An experiment

This jar? It's full of peas. These will grow into snap peas. Last Sunday I soaked them in water overnight, drained them the next day, and let them sit on the kitchen counter with a lid set on lightly, shaking them gently once in a while to keep them aerated and non-moldy. Today they were sporting these lovely "radicals," the proto-roots that first spring forth from a germinating seed.

Why do this? Because I've been reading that in my area, we can start peas in January, well ahead of my grandmother's pea-planting date, which was Washington's birthday, in February.

So I'm going to find out if that's so. But doubting that cold soils would encourage germination, I did the germinating on the kitchen counter. I put the seeds in the ground this afternoon with some pea inoculant. We'll see what happens. I'll try another batch later in February and see if there's a difference in harvest date.

And another rooftop garden - this one edible

From the Dig In with Kym blog on OregonLive.com, a post about great gardens from 2007, featuring the city's first commercial rooftop edible garden. The garden, atop the Rocket building near East Burnside in Portland, feeds the Rocket Restaurant just one floor below. Discarded kiddie pools hold enough dirt to support fresh arugula, lettuce, and other fresh foods for hungry diners.

That's a trend I would like to see spread even further -- restaurants striving for the freshest of produce by growing at least some of it themselves.

Keeping Your Resolutions, Now Easier Than Ever

Let me guess, your New Year Resolutions, if you made any, include one or more of the following:

1. Lose weight
2. Get fit
3. Save money

Good news! According to this article in The Telegraph, you can do all three at once by doing what you're already doing: gardening!

1. Lose weight: Heavy garden chores like shoveling or mowing use as much energy as jogging.
2. Get fit: Ditto, and besides, all gardening tasks involve moving your body.
3. Save money: Who needs a gym membership or expensive exercise equipment when you've got a complete workout just outside your door?

In addition, being outdoors and working in the garden often help alleviate the post-holiday blues. So your call: spend time on the treadmill down at the gym, running and running and getting nowhere, or go turn your compost heap and actually get something accomplished. Me, I know where I'm headed, and it doesn't involve running in place.

Review: Cultivating Delight

Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden, by Diane Ackerman (2001, HarperCollins)

Diane Ackerman, well known for her delight in the senses and the sensual, as told in her book A Natural History of the Senses, takes on the garden in this series of seasonal essays about delight, sex, squirrels, roses, Gertrude Jekyll, and more. Ackerman's essays ramble from topic to topic like a strolling observer wandering down a winding garden path. From picking beetles off of the roses in her New York state garden, to tagging Monarch butterflies in the eucalyptus groves of California, to grieving over the death of hatchlings in a toppled birdhouse, to pondering the mystical writing of John Muir, Ackerman details both the dramas and delights of nature and of the garden.

If I were asked what the book was about, I'd have to pause and give it a good deal of thought. I could be flippant and say, "It's about 260 pages long." The only running theme is a close observation of nature, followed by deep pondering. A single essay may start with cicadas, soar to William Blake's poetry, flutter like a butterfly through several herbs, and finally focus in on a female hummingbird and her young offspring visiting a feeder and a sphinx moth that resembles them. Yet when the author says, "Look here! Look at that!" one feels compelled to look and delights to wonder alongside her.

Perhaps it's really garden-themed poetry disguised as prose.

One phrase toward the middle of the book gave me pause. Not long after describing a laborious morning spent picking Japanese beetles off of her vast herds of roses, Ackerman relates why she doesn't grow vegetables: "I've never grown a vegetable garden. I envy those who do, but in my yard that would mean taking a number behind such a long line of vegetable lovers -- raccoons and squirrels and groundhogs, birds and insects -- and demand constant vigilance with little reward. Also, I only eat organic fruits and vegetables, and organic farming takes a lot of labor. I bless all the kind souls who devote their lives to it."

Oh, come now! Can home organic vegetable gardening be any more laborious than organic rose culture? And as for "little reward," surely the author has experienced the beauty of the French-style potager, or well-designed pattern gardens, both of which may take advantage of the natural beauty of vegetable plants and combine them freely with flowers -- which by itself is an organic measure for confusing pests. I wonder what she would think of garden beauties such as Flashy Trout's Back or Devil's Tongue lettuce, what she would make of Drunken Woman, Frizzy Headed lettuce and how it might have gotten its name? How about Purple Peacock or Veronica broccoli, Nero di Toscana kale, or the crimson-and-cream blossoms of the Painted Lady runner bean, as attractive to hummingbirds as to people? Tomatoes, when first introduced to Europe, were grown as ornamentals, and a mauve-tinted, green-shouldered Cherokee Purple, the dusky Purple Calabash, and the weirdly different Ananas Noir have all the colorful subtleties of many a garden flower.

Certainly there's nothing wrong with wanting a bower of roses instead of a vegetable patch, or of wanting a potager instead of a rose walk. But let's not pretend that one is "easier" than the other. We're only more willing to tolerate the dirty work if we're working for something we love.

The book concludes with a section of winter essays, full of the angst of a snowbound gardener waiting for spring, when the novelty of the first snow has long worn off and one longs for an end to the seemingly endless cold. At this point one might emulate the cycle of the seasons and cycle back to the first section, Spring. There is certainly plenty in this book that a second reading -- or a third or fourth -- still feels fresh and full of discoveries.

Gardening at 17 Stories

Many is the time I've been in a big city for one conference or another, and have looked across acre upon acre of black tar rooftop, thinking, "Look at all that space that could hold solar panels and help power those buildings."

Horticulturalists at Oregon State University looked across the same urban roofscape and thought, "That could be a meadow."

Rooftop gardens have been around for a long time, but those meant to be human-centered gardens, with tables and chairs and trees to shade them, generally require extra structural support to hold up all the dirt that's required. OSU researchers are investigating extensive gardens with low-growing plants, some requiring only a few inches of lightweight growing medium, which can happily co-exist with ordinary rooftop structures. Add a rainwater collection system to store water for dry summers, and you have a sustainable garden that can help mitigate runoff, clean the air, and mitigate the effects of putting concrete structures where wild nature used to be.

The full article is here: Greening the Concrete Jungle

Wind!

When, oh when, will this cycle of storms end? Seems like we've been having a steady stream of windstorms since the end of November. The winds kicked up hard on Friday, whistling through the power lines as I took a noon walk at work, and knocking tops out of trees around the area and then dumping a deluge of rain over the Willamette Valley. We didn't get it quite as bad as the east side of the mountains, where winds were knocking over semi-trucks near Pendleton and blowing rocks -- rocks! -- into people's windshields.

We're getting the winter snowpack we need to keep the rivers fed in the summer, but at what cost?

I watch the rain sluicing down the downspouts and down my driveway in the back and I'm thinking seriously about rain barrels. Something I'll have to look into.

A Locavore Baby-Steps Resolution

Happy New Year, everyone! May 2008 be the best year yet. May your lives and your gardens be fruitful.

The longstanding tradition at the New year is to make a list of resolutions for the coming year, so why buck tradition? If you want your resolutions to actually happen, experts suggest writing them as goals, and to be specific as possible. That is, rather than say, "I resolve to save more money this year," say, "I resolve to put $300 in savings at the start every month," or, "I resolve to fully fund my IRA this year."

So in the spirit of the running theme of local eating that has prompted a number of posts here, I propose a baby-steps approach to eating locally to add to your list of resolutions:

The weekly locavore/organivore grocery cart item check system:
Here's how it works: Each week when you shop for groceries, pull one item from the cart and find out where it is grown or produced. If it's not a local product, try to find the same or similar product that is locally grown or produced. You may not be able to answer this right away at the grocery store, but you can carry on your homework for that product during the week. For produce, check out farmer's markets or fruit stands to find out if the item is available now or if it's out of season. Check seed catalogs to see if you can grow it yourself. Find out if it's something you could buy in bulk when it's in season and preserve it for later. In the case of manufactured food products, look up recipes to see if you could make the same thing at home or something better. Are the ingredients that you need locally grown? Can you find local sources for them?

If there is no local source and you can't make or grow the product, look around the store to see if you can:

• find an organic version of the product (but let's not succumb to silliness in organic labeling, such as this post from The Gardener's Pantry describing an "organic" prepared pancake batter in a spray can).
• find a fair trade version (for teas, coffee, chocolate, or spices if you can't do without them).
  
• find a substitute, such as using locally-produced honey instead of sugar.
• do without entirely.

Will you count "locally manufactured" as fair if you can't find locally-grown? I leave that up to you. Patronizing local businesses is usually a good thing. By the end of the year, though, you'll have made a thoughtful decision regarding up to 52 items you commonly buy at the grocery store. And if there aren't 52 different items that you commonly buy, you'll finish your resolution before the end of the year. Everybody wins.

Here are a few of my more interesting finds from the past year:

• Bob's Red Mill products: Bob mills all kinds of flour, grain, and gluten-free products, many of them organic. I'm trying to find out where Bob gets his grain from, but at least the mill itself is well within my 100 mile radius, and I can get high-quality organic flour for my pantry.
  
• Zhena's Gypsy Tea: Until I can grow my own Camelia sinensis (tea plant) and make my own tea, I'm buying my tea from Zhena. It's 100% fair trade tea, and comes in the most fabulous flavors. Gypsy King Chai (a spiced black tea), Ambrosia White Plum, Sense of Peace (a rose-scented tea), Gypsy Love (another rose-scented tea), and Lemon Jasmine are my favorites. Not locally-grown or produced, but a compromise: supporting a fair-trade product.
  
• Dagoba Chocolate: Dagoba is manufactured in Ashland, Oregon, a little outside my 100 mile radius, but still within my home state. They use organic, sustainably-grown cacao and support rainforest reforestation. They also make the best dark chocolate ever, leaving Hershey's dark chocolate tasting nasty, bitter, and grainy by comparison. Try their Lavender bar for something different. Or go full-strength with the New Moon 74% cacao bar.

I'll keep posting my discoveries as I learn more about local eating over this next year. Who cares to join me on this journey?

Review: Plenty

Review of Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon (Harmony Books, 2007)

This is where the whole 100 mile diet movement got off the ground. Aghast at the distances that supermarket food has to travel, and the waste of oil that goes into such insanities as shipping tomatoes from Ecuador to the U.S. at the same time that the U.S. is exporting tomatoes, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon made a rash vow: that for an entire year, they would eat only food that was grown or caught within a 100 mile radius of their home in Vancouver, B.C.

For a young couple living in a tiny efficiency apartment in the middle of a city, with only a 10 foot by 3 foot garden allotment a short drive away, unplugging from the industrial food system meant long drives in the country in search of food -- at times, any food at all. Their odyssey began in March, the time of year when most fresh foods are out of season and even the cold-storage root crops are beginning to show signs of their age. Potatoes and onions are fine for one meal, but as the authors soon discovered, a steady diet of little else can drive one mad. Fortunately the farmer's markets opened in May, bringing a steady stream of fresh produce for immediate eating and for preservation.

Throughout their culinary journey, the authors reexamine their relationship with food, and even with each other. They expose their mistakes as well as their successes, and draw colorful portraits of the farmers, fishermen, and other characters they met as they discovered just what eating locally means, and how removed we of Western culture have become from our own food.

The one hazard of this book is that it may leave readers with the feeling that this is all too hard. A rash of articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post have all insinuated that eating entirely locally just isn't practical, or is even impossible in today's global market, regardless of how wasteful and unsustainable the industrial food system has become. True, going cold turkey may be an excessive burden for most of us working stiffs who don't have time for tooling around the countryside week after week in search of direct-market farms.

But how hard does it really have to be?

Article writers approach the issue as though it's an either-or proposition: either we eat only locally or we just keep eating the way we are. Hmm, let me see, work very hard to eat locally, or just keep on doing what I'm already doing. Which would I choose? But those aren't our only options. The 100 Mile Diet website suggests starting small. The leap-in-with-both-feet approach is overwhelming, so why not stick a toe in first? Start with one meal, made entirely from local produce. Or one meal a week. Or some chosen percentage of the contents of your grocery cart.

Or start a garden and grow some of the food yourself, your rebel you. You can't get much more local than that.

There are no rules. If each of us does what we can, it will make a difference.

Christmas loot!

I had a lot of good gardening stuff on my Christmas list, and Santa came through with some good goodies. Now if the sky would just stop raining and spitting bits of snow long enough for me to get outside, I could go play with my new toys. I'll borrow a few images from the source websites until I can get some good pictures of my own.

The biggest item that I'd hoped for was this Rubbermaid Storage Bench, ordered via our local Ace Hardware:



I assembled the bench this afternoon, and all but the last side panel went together easily. It took two people, though, and several tries to get the last side panel on. The seat is a lid for the storage box underneath. It now has a spot in the new garden, where it will store some tools so I don't have to run down behind the house every time I want a tool.

Territorial Seed Company was the source for this very nice cold frame kit made by Sunshine Garden House:



That, too, I assembled this afternoon. It wasn't too difficult, but I found it was much easier if I pre-drilled the holes for the screws. Otherwise I was afraid of splitting the wood. I also gave the wood a coat of tung oil. The frame is redwood, so it should be fairly impervious to rot for a very long time, but some extra care will help it last even longer. Right now the cats think it's a nice thing to climb on and to get inside, so the cover already has little paw prints all over it.

This automatic cold frame opener, however, may prove to be a bust:



The scanty instructions in multiple languages were accompanied by tiny, blurry sketches, and were only somewhat comprehensible in any language. Without an illustrated parts list I could only guess at which part was being asked for in each step and exactly where each part was supposed to go. The spring-loaded jaws snapped shut like a mousetrap several times, twice catching my fingers and leaving a bruise on one finger. Even after I got it assembled, I couldn't figure out if it was assembled correctly, nor could I figure out how to make it work with the cold frame. With the temperature-sensitive cylinder in place, the device stays open, as seen in the photo. How is the cold frame lid supposed to shut? I've never liked post-Christmas returns, especially for things that I asked for in the first place, but this evil little finger-eating device may be transformed into seeds and plants instead.

But returning to the fun toys, this Wheeleasy collapsible wheel barrow was simple to put together and should be extremely useful:



It's big enough that it will be a real help when raking fall leaves, and will be good for small hauling jobs. You have to pull out two little pins in front to make it fold up, and there are clips on the front to put the pins in when they're not in use. I was hoping to store this in the garden bench, but the bench is shorter and the Wheeleasy longer than I'd pictured either of them. It'll fit in the storage shed I have, though.

In addition to the toys I got several books, which I'll highlight in upcoming reviews.

One good "gift" that wasn't on my list was the pathology report from a biopsy of a pigmented patch on my face. The thing went from flat to rounded a few months ago. My doctor looked at it and referred me to a plastic surgeon to have it looked at, and by the time I saw the plastic surgeon, it had gone flat again. The plastic surgeon took a biopsy last week, and pulled the stitches this week. While there were a few slightly abnormal cells in the report, there wasn't anything to be worried about, and if the thing does anything weird now, the biopsy itself took out so much of it that the remainder can be frozen off. We gardeners spend a lot of time in the sun, so be sure to use sunscreen, wear a hat, and check your moles!

Everyone else get their Christmas wishes this year?

Christmas goodies: Springerle (anise cookies)

Anise is easy to grow and is lovely in the garden, with its feathery and frilly leaves. It's a great herb for attracting beneficial insects, as the blossoms supply pollen and nectar for beneficial insects to eat. The licorice-scented seeds can be harvested to save for next year or for cooking.

But what do you make with anise seeds?

Springerle, of course!

Springerle are one of the traditional cookies that my grandmother made every year. These are floury, no-fat cookies flavored with anise seeds and adorned with decorative pictures from a special carved roller or wooden mold. Grandma always kept the cookies in a gallon-sized glass jar. Hers were generally hard enough that they required dunking in coffee to make them edible, though I always liked gnawing on them without dunking them. I guess I'm just weird that way. My springerle are a considerably softer, which I suppose has to do with how long they dry before baking. This year's batch is slightly tan because (oopsie) as I was mixing them I discovered I was one cup shy of the amount of unbleached flour that I needed, so I added a cup of whole wheat flour.

It takes two days to make the cookies. The dough is mixed and the cookies are shaped in the first evening, then baked the next day after they dry overnight. For best flavor, make the springerle a week or two before Christmas to allow the flavor of the anise seeds to permeate the cookies. Store them in a tightly-closed container while they season so they don't turn rock-hard.

This recipe will make 5-6 dozen small cookies.

Springerle
4 eggs
2 cups of sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 1/2 cups of flour
Anise seeds

Beat the eggs until they are thick. Slowly add the sugar and salt and continue beating 5 minutes with an electric mixer or 15 minutes by hand. Stir in the flour about 1/2 cup at a time. The dough will be stiff.

Divide the dough in half. Shape in to a slab slightly more than 1/4 inch thick and the width of your springerle roller or wooden mold. Roll the dough with the springerle roller to press the pictures into the cookies. Cut the cookies apart. If you don't have a springerle roller, roll the dough out to 1/4 inch thick and cut into bars 1 inch wide and 1 1/2 inches long.

Lightly grease two cookie sheets and sprinkle thickly with anise seeds. Place the cookies on top of the seeds. They can be fairly close together because they will not spread during baking. Cover the cookies with a cloth and let them dry overnight.

The next morning, heat the oven to 375 degrees. Place the cookies in the oven and immediately reduce the temperature to 325 degrees. The initial heat sets the design. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove from the sheet and allow to cool, then store in a tightly closed container. Seeds that were left on the sheet after the cookies were removed can go in the bottom of the jar to add to the anise aroma.

Essential tools: Grandma's springerle roller and her favorite cookie cookbook, dated 1941.

Christmas goodies: Knock-their-socks-off Pumpkin (or squash) Pie

The frustration for a gardener who has grown some lovely pumpkins or squash for eating is this: you go to the recipe book to find a good recipe for your pumpkins, and what does the recipe call for? "1 can of pumpkin." True, that's the usual form of pumpkin that most Americans are familiar with, but there's nary a suggestion of how much pumpkin comes in one can. One wonders how it came about that pumpkin for eating comes only in a can, while the real things, the orange globes that appear in the stores in the fall, are only for carving. Squash, when it's thought of at all, is more likely to come frozen in a plastic bag that as a whole squash.

So for gardeners or farmer's market buyers, here's my secret recipe for pumpkin pie, which can also be made with squash (which, after all, is really what's in those cans labeled "pumpkin").

When the in-laws are coming over, or you have special guests, or you're trying to butter up the entire office at the annual Christmas party, try serving up this pie. The special spice mix and the vanilla make it yummy enough, but the secret sock-knocking-off ingredient is the rum extract. If you can find real, genuine cinnamon, you're in for an even nicer treat. The stuff sold in the U.S. as "cinnamon" is actually cassia bark, which is cheaper but coarser and has more of a bite. You have to find a specialty spice shop such as Penzeys to find real cinnamon. I haven't yet experimented with using fresh ginger instead of ground, but I may have to try that sometime. To be really genuine, you can use cream instead of canned evaporated milk, but I don't think my arteries would forgive me for that even if my mouth would be in heaven.

First, of course, you have to have some cooked pumpkin or squash. I used butternut squash grown on a local farm for this pie. I grew up hating squash because all I'd ever tried was acorn squash from the grocery store that my mother used to cook with brown sugar, which never did hide the bitterness. Then I tasted butternut. What a revelation. Mellow, sweet, almost as nice as a sweet potato. To cook a butternut squash, I cut it in half lengthwise, remove the seeds, brush with olive oil, and roast cut-side-up at 325 degrees for about an hour. I scoop out the flesh, mash it, and whatever I don't need for the recipe I'm using I freeze in 1 cup portions in plastic bags. If you press the bags flat, they freeze and thaw quickly.

Knock-their-socks-off Pumpkin or Squash Pie

Mix together:
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon cloves
1/4 teaspoon allspice

Set the sugar and spice mixture aside.

In a blender, put:
2 cups cooked pumpkin or squash
1 can of evaporated milk (regular or nonfat)
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 teaspoon rum extract

Blend until smooth.
Slowly add the sugar and spice mix and blend together.

Pour into a prepared pie shell (regular pie crust, graham cracker crust, or whatever your heart desires). I use a deep-dish 12-inch pie pan to hold all this filling. It will also fill two 8-inch pie pans. Sprinkle the top with nutmeg if you like. Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 350 degrees and bake another 40 minutes. The middle will puff up and will still be wobbly when done, but a knife or toothpick inserted in the pie should come out clean. Let cool about 2 hours before cutting. Refrigerate once it has cooled.

Serve with whipped cream. My husband insists on naked pumpkin pie, but I learned better when I was growing up.

Pumpkin pie. Fully dressed. On Grandma's vintage china. Mmm-mmm!

100th post: a holiday gift to my readers

So cool that I can do something special with my 100th post. In honor of all my readers at Reading Dirt, some lucky family in need will be receiving tree seedlings from Heifer International. Now, if we're lucky, the picture of the cute little girl with the seedlings will show up on this card:

Season's Greetings to All!

Christmas goodies: Lavender Shortbread

Mmm, it's the time of year when the baking begins. My grandmother used to begin her Christmas baking sometime around Thanksgiving, and on Christmas Eve, here came Grandma with a mountain of tins, jars, and boxes of cookies, fudge, divinity, candied nuts, kolace (Czech sweet buns with fruit topping -- Grandma's parents immigrated from Bohemia), pumpkin pie, mince pie, hard sauce, Christmas bread, and all the glories of holiday goodness. My brothers and I ate our way through Christmas vacation with Tom and Jerrys (sweet batter, hot water, rum and brandy -- only a dab of the booze for flavor for us kids) to wash it down. Sometimes leftovers went in the freezer -- if there were any leftovers with three kids in the house and relatives coming to visit.

I can't say I've kept up with Grandma's output, but I do make at least three or four different cookies, some Christmas bread, and pumpkin pie. Some of the cookies are traditional, some I've added over the years, and while I don't strive to do all the traditional cookies ever years, I do make sure I do one or two.

The pie plate in the picture above holds traditional Scottish shortbread -- my father's father's family came from Scotland -- with my own touch from the garden: a hint of lavender. It's easy, delicious, and really truly, the calories don't count when it's a holiday. Or so I tell myself. Be sure to use real butter, or at least one of those butter-margarine blends, because it really does make a difference in flavor. So does the real vanilla.

Lavender shortbread
1/2 cup butter (room temperature)
1 cup unbleached flour
1/3 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon dried lavender blossoms

Grind the lavender blossoms in a mini food processor or in a mortar and pestle. Mix with the flour. Add the sugar and mix well. Using a pastry cutter, cut the butter into the flour until it forms fine crumbs. Sprinkle on the vanilla and blend in with the pastry cutter. Press into the bottom of a 9 inch pie plate or cake pan (or a shortbread mold if you have one). Bake at 325 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. Cut into 16 equal wedges while still warm. Leave in the pan to cool, and remove when it is completely cool.

Now doesn't that look delicious?

'Tis the Season -- for seed catalogs!

Call them eye candy, call them garden porn, call them what you like, there's nothing like a good seed catalog to while away a rainy or icy winter evening by the fire with a hot cup of tea, planting beautiful gardens in one's mind. Bugs never invade, diseases never strike, the flowers all bloom on time and the vegetables are perfect in the garden of the mind, nurtured by the effusive prose of the seed catalog.

Every gardener has his or her favorite company or catalog. There are catalogs one prefers for buying certain types of seeds or plants, catalogs with the most amusing prose, catalogs with the best and most tempting photos, and they aren't always one and the same.

My preferences have long been Territorial Seed Company and Nichols Garden Nursery. Both are Oregon companies (still on the locally-grown theme, yes?), and both feature varieties best suited for the Pacific Northwest.

Territorial's catalog is richly informative, with complete growing instructions in front of each vegetable section. They have a good selection of garden tools and books, without a lot of decorative flim-flam. Their seeds and plants are almost always good, though one year none of the lettuce that I bought from them germinated. I don't know if it was due to their processing, or if it was exposed to extreme temperatures in shipping. Had I complained, they would have shipped new seed, but I'd already re-seeded with packets from the prior year.

Nichols is located just a half-hour away by freeway, close enough to drive to, in a red barn-like building redolent with herbal aromas. A lovely display garden sits in back. Some years I make the trip, and some years it's more convenient to order from their catalog. The catalog copy itself is sometimes a little dry and may have more typos that one might prefer, but their selection of herbs and native wildflowers for the region is wonderful. They have some downright unusual vegetables (yacon or oca, anyone?), saffron crocus, a selection of brewing supplies for those so inclined, and my very favorite of all herbal teas, Red Dragon. Their Eco Lawn mixes are a nice compromise for people who are concerned about the ecological impact of lawn care, but don't want to give up their lawns entirely. Rose Marie Nichols McGee is the co-author of Bountiful Container, the definitive guide to edible container gardening.

This year I'll be installing some new fruit trees, so I've perused the One Green World online catalog. The nursery is just an hour's drive to the north from where I live, and the catalog features an amazing collection of fruits from around the world. Many are unusual and hard to find elsewhere. If you want to grow a medieval Medlar or a Chinese Goumi, One Green World is where you'll find them. I'll be looking for dwarf pears, cherries, and an apricot, so if I can't find the varieties I want at One Green World, I'll look into Stark's catalog, as well as checking with local nurseries.

I'll also be improving several spots with native plants, so I'll be hitting Wallace Hansen Nursery during its spring sale. There's a nice PDF plant list on their website for drooling over in the meantime.

Now if I really want a big dose of eye candy, there's nothing like Thompson & Morgan's all-color catalog. Not local, but so much fun to look at. For the really discerning who want their perennials just so, try Digging Dog Nursery. For the xeric garden and western natives, High Country Gardens is hard to beat. Their plants always arrive in excellent shape.

Ah, now if only the gardens of reality looked as grand as the gardens of my dreams!

Let the Christmas decorating begin - gardener style

Whew! NaNoWriMo is over (and I won! Yeah!), dead week and finals week are over, grades have been turned in, and I'm back from several days in Santa Monica where I went to a workshop on using some new video-based teacher training materials. Now I can finally attend to my neglected garden and my neglected garden blog.

How about this pretty pansy, all in Christmas colors? It's part of my outdoor Christmas decorating scheme. No blow-up manger scenes with a robotic baby Jesus waving at the crowds, not for this garden. I began the holiday decorating instead with a trip to the garden center for one flat each of white and red pansies, which went in the center circle of the new garden:

Okay, so it's not as exciting and obviously Christmas-like as the robotic baby Jesus. These flowers went in a couple of weeks ago, but the weather has been all blowy and rainy, so they haven't put on much growth. I'm not sure if the neighbors can see enough blooms to recognize the color scheme, but at least I know it's for Christmas! After the holidays are over, I'll find some early primroses in pink to add to the pansies for a Valentine's day display. By the time Easter comes around, the pansies will be fading and the primroses can take over in springtime pastels.

I tucked several red and white pansies into the herb pots on the front porch, which yesterday got wrapped in light-up green garland:


Some years I've started the porch pots with black and orange pansies for Halloween, replaced the black pansies with yellow for Thanksgiving, then moved the fall colors to a flower bed and replaced them with the Christmas colors.

I also moved a few dozen strawberry plants from their old bed to the new bed in the new garden and started mulching them with raked pine needles:

The old bed borders a back-access to the neighbor's yard, and every time they have yard work done, the strawberry bed gets trampled. You'd think that a bunch of guys who are hired to do yard work would be able to see plants instead of trampling them. But no, I have to remember that 1) these are guys, not gardening guys, but just plain guys hired to do some work, and 2) the work they're hired to do is in the neighbor's yard, not mine. So whatever is in the neighbors' yard is important, but my yard is just the place they drive through to get there, and a convenient place to dump their trash. Grrr.