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:

Purple peacock broccoli

Perfection fennel

National Pickling Cuke

Walla Wall Sweet Onion

Deep Purple Scallions

Little Bells pepper

Jimmy Nardello pepper

Beaver Dam pepper

Klari Baby Cheese pepper

Early Jalapeno

Bulgarian Carrot pepper

Fish pepper

Long Red Narrow cayenne

Golden Zucchini

Eight Ball summer squash

Trombocino summer squash

Table Queen acorn squash

Zeppelin delicata squash

New England Pie pumpkin

Sungold cherry tomato

White Currant tomato

Jaune Flamme tomato

Green Zebra tomato

Mexican Purple tomatillo

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.

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!

I am a sucker for good package design in general. But when a cute package contains heirloom seeds, I cannot resist. These “art packs” are sold by the Hudson Valley Seed Library, a non-profit based in Accord, New York that offers (mostly) locally grown and regionally adapted seed varieties. Each seed packet in the series is designed by a New York-region artist to celebrate the beauty of heirloom seeds. The Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper packets are printed with vegetable based inks—and while they are recyclable, or even compostable, I think they belong in a picture frame more than the paper bin

The Hudson Valley Seed Library was started by Doug Muller and Ken Greene, two young farmers with a dream of creating an “accessible and affordable source of regionally-adapted seeds that is maintained by a community of caring gardeners.” They sell seeds grown on the seed library’s farm and by other local farmers and gardeners, but they also encourage people to save their own seed and share it. If you pay $20 to become a member of the seed library, you get discounts on seed packs and events and 10 packets of plainly packaged seed of your choice. Best of all, members who save seeds can return them to the seed library in exchange for a discount on the following season’s membership fee. If you’re a novice seed saver, no worries. The seed library offers classes, workshops, and information on seed saving.

This organization provides such an interesting and valuable model for encouraging seed saving among home gardeners and preserving seed diversity. Wouldn’t it be cool if this concept expanded into a system of seed libraries across the country, with each one growing and offering heirloom and open-pollinated seed suited to local climate conditions?

Even though I live in an opposite corner of the country from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, I’m definitely placing an order for Spotted Trout Lettuce (aka Forellenschluss). This German heirloom has outstanding flavor and is a mainstay in my garden because it handles heat, cold, and rain with aplomb. I could buy ‘Forellenschluss’ at my local nursery, but I want to spend a few of my dollars at this seed library in the hopes that it thrives and grows—maybe even into my own part of the world.

Sweet Pure Honey is the kind of small businesses that I absolutely love supporting. Kelly Snowden from Food & Wine first introduced me to Sweet Pure Honey when she included a few beeswax tea lights in her Recipe and Seed Swap package. I had just gotten my honeybees and I loved the candles, the packaging, everything. So I got in touch with Stella, who co-owns Sweet Pure Honey with her husband, Sheldon, and we’ve been chatting by email ever since.

Stella just has a wonderful presence and she is so passionate about honey, and her business, and her family. She and Sheldon raise bees–and three beautiful children–on the plains surrounding the small farm community of Porcupine Plains, Saskatchewan. Like so many beekeepers, Sheldon often has to work away from home during the winter to make ends meet, so they decided that rather than sell all of their honey to wholesale honey brokers, they would start a business that directly sells honey and beeswax products at a fair price for them and their customers.

They put together a wonderful selection of products–honey, lip and body balms, and long burning candles–made with honey from their hives.

They are committed to providing fair compensation for their partner farmers, giving back to their local community, and building a business that allows them to support their kids Marley, Sierra, and Lauren (who are almost too cute to handle, don’t you think?).

I am obsessed with their lip balm (it is pretty much the only thing that helps my constantly chapped lips) and their honey has an amazing floral flavor. Anyways, I just love Sweet Pure Honey and I hope you guys do too! You can find them online at Facebook (just search for sweetpurehoney.ca) and at their soon to be up-and-running website.

The young British poster artists, Lucas Lepola and Hayley Thwaites, burst onto the design scene a couple years ago with their graphic Keep Calm and Carry On poster. Their online store, Keep Calm Gallery, now features a wonderful collection of posters, tea towels, mugs, and cards.

This uber talented duo, along with Matthew Green and Lucy McLauchlan, recently put together a limited edition collection of three screen prints whose sales will benefit Garden Organic, a really amazing UK non-profit “dedicated to teaching people to grow organic food at whatever scale they can.”

Garden Organic has a heritage seed library and organic demonstration gardens, including the restored Audley End Organic Kitchen Garden, plus they research organic farming and gardening techniques, teach school children to grow food, and offer a Master Home Composting program. Like me, the organization “believes that active involvement in food production, at whatever scale, is vital in terms of reconnecting people with the foods they eat.”

If you need a reason to add some more art to your home, now you have one. I’m partial to Hayley & Lucas’ poster featuring a list of my favorite vegetables—look carefully and you’ll notice the green letters spell out a message.

Also, check out their tea towel collection—the towels are so fun, they might actually make drying dishes enjoyable.

I adore my four hens, Inky, Clyde, Bumble and Boo. I can’t help it, even though they occasionally rampage my garden, escape from the yard, and wake me up very, very early in the morning. They are just so cute and lovable. Especially Inky. She follows me around the yard and coos contentedly when I pet her.

So I was super excited when Bay Area-artist and gardener Rigel Stuhmiller emailed me to say she has a new line of rooster and hen prints in the works. She will be creating a hand-pulled, hand-carved chicken block print each week until she “runs out of chickens or out of steam”! She’s playing around with the texture and tone of the prints—so each one will be unique. Most amazing of all, she’s selling these prints for only forty-five dollars in her Etsy store, making them a special and affordable gift for all those chicken lovers out there.

I was so excited when I discovered these adorable canning label designed by LeAnn of the Portland-based blog, Lelo in Nopo. I have not labeled a single jar of my homemade chili sauce, raspberry or strawberry jam because I wanted the label to look cute and my handwriting is super messy. But now I don’t have to worry about it!

LeAnn is selling customizable versions of these super stylish labels in her Etsy shop. You can choose from Plum, Green, Orange or Red and send in your own title, description, and date for your canned goods. LeAnn will make up the label and send you a printable PDF of them. So cool! I’m hoping to make grape jelly with my neighbor’s Concord Grapes this weekend. If I do, I’m going to order labels in plum and have them read: Grape Jelly. Made with Handpicked Concord Grapes. Fall 2009.

Exciting news! The fabulous Philadelphia area Terrain at Styers has a new online shop (you may remember my guest blogger extraordinaire and Terrain employee, Aimee Theriault, gave us a sneak peek of the flagship store earlier this summer).

The online shop is an absolute treat to explore. Prepare to wile away your lunch hour as you admire their carefully curated collection of containers, outdoor furniture, and stylish garden gear. I am completely smitten with their selection of harvest baskets, especially these vintage grape crates, which are imminently affordable at $28. Don’t you think they’d be cute planted up with baby greens?

Topsy Turvy tomato planters are all the rage. Why? I do not know. The planters are totally hideous. The novelty of growing a tomato upside down certainly does not outweigh the eyesore factor.

I’ve had several people tell me that tomatoes do wonderfully in Topsy Turvy planters, but I will not be swayed in my opinion that a green plastic column has no place hanging in my garden when tomatoes perform well when grown upright and in the ground.

I do not, however, reserve my scorn for all upside down planters. In fact, I am strangely drawn to the idea of growing a plant the wrong way up. Enter the Sky Planter. This self-watering container features a minimal, modernist design and hangs from inconspicuous metal wires. It is certainly smaller than the Topsy Turvy, but I think dwarf tomato varieties like ‘Totem’, which only grows 12 inches tall, or ‘Tumbling Tom’, which tops out at 2 feet, would grow well in the Sky Planter and look nice, too.

Hideous, Don’t You Think?