and Gluten Free Baking), as well as family style dinners, which will be held around the Pantry’s huge and beautiful table. Inside the space reminds me of a super hip farm kitchen, with white walls, shelves of cookbooks, and a big stove. Outside the kitchen garden is clean, simple and inviting.

The garden was designed by landscape architect Chris Saleeba of Fresh Digs (I did a sneak peek of Chris and his wife Ashley’s front yard vegetable garden in 2010). Almost all of the work, which included lots of digging, leveling, and rock hauling, was done by the Pantry crew. And kudos to them! It is really a lovely space. The garden runs East to West in a narrow alley-like area behind the building. Chris designed a pathway, divided by wide, packed gravel stairs and landings delineated with wooden decking. Planting spaces run on either side of the pathway. A custom fence lines the southern border of the garden. It features wide spaced planks that screen the garden from the adjacent house while still allowing light to stream through. Horizontal lengths of twine run between the fence posts. The idea here is to pack in as much food as possible by utilizing the garden’s vertical space.

The east end of the garden gets the most sun and it is planted with a mix of herbs, fruit (like the rhubarb pictured above), vegetables and flowers. An edible wall and containers are planned for the future.

Currently a mix of brassicas, including red bok choy (one of my favorite vegetable varieties) and ‘Red Russian’ kale line the beds. Artichokes and columnar apple trees add an architectural presence. Plants that produce food over a long period, including sage and Swiss chard are dotted throughout.

The west end of the garden is shaded by a large street tree, so the beds are planted with shade-tolerant edibles and native plants, including ferns, parsley, kale and ‘Golden Alexandria’ strawberry. This alpine strawberry actually prefers to grow in a spot that gets some afternoon shade because its unusual chartreuse leaves burn in hot sun.

The garden had a pretty tight budget and Chris (pictured above) and the team at the Pantry worked hard to stay within it. Rather than paving the pathway or building a boardwalk, they used inexpensive, but attractive, crushed gravel. The team also scavenged some very cool pavers (pictured at the bottom of the post) at the Re-Store, which are used to add interest to a gravel patio area and also as stepping stones within the planting beds. They also relied on their own labor and volunteer time from friends to transform the overlooked area into a functional space.

Perennial edibles form the backbone of the garden, including evergreen ‘Sunshine Blue’ blueberries, the columnar apple trees, artichokes, herbs, and strawberries. These plants will ensure that the garden looks great year round, while leaving space for seasonal annual edibles like greens, tomatoes, and squash. I am so thrilled that the Pantry team decided to integrate an edible garden with their kitchen and community table. It is a beautiful garden and really shows that food can thrive in even the smallest of urban areas!

If you are interested in taking a class or attending a dinner at the Pantry, you can see the schedule on their website. If you, like Chris’ work, you can see more of it over on FreshDigs!

I am in the process of finishing my book, which means I spend pretty much all my time either thinking or writing about growing vegetables. Today my mind kept wandering back to a lovely formal kitchen garden in Marin County that I had the opportunity to tour when I spoke at a symposium sponsored by the Garden Conservancy last summer. Located at the back of a large, tree-lined lot, the fenced kitchen garden artfully combined formal kitchen garden design with whimsical plant supports and plantings.

Boxwood parterres and decomposed granite pathways divided the garden into quadrants, with narrower beds ringing the perimeter. To help keep the family’s chickens and ducks out of the beds, they installed unobtrusive chicken wire fences behind the parterres.

I loved all of the homemade trellises in this garden. The rustic tuteurs, which provided support for sweet peas and cucumbers, were constructed of grapevines scavenged from local vineyards. Weathered 1 x 1 posts looped with wire housed tomatoes and created a scaffold for beans. Roses and clematis twined through the split rail fence that enclosed the garden.

The garden featured tons of architectural plants, including tall stands of blooming fennel, spiky artichokes, Tuscan black kale, flowering onions, pruned boxwood and rosemary, and trellised vegetables.

My favorite detail was this cute little frog perched on a post!

Our new house doesn’t have nearly enough sun—or space—to create a kitchen garden like this. But a girl can dream, right?

(Image via Bloom Town)

A couple of summers ago I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit Portland-based garden designer, Darcy Daniels‘, beautiful garden. Darcy transformed a basic, boring yard into a thriving garden when she bought her home. The coolest part of the garden is the side yard, which instead of the usual driveway or weedy grass, features tall zig zagging raised beds and a pretty crushed gravel pathway.

Darcy manages to pack a lot into a narrow area by utilizing the vertical growing space. The beds back into a fence that screens out the neighboring yard and does double duty as a trellis for climbing crops, including tomatoes, squash, and fruit trees. Such an inspiring use of what often becomes a throwaway space in most yards!

My first sunflower bloomed just in time for the West Seattle Garden Tour this Sunday, July 18. While my garden isn’t featured on the tour, I will be giving a talk on creating a beautiful and productive kitchen garden at 12:00. My lecture is full of pictures and I’m planning on covering a lot of do-able strategies for growing more food in a regular city lot, including vertical gardening, succession planting, and integrating ornamentals and edibles.

The best part about my lecture? It is being held at South Seattle Community College, which is home to one of Seattle’s best kept gardening secrets—a lovely arboretum! The self-guided tour features a wine tasting and eight fantastic residential gardens, including my friend and neighbor Mari Malcolm’s absolutely amazing retreat. When you enter her garden it is like stepping into another world!

Tickets and maps for the tour are available at Swanson’s Nursery, Wells-Medina Nursery, and West Seattle nursery, as well as a number of small businesses in and around West Seattle. I hope you’ll consider joining me on Sunday!

Update! My original post had a typo. My talk is at noon (not 1:00 as originally stated). I apologize for any confusion!

I dragged Jon to see the Meryl Streep movie It’s Complicated because I wanted to see her character’s Santa Barbara kitchen garden. It was lovely, with gravel paths, geometric raised beds, and gorgeous vegetables. Later I learned that the tomatoes were wired to the vines and the cabbage were actually growing in individual pots sunken into the ground. I was so disappointed!

Little did I know that just a few months later I’d have the opportunity to visit an authentic California kitchen garden that is even more beautiful than the movies. The Collenette family’s home is nestled into the base of a grassy hillside in rural Marin County. Their garden, which they designed in collaboration with Sylvia and Eric Blasen of Blasen Landscape Architecture, has a classic layout, but a decidedly relaxed, lived-in feel.

The kitchen garden spreads out from the front courtyard and is defined by straight gravel pathways and square beds. Espaliered fruit trees and grapes divide the garden into sections and also serve as screens, adding privacy to the house’s wide, wrap-around porch.

Drought-tolerant herbs, including rosemary, thyme, and oregano, carpet the soil in many parts of the garden. I was especially partial to this quilt-like collection of herbs planted beneath a grape vine.

A hedge of California wax myrtle shields the garden from an adjacent golf course, but not from the occasional stray golf ball that flies in from across the way.

A curving gravel path leads you from the edible-focused front yard to the more private, recreation-based backyard.

There is a small lawn for kids and dogs to play on and a slender, rectangular pool, which looks more like a reflecting pool then a swimming pool. The clean, geometric design and minimal plantings make this part of the garden very restful. Along the perimeter of the property, the garden’s plantings become more naturalistic—helping blur the border between the cultivated landscape and the hillside beyond.

The soft, fragrant herbs growing between these stepping stones soften the edges of the very linear pathway and make a nice transition from the lawn to the mixed border.

At the back of their property, just outside the gate, the Collenette’s have a small aviary where they raise carrier pigeons! The birds spend their days swooping over the house and gardens. How cool is that?

The Garden Conservancy has kindly invited me to be a part of a wonderful edible gardening event in Marin County on Friday, June 18. The event, Count Your Chickens—In Your Edible Garden, promises to be so much fun. The day begins with a series of short lectures, followed by a luncheon, a tour of two spectacular Marin County kitchen gardens, and a wine reception in the afternoon.

The lectures will include a talk by the celebrated landscape designer, Nancy Goslee Power, on the history of classical kitchen gardens and a panel discussion on backyard chickens, honeybees, and fruit trees with the wonderful garden designers Kate Frey and Mary Te Selle and espalier expert Sean McNeil. I will be speaking about how to grow gourmet quality vegetables in a home garden.

I am just thrilled to be included in such a wonderful event and I hope those of you in the Bay Area will consider joining me in what I’m sure will prove to be a very fun (and educational!) day.

Here are the details!

Count Your Chickens—In Your Edible Garden

When: Friday, June 18 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm

Where: Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, Ross, California

Admission: Garden Conservancy and Marin Art & Garden Center members: $110; General Admission: $125. The admission fee covers the talks, lunch, garden visits (carpool), and wine reception. Visit the Garden Conservancy to register online.

On July 4^th, 2008, while their neighbors barbecued hot dogs and snacked on watermelon, Ashley and Chris Saleeba worked on a slightly more subversive Independence Day project: they dug out their front lawn and planted an edible garden.

In just one weekend, Ashley and Chris completely transformed their landscape. Gone was the weedy patch of grass, the lame shrubs, and the narrow, cracked sidewalk. In its place they planted an appealing edible garden that matched their modern aesthetic, fit their slow food values, and didn’t require spraying chemicals, spreading fertilizer pellets, or spending time behind a sputtering gas-powered mower.

What I love most about this garden is that even though it is full of edible plants, it doesn’t look like they have a farm in their front yard. The area to the left of the sidewalk features a keyhole design, with designated edible beds in the center. A mix of ornamental grasses, herbs, beneficial-insect attracting perennials like lavender and echinachea, strawberries and blueberries form a border around the vegetables. A gravel pathway divides the keyhole in half, neatly connecting the driveway with the sidewalk and the front porch. This smart addition makes it easy to cart groceries and baby gear (Ashley and Chris have an adorable baby, Lola) between the house and the car without trampling on plants or having to walk around the whole garden.

Ashley and Chris wanted their new garden to be more welcoming than their old landscape, so they remodeled the front porch and widened the sidewalk. On the north side of the yard Chris designed and built offset wooden panels lined with wire that peas, beans, squash, and tomatoes can scramble up in summer. These attractive trellises nicely delineate the yard’s boundary without seeming like a barrier. To help minimize water usage, Chris installed a drip irrigation system that runs off a timer.

When I visited this garden in December I was impressed with how nice it looked in the dead of winter. Alpine strawberries formed a pretty evergreen groundcover. Kale, bok choi and other greens filled the annual vegetable beds, crimson clover was germinating underneath the trellis panels, and neatly clipped lavender, ferns, and ornamental grasses added color and texture.

As you may have guessed, Chris and Ashley have some serious design chops. He has a Masters in Landscape Architecture and she is a graphic designer, and they just launched Fresh Digs: Edible Gardens with a Modern Attitude. They offer DIY kits for modern raised beds as well as the trellis panels, plus they create custom garden designs and sell cute garden accessories, including plant stakes. I can’t wait to see how their business unfolds, because if their own yard is any indication, they can help people reclaim their front yards and turn otherwise wasted space into a welcoming, productive extension of their homes.

My friend Robin got a greenhouse this year and I’ve been beside myself with jealousy ever since. It’s really a gorgeous little space and I want one. Badly. So I asked Robin if she would mind writing up a little guest post about her greenhouse and some tips for those of us who are considering investing in one. ~ Willi

For years my husband and I have dreamed of adding a greenhouse to our mid-sized residential garden in Seattle. In 2008, we invested a meager $100 on a cheapie hollow aluminum frame greenhouse that was held together with plastic clips and covered with plastic sheeting. During the spring and summer, we enjoyed this foray into greenhouse gardening, but fall rains rapidly rusted out the cheap frame. Then, in our record snowfall, the whole thing came tumbling down. I was able to recycle some of the aluminum tubing as training stakes, but the rest was a big pile of trash. Learning from our not-too-costly mistake, we resolved to add a more permanent, sturdy structure to the garden. Our challenge became finding an affordable greenhouse that fit our garden aesthetic.

Initially, my handy husband Bob ordered greenhouse construction plans from The New Yankee Workshop. But, before he got started building, we went to the 2009 Northwest Flower & Garden Show where several greenhouse vendors were displaying their floor models. So, we did some comparative shopping.

First, we looked very briefly at some of the fiberglass greenhouses. Honestly, they pretty much gave me the creeps. They were dark, with short ceilings, and to my eye, they were ugly. Then, we dreamily window-shopped the booths filled with ornate glass greenhouses framed in powder-coated steel with fancy filigree, but they were beyond our budget. Finally, I found myself talking with a couple of vendors offering reasonably priced greenhouses similar to the style Bob planned to build from scratch. They offered twin polycarbonate walls, cedar or redwood frames, a few footprint sizes, and simple pre-fab construction that looked doable to me.

After comparing prices, time requirements and construction materials and formats, Bob agreed that these kits were a good option for us and much less expensive than building the greenhouse from scratch with the plans. So, we ordered the Mt. Hood Sunshine greenhouse kit. And about three weeks later it arrived. Within just a few hours on St. Patrick’s Day, Bob had put it up on our back patio—with just a little help from me.

I should note that we negotiated a few custom modifications to the standard kit (without being charged for the difference). First, we ordered two Dutch doors rather than the standard one door with an opposite self-opening floor vent. This adjustment allows us to enter from the patio and exit on the opposite side into a renovated garden bed. This simple change helped us better integrate the beds surrounding the greenhouse into our overall garden plan (see above).

Having worked in large greenhouses, I wanted multiple shelves made from expanded metal instead of the redwood slat shelf that came standard with the kit (see above). Metal is easy to clean and doesn’t harbor insect and disease. Along with making these modified shelves, Bob changed the door hardware to improve the locking system and allow us to anchor the top of each open Dutch door to nearby fence posts. And, he added ground-bolts (available from Sunshine Greenhouses) to keep the structure in place should it get excessively windy.

Our greenhouse is a beautiful and well-used addition to our garden (see below). It has served us well for propagating edibles from seed, growing tropical lilikoi, and ripening tomatoes well into fall. It serves as a backup location for leafy greens and other hardy cool season crops just in case the ones I have under hoop houses don’t quite stand up to winter. We haven’t added lights or heat to the greenhouse, but even on cool fall evenings, it manages to trap enough heat to remain warm overnight. We’ll see if additional sealing is required in winter.

The small, semi-permanent structure is just right for our residential garden. Sure, I could fill an enormous greenhouse given the chance. But, by carefully planning my planting rotations, monitoring my crops regularly for pests and disease, and spacing my plants carefully, I’m content with the amount of greenhouse space I have. At least once daily regardless of weather, I duck inside where I harvest fresh, homegrown, organic produce; inspect plants for pests and disease; water; or just simply soak up the warm, moist, herbaceous atmosphere always waiting inside my little horticultural dream house.

Here are a few tips if you’re considering a greenhouse of your own:

Kit, DIY Plans, or Installed? A kit worked for us, but we did make several modifications that required additional investment and Bob’s handyman skills.

Consider Space. Think about how you plan to use the greenhouse and how much footprint you have for it. You’ll need a solid, level spot on which to build your new structure where it will get enough – but not too much – light and warmth from the sun.

Make sure you have water nearby. In the heat of summer, I often had to water in the greenhouse a couple times a day.

Controlling heat. Our greenhouse came with a roof vent that requires no electricity yet opens automatically as heat builds too high. On extra warm days, we have the option to open both Dutch doors open to create a great pest and disease-deterring cool breeze.

To read more about Robin’s greenhouse and her really amazing edible landscape, check out her blog Garden Help.

I garden smack in the middle of Seattle, but sometimes I seriously consider moving to the country and planting a huge vegetable garden. Luckily, I can keep my city garden and live out my country dreams by reading Red Dirt Ramblings—Dee Nash’s wonderful blog that chronicles her ever-changing one-acre garden in Oklahoma. Dee just ordered 37 chicks (!) and she grows a really astonishing variety of vegetables in her classic potager-style garden. I asked if she’d be willing to give us a tour of her and she most graciously obliged.

[Above: My youngest daughter, Bear (what I call her on the blog), holding her first crop of radishes for the year.  She likes plants which can be pulled from the ground best: potatoes, carrots, radishes and turnips.  No interest at all in lettuce or kale.  In fact, all of my children have liked this "buried gold" best.]

This an overview of the back garden.  The four long beds at the end of the garden were for vegetables, although more and more flowers try to creep in.  I’m thinking of making a brand new garden up on the hill.  I have a plan in mind, and the sun would be better.  My trees have grown over time, so that they cast more shade on the garden than they once did.

Spring was best in my garden this year.  The heat didn’t arrive until June, and then the temp hovered around 107 degrees F for two weeks straight.  All the blossoms on the tomatoes dropped, but because they were indeterminate, they produced later in the season.  Lucky for us, we have a long growing season.  My climbing beans failed to produce, and with my mother in the hospital for two months, nothing was normal for the garden.  However, we ended up with carrots, a few beans, lots of late tomatoes, eggplants, some squash (I had rot problems due to too much rain, too fast), but no potatoes because I tried something new, and it didn’t work.  I planted them in the compost pile, but it dried out in summer, and wasn’t near enough to a water source.

This is just a pretty sugar snap pea blossom photo.  We have a difficult time with true sweet peas in the spring, but this little blossom gives me almost as much cheer. Plus, the peas which came later were very, very sweet.

‘Giant Belgium’ (above) was my best producing tomato.  The plant was huge by season’s end, and it just pumped out the fruit.  Sadly, the taste was bland.  I still ate them.  I really liked ‘Royal Hillbilly’, ‘Cherokee Purple’, ‘Carbon’, ‘True Black’ ‘Brandywine’, ‘Sungold’ and a hybrid, ‘Super Fantastic.’  I plant this hybrid every year.  As for cherry tomatoes, I can’t beat ‘Sungold.’  Usually, they don’t even come indoors.  I eat them as I work.

This is a ‘Carbon’ tomato (I think!), which is an offshoot of ‘Cherokee Purple’.

My vegetable garden is completely organic, so it has lots of insects, both good and bad.

All photos in this post are copyright of Dee Nash. To see more pictures of her garden, visit Red Dirt Ramblings!