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!

My friend Mary Ann’s garden is a little slice of heaven that just happened to drop to earth on a bluff overlooking Boise, Idaho. Mary Ann approaches gardening-and well, pretty much everything-with gusto and it shows. Feathery ornamental grasses line a plunge pool, espaliered apples disguise a regular old wall, and edibles and ornamentals intermingle in the wide garden beds that encircle her gorgeous mid-century home.

It’s a garden that is easy to admire and envy, mainly because it doesn’t always follow the rules. There is no segregation here, where edibles are confined to the back and ornamentals put on a show up front.

In a bed besides the driveway, Mary Ann enclosed ‘Fall Gold’ raspberries within a gorgeous steel frame and then planted a big and bold Joe Pye Weed behind them. Nearby ‘Sun Gold’ and ‘Pink Thai’ tomatoes rub shoulders with Clematis tangutica and Miscanthus sinensis ‘Gracillimus’. Out in the back, newly planted espaliered pear trees (six varieties on each tree!) are trained along a rustic steel fence.

Mary Ann looks at her garden as a work in progress. This year she ripped out a mature ornamental bed because the grasses growing in it blocked her view. Rather than look at this as a design failure, Mary Ann saw it as an opportunity to try something new. She recognizes that gardens constantly evolve and are never truly finished. A lesson that I’m still learning. I often procrastinate about putting in new beds, designing our patio, or installing a trellis because I suffer from design phobia–I’m terrified that I’ll plant or build something and it will look bad. But what Mary Ann has taught me is that you might not always get it right, and that is totally okay. I’m also learning that by mixing up plants that scare me (ornamentals) with ones I love (edibles) I can create a changing palette that will only get better with time.

To see more of Mary Ann’s garden and read about her gardening exploits, check out her blog Idaho Gardener. It is always a fun read!

{via Bastille’s website bastilleseattle.com}

A couple of weeks ago I found myself standing on the roof of Bastille—an exquisite new restaurant in Seattle’s historic Ballard neighborhood. A blue sky was overhead, a sea of salad greens were at my feet, and the smell of freshly fried frites was in the air.

Colin McCrate, who owns Seattle Urban Farm Company, invited me up to check out the 4500 square foot kitchen garden that Bastille’s owners, Deming Maclise and James Weimann, hired him to install and maintain.

Colin custom-built a series of wooden raised beds fitted with pitched panels covered in shade cloth. To make harvesting easy, the panels hinge open. They are also interchangeable, so when the weather cools this fall, Colin plans on switching the shade cloth panels out with ones covered in plastic, effectively turning the beds into mini-greenhouses.

Each bed also has it’s own drip irrigation system and heating cables to keep the soil warm and productive during the winter!

The garden also features several kiddie pools repurposed into round raised beds—an idea McCrate borrowed from Rocket, a restaurant in Portland that installed a rooftop kitchen garden in 2007. Currently both the wooden beds and the pools are filled with salad greens and herbs, which the chefs harvest for the Salade du Toit, a green salad tossed with a hazelnut vinaigrette, a beet and arugula salad, and the herb incrusted salmon.

The roof—which was retrofitted during the building’s remodel to withstand the weight of the garden—still has plenty of spare real estate and Colin mentioned the possibility of expanding the garden next year to include space for tomatoes and other crops.

{via Bastille’s website bastilleseattle.com}

Downstairs, the restaurant is full of lovely details—a huge zinc bar, vintage light fixtures, and custom tables. Shannon Galusha, who started his career off with a 3 year residency at French Laundry, is heading up the kitchen. With so much inspiration growing right above his head, I can’t wait to try what he dreams up!

Bastille is located at 5307 Ballard Ave NW in Seattle. It is open for dinner Sunday-Thursday from 5:30 to 10:00 pm and on Friday & Saturday until 11:00 pm. Brunch is served from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm on Sundays. Reservations can be made online or by calling 206.453.5014.

Hello, hello!

I have arrived back in the States safe, sound, and full of ideas from my travels in Cuba. My plane touched down in Havana on July 13 and for the next 18 days I traveled the country, visiting eight urban, organic farms along the way.

Cuba left me feeling inspired, fascinated, frustrated, and hopeful all at the same time. It is a country full of contradictions. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the experience and what I want to say about it. My travel partner and I are in the process of sorting through our photos and thinking through our experiences, but we will soon sit down and put together a website that documents our time in Cuba and what we learned there.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some photos that offer a window into my world for the past month. The photos here are just the first in a series that I’ll be posting in the next few days.

Also, I have to mention that my trip would not have been possible without the incredible ideas and work my guest bloggers offered all of you in my absence. I want to thank my wonderful friends John Hurd, Justine Dell’Aringa, Betsy Gardner, Dinah Dimalanta, and Aimee Theriault for taking such fabulous care of DigginFood while I was away. Coming home and discovering such a wonderful collection of guest posts was so fun. I can’t wait to make fruit infused vodka, basil ice cream, and authentic New Jersey red gravy!

While visiting Santiago de Cuba, we had the opportunity to visit a really amazing farm located right in the middle of a decaying urban landscape punctuated with tall, concrete Soviet-style apartment buildings.

This 1-hectare farm featured rows and rows of raised beds built with recycled concrete and rocks. The beds are filled with soil and amended with worm-compost that is made on site. The farm grows a wide range of fresh vegetables year round, including sweet peppers, tomatoes, greens, medicinal and culinary herbs, cucumbers, eggplants and more.

Workers, like this man named Santiago, arrive each morning early and harvest crops that are sold in the on-site farm stand and distributed for free to primary schools, old folks homes, and maternity centers.

The crops are sold at a very low price (about 4 cents for a bunch of lettuce) to members of the community and workers at the farm can purchase food at a discount twice a week. This was truly one of the most productive, organized, beautiful urban farms that I’ve seen anywhere. I was most impressed with their cropping system, which follows a strict rotation and soil maintenance plan. Each long raised bed is capped on either end with small plantings of corn, flowers, and herbs designed to lure in beneficial insects and everything was strictly organic. Totally amazing and I think a good model for urban farms here at home.

honeybee pollinating ecinacea flower

I never imagined myself as a beekeeper. Thanks to a generous and helpful uncle that’s what I’ve become!  We often spend thanksgiving with John’s family and over the years his uncle Marc has entertained us with stories about his honeybees. I don’t remember ever asking him directly, but Marc must have noticed the interest in our eyes because a few years ago he offered to help get us started off with our first honeybee hive. We jumped at the chance!

There is just something special about honeybees. Our honeybees have been an exciting and rewarding addition to our garden, so this year we doubled up and now have two backyard hives!  I find being in their presence to be very soothing. I can’t resist checking on them daily, and I’m never disappointed. I see them come and go along their regular flight pattern; over the fence and then swooping down to the hives. I watch as they land at the entrance with their leg pouches stuffed full of bright yellow pollen. I watch the guard bees on duty and on hot nights the ladies (almost all of the bees are female) gather on the front porch fanning their wings to cool off the inside of the hive.

As if all this entertainment weren’t enough, bees are beneficial in countless ways. First and foremost they are great pollinators – our fruit yields have noticeably increased since we began keeping bees. Their honey is also thought to boost immunity, promote healing of cuts and burns, provide a remedy for sore throats, and eating local honey can help alleviate pollen allergy symptoms. All season we’ve been reaping the benefits of our bee friends hard at work, harvesting an abundance of fruits, berries, and veggies – and recently the sweetest of all, honey!

Last week we geared up for our big honey harvest of the year. Puget Sound Beekeepers Association, an incredible local resource for backyard beekeepers, rents harvesting equipment to their members for a very small affordable fee. We rented a honey extractor and few other helpful tools and began extracting our honey. The first step was uncapping our honey. We used an electric uncapping plane. You just glide the heated plane over the frame to uncap the honeycomb so the honey can come out.

capped honey

uncapped honey

Next we loaded the frames into the extractor and spun.

All the honey collects at the bottom and is filtered to remove bits of wax as it comes out the spigot.

The result is pure raw honey that is ready for eating!  This year we yielded four gallons of honey!

We share our honey with friends and neighbors and often trade it for other backyard bounty. If you’re thinking of keeping bees, I would recommend checking out Puget Sound Beekeepers Association or your local beekeeping club to help you get started.