The Eager Urban Farmer

Winter's hours and days have a languid quality to them, each day rolling gently into the next. But when the days begin to warm and darkness doesn't fall until well after the dinner table has been cleared, time seems to speed up a bit. By the time that summer is here, the whole season seems to whip by, and before I know it, it is the end of September and I never did find a good weekend for that day hike I meant to take.

Daylight savings time has come and the weather report makes me optimistic that our last frost here in the Puget Sound area has already gone. A couple of weeks ago it felt a little crazy to be shopping for seed packets and digging rocks out of the garden plot. But now, there are only a few days left in March, a month whose name sounds cold and muddy, and April is almost here.

While May might be the first month for most gardeners around here, April is the start date for the hearty, the optimistic, the eager urban farmer. If you are gardening this year and have not yet planted your salad greens, do so now! Early Wonder beets will do well now as well as carrotts too. Parsely takes its sweet time to germinate and can go in the ground in April as well.

Here are some events to mark on your calendars if you live in the Seattle area:

If you want to grow your own veggies, but dont quite know what to do with kale and broccoli rabe, find out at Vegfest 2010. The Seattle Center Exhibition Hall will host this vegetarian food festival on April 10th and 11th. There will be cooking demos, food samples and a cookbook sale.

"The best and brightest" gardening event is the Seattle Tilth Edible Sale, held the first weekend of May at the Good Shepherd Center in North Seattle. You will be able to shop for over 50 varieties of tomatoes and 20 varieties of peppers, rare and heirloom organic veggie varieties, as well as culinary herbs, edible flowers, and drought tolerant perennials. These plants are hand-selected by the Seattle Tilth experts to perform well in our Pacific Northwest climate.


When: Sat., May 1, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.
& Sun., May 2, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.

Where: behind the Good Shepherd Center,
4649 Sunnyside Ave. N,
Seattle, WA 98103

Planting vegetables early in the Pacific Northwest

Last year I kept a notebook of all of my planting dates, planting methods and seed varieties. This year, the notebook has been very helpful in planning for this year's garden. Because I garden in the Pacific Northwest, I am always interested in how to extend the growing season. Last year, I tried a few methods including the use of a cold frame (build out of wood and a recycled window) and the use of plastic liter bottles as small cloches. For some plants, no difference was found, but for others, the added heat and protection meant harvesting weeks earlier than my garden neighbors.

This year, I am going to replicate what went well and try some new things too. I will provide a photo tutorial of how I get my squash going early, when I plant them in a few weeks. This week, I worked on getting my space ready for the heat lovers: tomatoes, peppers and melons.

The soil that I am working with this year is very rocky and quite compacted. It is a big investment of labor to prepare rocky hard land into a fluffy fine soil bed. I don't want to skimp on what my plants will need to grow well, but I also want to save my back for carrying my six month old baby!

My solution? I dug a 30 foot long trench down the side of one of my garden plots. The trench is only about four inches deep, and is the width of the shovel. I used a sieve (think a shallow topless box that has chicken wire as the bottom side) to sift the soil I dug out of the trench. To sift the soil, I placed the sieve box over the trench and shoveled soil into the box. I shook the box to make the soil fall through into the trench and the rocks stay behind in the box. To the sifted soil, I added some sandy topsoil and some Cedar Grove Booster Blend compost. I used a hoe to chop the soils and compost together and mound it up a bit. I now have a 30 foot long row of top quality planting soil, loose and rock free. I will leave about 18 inches of the hard rocky dirt, unworked, on each side of the trench for my melons to creep and my tomatoes to spread.

In the photo, you will see the galvanized wire hoop frames that I have set up to cover the trench. I have ordered Gro-Therm perferated plastic row cover from Territorial Seed company. When it arrives next week, I will be setting up a tunnel cloche over the trench to keep my tomatoes and melons warm. I plan on planting the tomatoes about 3 weeks earlier than I normally would plant them uncovered.

I know a lot of gardeners warn agains the perils of planting too early, but I disagree! Plant too early! What is the cost of a few seeds in the ground that don't sprout? Wait too long and you miss the opportunity for spring salad greens, or worse, may miss the chance for your tomatoes to ripen. Start a row of lettuce or spinach every few weeks starting in March. If the first row you planted doesn't germinate, it only cost you a few cents of wasted seed! Plant over the same row later!

I started San Marzano tomato seed, the first week of Feburary. In the photo they are about six weeks old. They are growing on the window sill in my south facing bathroom. I use a seedling mix of washed sand, pumice and perlite. I started all of my tomato seeds in recycled, covered, plastic containers. This increases the temperature significantly, and keeps the soil moist. The shorter tomato plant had the cover removed after germination. The taller tomato plant was still under cover when the photo was taken, but has since outgrown the cover and is now growing uncovered. The added benefit of making your own planting containers from soda bottles and plastic take-out containers, is that you can see the roots develop and avoid your plants becoming pot bound.

Building Easy Raised Beds (a one woman job)

Ah, sweet soil! I am blissfully back to the garden after a winter hiatus. Five hundred square feet of earth awaits my shovel and seed. This weekend, I built a simple raised bed, which only took a few minutes. I have build very sturdy, permanent (and somewhat costly) raised beds before, and they are great for carving out garden space from a lawn or other non-farm quality space. But, in a shared and non-permanent garden space like a community garden, it doesn’t make sense to make the time, effort and cost investment. My sister and sister-in-law just built their own sturdy raised beds, to make good use of a sunny spot in the driveway. Check out their photos of the project on their blog Real Food.




Using a $3 pack of wooden stakes and some discarded old boards, I marked off the area, pounded in some stakes, lined up the boards, and filled with dirt. I recommend using the stakes in a triangle formation, two on the outside and one on the inside to keep the boards in place. Once the area is filled with dirt, the dirt itself will keep the boards from falling in. This easy raised bed will hold up very well and can be pulled apart in minutes if need be. I am going to use the raised bed area for my root vegetables. A raised bed will prevent soil compaction from walking, and allow me to sift particularly well in one area to get rid of pebbles so that the carrots can grow straight!



I am off now to haul compost and build another raised bed to cover an area that has compacted ground. More on my garden progress to come.

* Be aware that if you are consulting the photo to build your own, I removed the inside stakes after the soil was added, becasue the soil itself keeps the boards in place.