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This year I decided to add to my garden, not only by putting in a much bigger garden at home (posts on that to come) but also to take part in my local community garden. It is located in Marymoor Park in Redmond, and gets sun all day long. Since this is our first year, we are only allowed 1 plot, which isn’t a problem for us at all. We even decided to go halfers on the plot with our good friend (more family really) cbro. No, his mother did not give him that name, but if I called him by his real name none of my family would know who I was talking about. Each community plot is 10′x40′, giving us 400 sq ft. We are dividing it in half, so my wife and I have 200 sq ft in addition to the 500 sq ft we have at home.

We got to the plot around noon on a cool and rainy Saturday. This was fine by me as it meant it wasn’t going to be crowded.. in fact we were the only ones in the place for the first two hours. Our plot did not look like it had been used in a while. Later we discovered that both ours and the plot beside it likely belonged to the same person last year or the year before. Maybe we won’t have neighbors on one side this year and we can expand a little.

	The community garden looks pretty rough right now, being technically still winter. I took this picture from the main entrance to see how it changes over the seasons.
	This is what we have to work with. Random wire, and lots of grass, weeds, and old vegetative material. Looks tasty!
	But, you take 3 strong backs and a few hours of work and you end up with something a lot more pleasant. We will go back next week and make our beds and add our compost and organic fertilizers. We might even plant some peas.

This is a project that my wife and I have been wanting to do for a while. I started it last weekend and while cutting the first one out it caught in the drill and sliced open my finger. Pretty nasty too. That will teach me to wear gloves when working with sheet metal. So a week later and well on my way to recovery, we decided to tackle it again. This time we had much better success.

	We looked all over the web, local nurseries and my inventory of seed catalogs for cute, affordable and durable plant tags. Durable, in our case, means standing up to years of being soaking wet. We found some cute ones, some affordable ones, and some durable ones.. but none with all three attributes. They were all either cheap, ugly, or expensive ($14 each for plant tags, really??). So what do we do, we design and make our own! I think they turned out really well. Here’s how we made them.
	We started off with a 24×24 sheet of fairly thin sheet metal, cutting it down to 1.5″ strips.
	Then we cut those down to individual sizes.
	Using a metal stamp kit we stamp in each of the names we’re planting this year.
	Grind off the sharp edges.
	Using a fine point sharpie we draw in the metal stamps for better definition, and then drill a hole in the center of the tag.
	12 gauge wire we bought in 10′ sections, cut down to 16″ and bent in half. These form the legs.
	And here we go, the final result. Pretty sweet!
	Here is the back of it. You can see it is just bolted together.
	Quite a few, and still a few more to go. We need about 25 for this year. We are quite pleased with these though. We estimate they cost about 50 cents each to build. Way better than the cheap ones at the nursery and a lot cheaper than the metal ones you can get online.

It is mid-February and already spring is in the air. It has been an especially warm winter for us here in Seattle this year. I got out and enjoyed the 60F and Sunny weather we had yesterday. I actually had to mow the lawn,.. during which I found the first dandelion flower already. They don’t waste any time.

Other things are growing too.

	My garlic didn’t grow at all last fall. I planted it ‘on time’, according to my resources anyway, but nothing sprouted. That is probably a good thing since all of the greens avoided the week of 15F nights we had in December. They are wasting no spring sun though, they are growing quickly. The “mulch” is the leaves dropped by Japanese maple. It was sort of a half hearted mulching effort.
	Inside my cold frames the spinach is getting off to a good head start. These were planted in late October.. which is way too late really, but they just kind of hung out over the winter and have started growing quickly with each sunny day we get.
	My daylilies have started to break ground in the flower bed as well. The blueberry bush has buds forming and the trees and shrubs are all starting to bud and leaf out too. I love it!
	I was at my local independent hardware store picking up some supplies for a gardening project (which I’ll post about if it turns out well) when I saw some primroses on sale for $1 each. My planter box on the front porch has been bare all winter so I decided to pep it up a little. Scoring the brownie points with my lovely wife didn’t hurt either!