Lesley's Gardening

In place of the blueberries we would've liked to have had from our own garden...

2011-04-06T11:45:00.000-07:00


We went blueberry picking out in the foothills on this beautifully sunny day! July 15, 2010


Look at that beauteous mountain!


And those crazy barns!!

Hardscaping privacy

2011-04-06T10:09:00.000-07:00


Privacy Solution in the works

We realized pretty quickly that since all of our neighbors had second story decks, we might desire a little more privacy in our garden. One solution was to build a trellis and train some vines up it. So Brendan got to work. The photo above was the first weekend in June.


The next weekend - putting in the vertical slats


The horizontal slats finished and the honeysuckle planted at the base

Once the trellis was completed, we needed to create a place to enjoy our future privacy. So we got to work on the patio. We started by borrowing my parents old 80's truck and filled it up with base gravel. This was crazy because we had a couple of weekends in a row of extreme heat and that was the weekend for us to do this patio.
It isn't obvious from the photos, but our backyard is actually level with our basement. So to bring gravel around from a truck in the front yard, we have to go down a few steps from the street to our front yard and then around a full staircase on the side of the house. We'd invested in a little wheelbarrow and spent the day shoveling, wheeling up and down stairs and tamping down the gravel. UGH! By the end of it all, one full ton of gravel had been shoveled, moved and tamped!!
The little pavers you see in the patio were a mistake in the initial stages. We thought we were going to build a pergola over the patio and would sit it on top of these pavers. That's another story....


Patio in progress

We original were going to be putting pavers over the entire patio, with a gravel base. In the end, we decided we liked the casual rustic look of gravel a bit more. Most of the pavers we could afford were awfully cheesy anyway.
The decorative gravel choice took a while to figure out. We finally decided on this really beautiful crushed rock in a light turquoise color. When it's wet, which is most of the year, it's absolutely beautiful. When it's dry, it ain't bad either. I will take a more detailed photo of that and get it up here soon.


Final decorative gravel layer.


Our little house at the beginning of last summer

Time to revive the blog

2011-04-06T08:20:00.000-07:00

So I've realized that the gardening blogs I want to see are mostly pictures. When planning my garden as a novice, I want to know what to expect. So I'd love to see blogs where people just took pictures of their gardens through the year, briefly explained what was going on in the pictures, and left it at that. That doesn't seem awfully time-consuming, so I am going to start doing that myself!

Not much is going on in the garden at the moment because we have had relentless rain since Spring started. I am going to have to get my boots and rainpants on eventually and brave it to get things going. But for now, I will post some pictures of how things have transformed so far.

Brendan and I moved into our house that we bought in West Seattle in August 2009. Here we are, a year and a half later. We did a lot over last summer to transform things and it is so far from completion it is not even funny! We had big ambitions and learned a lot about reducing our expectations and just taking baby steps.

This was our first "baby step" last year.

Our entire back yard was lumpy grass. We decided to take a shovel to it, dig up all the grass, and then rototill the crap out of it!! Then we hand tamped it, then it rained and got lumpy again. So we rototilled and tamped it again and got our landscape fabric down.

We made a few raised beds and framed out a future patio. The area on the right was still uncertain.

Two days later....the photo above was taken. Looks like it rained, got muddy, yuck!
Though I had used some of the leftover soil to plant my blueberries in containers, as well as my fig tree, and a few other veggies. We were attempting the square foot gardening method, which, as you will see, we failed at!!
The small bed in the middle with the t-trellis is for our raspberries. So nice and tidy with only two plants.

Blogging isn't much for me, I guess

2008-08-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

My garden has been growing, albeit slowly. We do have 4 peppers on one plant and more coming. And lots of green tomatoes, as well as big zucchini that sprung out of what we thought was Delicata. I guess we got our seeds mixed up!

Anyway, I think I'm not as into the blog world as I thought I might've been. sorry to have not kept up. I'm glad to live back in Seattle and nearer to friends so I don't feel like I need to keep up with people on the internet as much as I might've at one time. My life is busy! I guess that's good.

And it is summer. So much to do before the rain comes back.

Now what do I do?

2008-06-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

So the news tells me that summer has arrived in Seattle, and I think they're probably right. I went to visit my sister's house a few days ago and saw their garden. They have beds and containers all over the place. When they moved there in 2006, the back yard was small and all lawn. They tore out all the lawn and now it is mostly vegetable gardens and a small patio. I'm jealous of all the space they have in their beds, compared to our cramped little containers. I'm getting the feeling that some of our plants are getting a little claustrophobic. And also that I don't exactly know what I'm doing. I'm sort of winging it this year. I'm sure something will come from it all. We have lots of flowers coming in on our tomato plants and the back yard is full of bees from all our flowering plants, including this beautiful tree that we thought was dead when we moved in, and our neighbor told us it was a Mock Orange, but I'm not so sure. Anyway, the flowers are beautiful and smell wonderful and it drapes over our garden to attract bees!

So I'm hopeful that we will get some tomatoes.

I'm thinking of starting over with a new container of lettuce. I got a "gourmet mix" that said to rake the seeds over the soil. What we have ended up with is a bunch of overcrowded lettuce.

And we also got some things that bolted early and some that are just maturing. So I'm thinking of starting with a new container and some lettuce that we can eat a little later in the summer. I tried thinning out some of the weaker looking heads of lettuce today, only to find that all their roots are entangled with one another. They're definitely crowded.

Leeks!

And just today I'm noticing that my monster Delicata Squash plants are starting to yellow on some of their biggest leaves. I have to investigate the cause of that. Are they getting root bound? Do they need fertilizer (probably!)?
My Delicata last week:

My peppers are still dwarfs.
They seem to have some buds on top that are just waiting to flower as soon as it is hot enough for a long enough time. Maybe this weekend?

We will be camping Sunday through Monday, on the hottest days of the weekend. So we will see what has transpired in the garden when we return on Monday evening.

Cold Wet Weather

2008-06-08T08:55:00.001-07:00

So I am saving money on water because Mother Nature has been watering my garden for me all week. It's barely reached the upper 50's, though, which has kept my pepper plants at the size they were when I bought them as starts, and kept a lot of my other plants from doing much this week, as well. We had a giant windstorm one night and I was glad that I had my plants in containers, as Brendan and I went out in the blustery evening and moved them all to a more sheltered area of the yard. They survived.

Some things have actually kept going, though! My basil, which I am growing from seed, have all gone on to their third or fourth set of leaves. Pretty soon I will have to thin them out, as there are probably 25 or 30 seedlings in that container. I started a "gourmet salad mix" from Seeds of Change a month or so ago and it is doing great. I am going to have to thin that very soon as well, and have a salad of baby greens. one interesting thing is that Broccoli Rabe is coming out of that mix, which I didn't expect, but I probably would've if I would have read the package more closely. So in the heat of the week before, it shot straight up and is probably about to flower. Pretty amazing growth. I'll keep that in mind for the future. I think they actually grew too quickly, and I've read since that Rabe enjoys cool weather, so next year I will plant it early to allow it more time to grow before it bolts.

My tomatoes are growing huge leaves, and I see buds of flowers that haven't yet opened. They are not extremely large in height, but I hope we get a warm spell soon to help that along.

My leeks that survived the heatwave of a few weeks back are doing very well. I think that I am supposed to start mounding dirt up around the bases to encourage more white and less green as they get larger.

The snap peas that I grew from starts died a month or so ago, so I started new ones from seed. I planted at least ten seeds and, oddly, only two have come up. That is sort of how I thought all my seeds would go, which is why most of my seedlings are overcrowded at this point. Or why I have six Delicata Squash plants! The snap peas are looking very good, though. I wish I had a few more, but I think they will produce some tasty peas!

We are probably going to continue to have grey cool weather for at least the next week, which is sad for my garden. And sad for my mood. It seems this past winter was endless. It might have had something to do with me spending it at a job at a desk, which was 8 to 5. I would drive to work in the morning just as the sun was rising, and I would come home just as it was setting. It is nice to have such wonderfully long days now. Last night at 9, it was completely light out. And the sun starts to rise very early, too. I often wake because of the light around 4:30am. What nice summers here. If only we didn't have to put up with the winters to live through the summers.

I am worried the unseasonably cool and rainy weather will keep my garden from doing much this year, which is very disappointing because it is my first and I am really looking forward to delicious tomatoes and home-grown, cheap organic peppers. I'll keep ya posted and I will put up some photos with this post today when I go out and take some later.

2008-05-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

So here are all my little plants. Some of them are getting quite hefty, though. I'm impressed by a few of my tomato plants that are growing very thick stalks and giant leaves! I did not spend much time in the yard last week because we had an unexpected visit from house painters (or at least that is what they claimed to be). They were around the house off and on for a week and a half, and though I love my house, I definitely hope to be in a position where I can afford to buy my own house when our lease is up here. My last string of landlords have left a lot to be desired.

But the warmer weather has really improved the garden. I don't have lots of details, but I do have some photos. The hot weekend while we were away, about half of our leeks shriveled, but the other half seem to be thriving. I am not sure how well they will survive in the rubbermaid container I planted them in. I did drill many holes in the bottom, but I am not sure if they will have enough space. We will see....

My lettuce is totally overcrowded. I will plant another bit of lettuce soon, but this time keep the seeds much further apart.

The herbs are all going crazy. The basil is also going to be very overcrowded. Even in its small state it is incredibly fragrant. I can't wait to make pesto.

First Hot Weekend

2008-05-15T22:26:00.001-07:00

I left the plants outside overnight for the first time. This morning, they were covered in dew. And it got nice and warm today. Tomorrow, it should be in the 80's and this weekend, probably in the 90's. We are leaving for the mountains, though, tomorrow afternoon, and I don't know of anyone that lives nearby that I would feel alright asking to come over and water the plants. So I think I will just water them tomorrow afternoon before leaving and then as soon as we roll into town on Sunday evening. I imagine that, with the heat, they will probably grow a lot, so I will take photos and post them after this weekend. If I am lucky, they won't die!! I'll keep my fingers crossed.

My Garden

2008-05-12T09:10:00.000-07:00

My partner and I rent a little house from the 1940's in Ballard, the old Swedish neighborhood of Seattle. What's great about Ballard is that it was once its only little town, so it has a nice infrastructure. In my part of Ballard there are a few very wide streets that used to have street cars on them. I wish they were still there. But we do have a couple of buses near by that can take us around, and it's easy to bike around here, too.

Anyway, we have a very cute little yard
and I'm finding that it's starting to get lots of sun now that it is getting towards the Solstice. There are many beautiful flowering plants and trees back there already, but I want to grow food. When renting, it is hard to justify making an investment that would be a permanent structure because you never know when you might get kicked out. We have a year on our lease and we'd like to stay here until we are actually ready to buy our own house, which I predict to be at least two years away. However, it's perfectly possible that the owner of our house could decide he wants to sell it, and we don't even have the right to stay through the end of our lease, at that point.

So originally we wanted to build a huge raised bed for our garden. After looking at the costs of that and realizing that it would be very difficult to take it with us if we moved, we decided to plant everything in containers this year. Containers can be very expensive, but we decided planting things in boring looking nursery containers would be fine for us. That way, we can also move the plants around, which we have been doing a lot of.

This year has yet to get very warm. There is a "heat wave" predicted for this weekend, which will be welcome. We put some plants out too soon on a nice sunny day a few weeks ago. I went to work and the sky turned dark and the wind picked up and we got some nice stormy hail. It killed my snap peas. So I've been carrying my plants in and out of the house a lot. If the weather is nice and warm, they are out in the sun, and they come in every night. We are going out of town this weekend, and it is supposed to be nice and sunny, so I am going to leave them out for two days straight for the first time.

We got starts for our tomatoes and peppers and leeks and a few of our herbs. However, from seed, we are planting Delicata squash

Zucchini

Green Onions

Tomatoes

Peppers

Basil

Cilantro

and "Gourmet Salad Mix"

It know it's incredibly naive of me, but I really didn't think it would work, starting plants from seed. Of course, people do it everyday, and nature does it on its own. But I thought it would take some level of experience to make it work. It doesn't!! I put the seeds in the soil, keep it moist, give it sun and warmth, and all my seeds have started coming up. The squash is completely out of control and today is the day to transplant those monsters.

I also have other seeds that I am contemplating planting, though I might need to dig a bed for them, such as beets and radishes.

So that's the introduction to the garden. When new things happen (which are bound to everyday) I will update! And also tune in for other things that are happening that relate to changing my lifestyle to be more environmentally and economically viable in the future.

New Blog

2008-05-12T08:43:00.000-07:00

I've started a new blog that is open for the public to see (as opposed to my friends and family only everythingsinteresting.blogspot.com). This blog will mainly be focused on my journey towards a viable life in the future that we face on earth. I don't believe in being "doom and gloom" and preparing for the time when society goes out of control because of disastrous climate change and peak oil. But I think that is a possible future that we face. So what I am doing now is trying to make myself less of a contributer to the causes of this possible future, while also trying to arm myself with the tools I would need to be part of a community that could ride through those times successfully, if they came.

I think that a lot of people realize that the lives we have formed for ourselves over the last hundred or so years have given us a number of benefits, but it has worn away the very fabric that keeps the earth and all it's living beings (including us) running smoothly. I remember being in middle school and there being some talk of this, as if it were a far off problem that we should probably be concerned about because our grandchildren might have to deal with it. Basically, it had to do with the hole in the ozone layer and the fact that we all needed to stop using styrofoam and hairspray because of the CFCs. That was pretty much the extent of it. Now we are all coming to realize that the foundation of our lives, our cities, and our economy has created so many unwanted effects, from our health to our weather to our food and our incomes. Especially out here in the West, where our cities were primarily built after the invention of the car, it seems especially difficult to envision a way to rework our lifestyles to become more locally focused, to drive less, and to know your neighbors. And with a predicted influx of 800,000 more people in the Puget Sound area by 2020, what are we to do?

It's a big problem, but this blog is about how I might deal with things on a much more personal scale. I decided to move back to my old neighborhood of Ballard, where I am close to many business districts, my place of employment, and many friends. I decided to rent a house instead of an apartment, so that I could do more at home. This year I am starting a garden, so that in a few months, much of my food can come directly from my yard. I think it will be a great lesson in food production and help me appreciate the real value of food. We have been accustomed to the "more stuff for less money" economy for such a long time that I think we have lost sight of the real value of food and the meaning it has in our lives. I think that it is going to be a worldwide crisis to have a food shortage, but I think that in America, the majority of us could stand to learn a few lessons about the real cost of food, and also the real cost of oil. I don't know if America will weather the coming years very well. I feel like places like Europe are much more well equipped to handle smaller scale lives, as they've been doing it for hundreds of years. But I am in America for now, and in a forward thinking city that is growing at a frightening rate. What will happen?

Stay tuned to Lesley's Gardening to find out....