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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!

“I hate dumb junk” is one of my favorite sayings from childhood. One of my biggest pet peeves is things that don’t do their job. If a tool was created for a single purpose and fails to do that purpose, it is worse than a failure.

My garden trowel frustrated me to no end last year. I’d really be digging in and instead of doing the job, it would just bend. Well.. no more!

I built my own. I call it The Apocalypse Trowel. It will take out weeds, or zombies.

	This is 1 inch square steel tubing as the handle, with 1/4 inch steel blade. The two are bolted together with 8mm bolts. I figured the bolts were stronger than a weld.. and since I don’t have a welder, bolts it is.
	This is a close up of the blade. I ground it down on my bench grinder.

One of the other things that I learned in 2009 was that buying your supplies, of any type (seedlings, fertilizer, or tools) from a garden supply or nursery center is amazingly expensive. I live just down the road from a well known residential nursery center and while they do carry anything I would need, they seem to want far more for it than I think is reasonable. In 2009 my garden was a hobby. Our house hold had two working adults, so money put into the garden wasn’t all that important. It certainly wasn’t an economically minded venture.

The end of 2009 brought a lot of change. First one of us was out of work, and a few months later so was the other. After 3 months of zero outside income, the amount of cash available to hobbies is now zero as well. The book “Gardening When It Counts” by Steve Solomon is my new favorite book all over again. Even though both of us are blessed with great jobs again going into the spring of 2010, the mind set as definitely changed from ‘garden hobby’ to ‘garden as low cost high quality food’.

Part of that is now reflected in the title of my page. No longer just a garden blog, but also a food blog. What happens to the vegetables from seed to stomach.

The biggest shift for me is thinking about my little 1,000 sq ft garden as if it were a for-profit farm. WWFD is my new gardening slogan. What Would a Farmer Do? A farmer wouldn’t pay $3 a pound for fertilizer like I did last year (Dr. Earth by the 4lb box, $12). He wouldn’t skimp out on cheap seeds with bad germination and poor genes either.

My first act of Farmer-ness is to make my own organic fertilizer. Thankfully my paperback-bound-mentor Steve Solomon gives a full chapter on soil amendments including his recipe for his ‘complete organic fertilizer’, which he calls COF for short. It is made of some interesting things I figured would be nightmarish to track down. Things like seed meals (mostly husks and byproducts from oil manufacturing, bloodmeal.. ground and dried animal parts (lovely huh), and various other things like lime, dolomite, gypsum and basalt. WWFD.. he’d go to the feed supply store. Turns out I have one right beside the nursery.

	The thing about farmers is they generally don’t just have 1,000 sq ft. They generally have a LOT of sq ft. As such, the best bang-for-buck per ingredient is the 50 pound bag. Steve’s recipe calls for 4 parts of a seed meal. Any seed meal will work (expect for coprameal, which isn’t as nutritious) DeYoung’s Farm Supply, where I got my stuff from, had two different kinds of seed meal.. Alfalfa meal and Cottonseed meal. I got 50 pounds of each. I put 2 parts of each meal into my first batch.
	This is what the alfalfa meal looks like. It has a very pleasant smell.. sort of like dried hay.. which isn’t far off.
	The cottonseedmeal comes in the same bag (both with a small tag stapled to the top describing the contents). The actual meal itself is slightly lighter in color and has roughly the same smell and texture as the alfalfa meal. A quick note about cottonseedmeal from Steve’s book says that cotton isn’t a food crop and can therefore be more heavily sprayed with pesticides not qualified for human consumption. He notes that during the processing of the cotton all of the oil residues (which include the pesticides) are extracted under extreme heat, leaving the meal entirely free of any pesticide residues. He also notes that these cottonseed oils that are extracted contain all of the pesticide residues… these oils ARE used in processed foods. Something to think about when choosing your next salad dressing.
	This is the blood meal. It looks like you’d think it would.. like dried and finely ground animal parts.. yummy. It smells pretty much like you’d think it would too, but thankfully, not nearly as strong as what I would imagine it would smell like if it were to get wet. Honestly though, once the whole batch is mixed together, it smells great. Like a fresh hay barn.
	This is the gypsum. There are 3 types of lime that are added to the COF, all of which provide calcium in one form or another. Gypsum is calcium sulfate.
	This is what the finely ground gypsum looks like. It doesn’t really have an odor.
	Another type of lime, and the one used most by volume, is your standard agricultural lime. It contains nearly 100% calcium carbonate.
	The final lime is Dolomite lime. Not to be confused with that great 70s movie, Dolemite. Dolomite contains both calcium and magnesium carbonates.
	Mixed all together you end up with your complete organic fertilizer. I bought 300 pounds of total ingredients, with taxes it came to $149. I think a farmer would be much more willing to pay 50 cents a pound versus $3 a pound for his fertilizer.

Steve does call for 1 /2 – 1 part of Kelpmeal for his COF. Kelp is super high in trace minerals, which are needed and used by vegetables Vegetables grown with available trace minerals provide a far superior nutritional content. Steve warns that kelpmeal is very expensive and you can get along without it. He wasn’t kidding. DeYoung’s had it in stock at $75 per 50 pounds. That is 50% of my total cost for all of the other ingredients, so this year I omitted the kelp. I’ll be sure and keep taking my daily multivitamin until I can afford the kelpmeal.

The main reason for starting my gardening blog back early last year was to keep notes on what worked, what didn’t, and what I would change for 2010. Since my 2010 Territorial catalog came in this weekend I guess it’s time for me to write the summary post on all of the things I grew in 2009.

First, though, the results of a few of my experiments from this year.

The stone bed really is good for plants that do better in partial shade. My tomatoes didn’t do well there. Spinach, lettuces, kale and carrots all did well there. Onions, bok choy and surprisingly enough, Chard, didn’t do very well. I guess it will be my ‘greens’ bed from now on. This works out well since it is elevated above the bunnies that would likely chow down.

I have several experiments planed for 2010. First of which will be to propagate my blueberry bush. Second will be the new garden itself. I’m going with Steve Solomon’s recommendation and moving away from raised beds towards low mounded rows. I’ll be doing a lot wider plant spacing in hopes of better water conservation. I have the 1/2 acre, I should put it to use.. and I will. This should allow me to run my in-ground irrigation system only rarely through the driest of summer months.

Now, on to the summary:

This weekend was eventful in the newbie gardener household. Friday night we partied with some neighbors, and before the party got out of hand I met a new almost neighbor that shares a lot of hobbies with me. She has a big garden, and she has chickens! I’m looking forward to getting to go meet her chickens and see her garden.

Saturday night we had a cheapie date night at Borders. I read through Steve Solomon’s newish book, Gardening When It Counts. It is all about how to garden super cheap. How to build the most efficient garden when the bottom line matters. This is important for me because I expect gardening to have a positive ROI. This isn’t a hobby for hobby’s sake.

Steve has recanted some of of his previous positions. For one, his new thought is that intensive raised bed gardening is too expensive. Mostly in terms of recurring water cost, but for me, also in terms of initial creation costs. His approach now is low mounded beds. He says that a 3” bed has all of the benefits of much deeper raised beds. 3” is easily attained without any sort of hardware, just pile up the dirt into beds. Once you have the beds, plant in much wider spacings. Steve did extensive investigation of root development patterns on just about every common vegetable. Based on this, he created optimal spacings. This is much wider than we do with intensive planting, but requires almost no artificial irrigation. He recommends 5-20 gallons of water –per year- for the Pacific Northwest for the larger plants, like tomatoes and pumpkins, given in 5 gallon waterings once a month or so.

On Sunday I pulled the last of the carrots and flashy oak and paris white lettuces. I added about a half inch of compost over that area and spaded it in and raked it into a fine seed bed. I planted four greens, all winter hardy crops that will be growing under the cold frames.

	Here is the book, Gardening When It Counts by Steve Solomon. Great book. I highly recommend it.
	This is the winter bed. Nice and clean. The junk in the foreground is all of the uncomposted organic material. It will be outside of the cold frame so it should compost over the winter. In the far side of the bed you can see the volunteer tomato, still going strong.   Planted, in order from left to right: Spinach:  Regal Spinach: Winter Giant Lettuce: Arctic King Lettuce: North Pole
	I also made up a batch of Mountain White Bread from the Bread Bible book. It is a good generic white bread, good for slicing and sandwiches. Turned out really nicely. It has a few tablespoons of honey so it has a nice mellow sweetness to it and a dense crumb.

It’s been a long time since I posted, but both the garden and I are still alive. The garden is doing its thing, producing at a mad rate, although not nearly enough tomatoes. I feel like a Cubs fan.. “Next year!”.

	My Flashy Oak Butter Lettuce is at its peak right now. We had this in a salad last night and it was great.
	This didn’t come from my garden, but it did come from my kitchen. I bought a copy of The Bread Bible and this was my first recipe to make from it, Challah. I also made six small “slider” hamburger buns from it and we had them during the football game last night (Go Pack Go!!).

I have three ‘regular’ garden beds, each 10×4. I created two of them last year, and the third earlier this year. My first bed just did not do well this year at all. I planted bok choy, two types of onions, dill, cilantro, parsley, peas and cucumbers in mid-Spring. The bok choy and onions sprouted and then mostly died away. The cilantro was super stringy, the cucumbers only grew about 3” and stopped. The peas did ok, but not great. The parsley didn’t even germinate at all, and the dill was a dud until I noticed this weekend that it had suddenly appeared out of no where and was a foot tall.

I didn’t know much about gardening when I started the bed last year. Well.. I still don’t know much, but I knew less then. I can’t remember what I filled the bed with, but whatever it was is super dry every time I go out to check the beds. Even though I have an automated irrigation system, I still don’t water all that often. Once a week during our normal weather (meaning when its in the 70s, low 80s) and only more frequently when the weather is hotter. I have a moisture meter and at 8” depth in my other two beds it is a nice 80% moisture level a day before watering.. but this bed is always around 65%. So whatever I made this bed out of it is certainly not a water-retaining substance.

I thought about amending it with some peat moss or something else to retain water. I thought about just getting rid of the bed altogether and setting up another one somewhere else in the yard (more on that later).

However, I’m going to try an experiment. Reading through ‘Gardening West of the Cascades’ in the winter gardening section Steve talks about using coldframes and hoophouses in the winter, not for cold protection but for rain protection. Any good soil will get waterlogged and the plants will drown. So.. I have a bed that drains too fast for summer, and weather that provides too much water in winter. Maybe my little bed here is just made for winter gardening. I planted winter broccoli and cauliflower in it this weekend (might be too late, but I had the seeds so why not try), along with peas and favas.

I’m also in the process of watching different sections of my yard during sunny days to track the shade patterns. I don’t really care for the beds just being shoved out in the yard.. I’d like to have them cordoned off somehow. Maybe a little 3’ tall cedar fence around it with some mulch all around them. That is a big project and before I do something like that I want to make sure I have the optimum location. I’ve already watched the shade pattern this summer in my current location. As you can see in the photo above, my neighbors row of Arbor Vitae cast a long narrow shade down the fence line in the late afternoon.

I was going to ditch this whole area and move all of the garden somewhere else, but the more I watch, the more I see this is a good spot, it just needs to be shifted out some. The shade pattern changes based on the time of year, and so far the sun is already setting between the tree line across the street (which shades my entire property) before it hits the neighbors Arbor Vitae.. so, for winter gardening it doesn’t really matter, because the shade pattern is different.

I also planted my chard, winter napa cabbage and an Arctic butter lettuce in my stone bed this weekend.

	The volunteer tomato is growing stronger and bigger by the day. He has 4 tomatoes on now and lots more blooms. The one tomato is getting bigger pretty rapidly.. it just might make it. The Flashy Oak Butter lettuce surrounding it is in need of picking.. and eating.
	My Paris White romaine is heading out nicely too.

I may be a 6’5 210lb motorcycle ridin man, but I love me some lolcats. I’m not gonna lie. We have a boy and a girl cat and they are hilarious. Other people’s cats with funny captions are hilarious. Cats have little to do with gardening.. but, the ‘Cheezburger network’ (the people that run lolcats) have a new(ish) blog up called ThereIFixedIt.com, and it is –awesome-. It is a tribute to the worst (best?) kludges from around the world. The site mostly pokes fun at the crazy things people do to get around a problem.. but this one is just.. just.. brilliant!