when god was a tree

Today I worked in the woods making a trail, woods buffing and talking about god with Margaret. It’s hard, but satisfying work - work that’s in my blood. This is what our ancestors did: made easier ways to move through the forests, gathered fallen branches, cleared future fire hazards to heat their homes, and talked about god.

Un-buffed Woods

Our ancestors knew no wilderness; they lived and worked in the forest. They shaped it to meet their needs, and it shaped them - heat their hearths, became handles and spindles, wattles and wickers, a place for pasture and picking nuts, a place for gathering mushrooms and herbs, a place to make love, a place for shelter, but most of all a place to worship.

When god was a tree, all of the trees, the sky, the wind, the rain, the water that flows through our bodies, when god was everything, there was no wilderness. We were at home in the forest, and this is what we did: we buffed the woods, cleared the dead and dying branches to cook our meals and warm our nights.

Nettles Tea & Broccoli bigger Than Your Head

Don't eat anything bigger than your head.

Nettle Tea
This Spring I harvested loads of nettles for teas for myself and my garden. I harvested the first tips without gloves, and enjoyed the baby stings so much, that I whipped my arthritic wrists for the pleasure and pain of too much stimulation.
There are alleged health benefits to the stingle (sting/tingle) of nettles - increased circulation to the stimulated areas - the body's own healing forces  drawn to where they are needed most.
In any case I like to drink an invigorating cup of nettle tea in the morning, and I don't mind a little stingle along with the harvest - makes me feel more in touch with the nettles plant.
Later in spring I come back for more nettles for my garden. The nettles are waste high and threatening to flower any day now. Last year I borrowed the perfect tool, a weed whacker that swings like a golf club with a blade on the end of it. I mowed the nettles down, and forked them into my truck with a pitch fork - a relatively stingle-free adventure.
This year I have a Japanese hand sickle called a kama. To use it I have to get up close and personal with the nettles. The nettles are more venomous, with more sting and less tingle. They sting me through my long sleeve shirt and pants, and through the backs of my gloves. I harvest enough to fill a trash can. I'm harvesting for a large garden - a five gallon bucket would be adequate for most gardens.
I cover the nettles with water, and let it sit for a few days before I use it to fertilize my garden. I'm careful to dilute it ten to one with water before I put it on my plants. I've experimented with less dilute mixtures and burned some of my plants with excess nitrogen. I fertilized the greedier feeders in my garden once a week during their youth. Any plants that looked like they could use a boost, I fertilize now and then.
The nettles tea starts to stink after a month, sooner if the weather is warmer. It's still good as a fertilizer, and you can continue to use it until the stench outweighs the value of the fertilizer.  When blowfly larva start to appear, it's definitely time to toss it.
I grew cabbages with leaves as large as collards and broccoli-bigger-than-your-head, thanks to weekly doses of nettles tea.

Broccoli bigger than your head
This summer we grew so many over-sized broccoli that we had too much to harvest, and had to give some away. A record-setting, cool spring and early summer created ideal broccoli growing conditions. Weekly waterings with nettles tea insured vigorous growth in during childhood and early adolescence of our broccoli plants.

Second summer broccoli

Of course the variety we chose made a big difference - Belstar, an F1hybrid that we purchased from Johnnys Seeds.
I was showing off my super-sized broccoli when my next door neighbor showed me her Belstar broccoli plant that had overwintered from last year and produced a fine head of broccoli.
Wow perennial broccoli! I've had kale plants that lasted more then one year - the longest lasting one lived seven years before the wind chopped its head off. It was growing in my parking lot where it never got fertilized or watered.

Long-lived brassica plants are nothing new. The Walking Stick kale is an example of a brassica  that has been especially bred to grow for more than one year. They are cut, dried and shellacked to create picturesque walking canes, and cudgels to chase away children and other garden pests from the cherry orchard.   http://www.anniesannuals.com/plt_lst/lists/general/lst.gen.asp?prodid=2875

The trick to extending the life span of your kale and broccoli plants is to disrupt the flowering cycle of your plants. Ordinarily annuals and biennials (plants that complete their life cycle in one or two seasons) expend all their energy flowering and producing seeds. Their role in the ecosystem is to fill in the blank spots as quickly as possible to protect the soil from the elements. They live fast, die young, and leave lots of seeds so they can do it all over again.
When a plant flowers, energy from the roots and leaves is sent to the flowering parts of the plants. For long lived plants you can and should cut back the flowers, but it is usually not enough. You need to cut the energy off at the source by picking off the leaves. Good luck in your experiments with perennial broccoli and kale plants.

How peas do it

The sex organs are nested in Robin's egg blue wings.  

Blue wings unfold to reveal a deep purple bud.

The wings turn pink and flare.
Purple keels open.

Hidden under the keels
another layer of frilly undergarments.

The pea flower plays hard to get -

pollinates itself.

The pea just feeds the body,
the flower is soul food.

Paulownia tomentosa

It's commonly called the Empress Tree or the Foxglove Tree. This specimen should be called Paulownia tormentosa because it's been whacked on to accommodate the power lines. So it goes.
Trees tend to get in the way of streets, houses, sewers and all of the other benefits of modern civilization. When there not in the way of progress, they block the view, like the giant Money Puzzle that obscured the full frontal nudity of the Court House.
But better butchered than gone.

This is my first post in the Trees of Port Townsend series. Eventually they will all be on a Google Maps, with descriptions and growing information.

Winter Harvest

June 19  1:00 - 3:00  Quimper Grange

It's hard to think of next winter, when the last one is barely over, but now is the time.

Winter is when fresh food matters most. The vegetables in the markets are expensive, and never as fresh as when they're just picked from our gardens. In winter our bodies crave the sunshine captured in the kale leaves or broccoli stems and flowers.

Jesse Hopkins from Collinwood Gardens will discuss sowing schedules and plant varieties for an abundant garden next winter.

Diversity Workshop

We can fight the weeds and insects, or we can offer them a modest share of our gardens. Yesterday I harvested some six-foot-tall giant milk thistles with their mottled leaves and their red-pink flower buds just opening. It was a shorts and t-shirt day, and I was uncomfortably warm in a jacket and gloves.
I have pokey holes all over where the thorns penetrated through my layers of clothes and gloves, like little thistle love bites.
Making compost changes your relationship with weeds. I could have got grouchy, cursing and gnashing my teeth, but I was grateful for so much fresh greens for my compost heap.
Milk thistle is a gift of the garden. It neither weeps nor toils. We eat the milky leaves, taking scissors to cut away the thorns. The seeds are favored by finches and used herbally as a liver-cleanser.

Even though it's a weed I introduced into my garden, I'm taking out this patch of milk thistle before it goes to seed - to avoid too much of a good thing.
Diversity in the garden begins with an attitude of accommodation. Milk thistle works in out-of-the-way places where it won't poke people walking by, or close in where you don't want people poking around. There's always a place or two for it in my garden.
I could have weeded it out a long time ago, but I wasn't ready to plant that bed. Milk thistle made a beautiful cover crop that kept down other less desirable weeds. The secret of weeds is knowing when to take them out - before they go to seed or start competing with your crops. Otherwise your weeds are a cover crop.


Workshop Themes
The Other Greenhouse Effect

In a greenhouse, or a tropical rainforest the air is warm and moist - creating ideal growing conditions. The relative humidity increases as plants exhale warm moisture from their leaves. We can mimic this greenhouse effect by growing plants close together in our gardens. 

Shelter
Windbreaks conserve moisture in the garden, create habitat for critters and can include fruits, nuts and herbs.

Attracting Pollinators
Flowering plants provide food, pollen and shelter for beneficial insects that limit outbreaks of garden pest populations.

Stocking the Weed Bank
The agonies and ecstasies of creating your own garden weeds from your favorite plants.

Companion Planting
Mixed plantings for healthier plants and more vegetables

More Tulips

Parrot tulips go wild.

Lily-flowered with Princely Early Mix

After a month and half, the early princes are fading, while the lily flowers flaunt their classic tulip shape - a style of tulip that you don't see often enough in todays gardens.

The Lily-flowered mix included a red and yellow combo that added a circus-y feeling when thrown into the mix with the pastel princes. I yanked those suckers out, and all of the other tulips heaved a sigh of relief.

Black Tulips, Parrots

and

Geranium Ann Folkard

Opposites Attract

Tulips

       Bulbs bloom so early, they often end up all alone in bare gardens. They look better when they're mixed in with some early foliage.

         Fire Chief Tulips with Euphorbia 'Jade Frost' and Thalictrum 'Elfin'.

Species bloom early and last long in the cool of the earliest Spring days. They only open when the sun shines. The buds open and close with the rising and setting of the sun. On overcast days the buds open only enough to test the waters.


Tulipa humilis violacea 

                                                                                                By the time these tulips bloom I've forgotten what kind I planted. This group starts out a rather ordinary yellow. They're 'nice', but thought we planted some outstanding tulips.

Two weeks later, the yellow flowers blush orange, mixed with swelling red buds of their companions - the kind of red that your mother warned you about.


Tulip Bastigone and Tequila Sunrise







Tulip Angelique with red lily-flowered tulips and Scilla, Hyacinthoides non-scripta. Watch out for Scilla, it will naturalize. I know this sounds like a good thing, but I've been paid to take it out of older gardens by the truckload.

 Tulip Clusiana    photo: j jaman     (click to enlarge)

Spring drags it’s feet, arrives in fits and starts. After a winter that timed its killing freezes to do the most damage with the least effort, the kale plants are short knobby stumps, pushing out miniature leaves just barely as fast as we can pick them. Everything grows in slow motion.

Where is all the miner’s lettuce, the tastiest green this time of the year?  Usually by now I’m picking salads piled high with succulent stems and tender cup-shaped leaves, and hauling away heaping wheelbarrows-full to the compost pile. This year it should be called minor’s lettuce, the juvenile and delinquent salad green.

And where are the orange and yellow flowers, called Calendula by the Romans because they bloom every month of the year, a calender of flowers to garnish salads and anoint the skin?

Spring drags its feet, and my seedlings creep when they should jump. I could complain, but there

are other compensations, like the clusiana tulips that are new to my garden this year. For the longest time, ever since the crocus flowers faded away, a small colony of these pointy buds on long, slender, spear-shaped stems, have gathered to wage war on a winter that drags on against all odds.

They grow next to a small clump of arugula plants from seeds that blew away with the chaff when I was cleaning the seed from last year’s seed crop. The arugula makes a lovely green backdrop to view the clusiana tulips against. I’m letting this arugula clump go to seed, even though it’s in an inconvenient spot, too close to the path to my front door.

I ate so many leaves through the long winter from this tiny little clump that I want to honor it by letting it make babies, and age with dignity and grace. I want to let it stand like a prayer that I pass every time I come home. I want to eat its babies and its children’s children. I want to age with dignity into a graceful old age.

Maritime Northwest Seed Growers

(click to enlarge)

At last Winter's Quimper Grange Seed Workshop, I took notes of the seed companies that were recommended. The complete list is here: Recommended Seed Companies

Most seed companies buy their seeds from different growers and bundle them into a catalog. A reliable seed company will insure the quality of it their seeds.

As an alternative, there are small-scale growers who sell regionally grown, organic, open-pollinated seeds. In the Northwest we are fortunate to be a hothouse of grower-to-gardener seed companies.

Grower to Gardener Seed Companies 

of the Maritime Northwest
Seed Dreams
Port Townsend Food Coop
Washington 98368

Oatsplanter Farm
Port Townsend Food Coop
Washington 98368

Uprising Seeds
2208 Iron St. Bellingham
Washington 98225
http://www.uprisingorganics.com

Wild Garden Seed
Box 1590 Philometh
Oregon 92570
http://www.wildgardenseed.com

Horizon Herbs
PO Box 69, Williams
Oregon 97544-0069
http://www.horizonherbs.com/

Victory Seeds
Box 192 Molalla
Oregon 97038

http://www.victoryseeds.com/

(click to enlarge)

More Seed Information Coming

This is the first list to come out of the Quimper Grange Winter Seed Workshop. I'm hoping eventually to have a list of recommended seed varieties for our area, and the best places to find those seeds. I started a list at last winter's workshop, and have entered the recommended varieties into a spreadsheet. 

The list is not complete and represents the opinions of only a few people. Ideally I might have something to show by next winter's workshop.

Winter drags on, Spring drags its feet

 Tulip Clusiana                                  photo: j jaman     (click to enlarge)

Spring drags it’s feet, arrives in fits and starts. After a winter that timed its killing freezes to do the most damage with the least effort, the kale plants are short knobby stumps, pushing out miniature leaves just barely as fast as we can pick them. Everything grows in slow motion.

Where is all the miner’s lettuce, the tastiest green this time of the year?  Usually by now I’m picking salads piled high with succulent stems and tender cup-shaped leaves, and hauling away heaping wheelbarrows-full to the compost pile. This year it should be called minor’s lettuce, the juvenile and delinquent salad green.

And where are the orange and yellow flowers, called Calendula by the Romans because they bloom every month of the year, like a garden calender? 

Spring drags its feet, and my seedlings creep when they should jump. I could complain, but there are other compensations, like the clusiana tulips that are new to my garden this year. For the longest time, ever since the crocus flowers faded away, a small colony of these pointy buds on long, slender, spear-shaped stems, have gathered to wage war on a winter that drags on against all odds.

They grow next to a small clump of arugula plants from seeds that blew away with the chaff when I was cleaning last year’s seed crop. The arugula makes a lovely green backdrop to view the clusiana tulips against. I’m letting this arugula clump go to seed, even though it’s in an inconvenient spot, too close to the path to my front door.

I ate so many leaves through the long winter from this tiny little clump that I want to honor it by letting it make babies, and age with dignity into a graceful old age. I want to let it stand like a prayer that I pass every time I come home. I want to eat it babies and its children’s children. I want to age with dignity into a graceful old age.

Tulip clusiana opened                  photo: Sam Cavallaro

Quimper Grange Garden Workshops

This is a Grange Member Sponsored Workshop Series

photo: j jaman

Hands in the dirt workshops, led by experienced local gardeners and craftspeople.

All workshops will start at the Quimper Grange, most will involve field trips to local gardens.


Irrigation

It’s easier than you think. We’ll discuss the irrigation system design, and demonstrate installation for all kinds of gardens and landscapes - including drip, mini-sprinklers and T-Tape. Learn how to identify the water needs of your plants, how to tell which plants are being over-watered and which plants need more water.  with John Barr May 22  1:00 to 3:00

Winter Garden

Now is the time to start sowing plants for next winter’s garden. We will discuss plant varieties and sowing times for a plentiful winter garden. with Jesse Hopkins

June 19  1:00 to 3:00

Companion Plants

Introduce diversity into your garden ecosystem with mixed plantings. Includes techniques for increased production, encouraging beneficial insects, saving seed, and repelling pests. John Barr

July 17 1:00 to 3:00

Herb Harvest

We are blessed with a rich native flora of  both medicinal and culinary herbs, as well as a climate that supports a great variety of herbs from around the world. Denise Joy from Mountain Spirit  will give you information on how and when to harvest, and uses for the herbs in local our neighborhoods. We will take a walk and harvest the rich abundance of the season.

August 7th 1:00 to 3:00

Seed Harvest

How to harvest, clean and store seeds. Tess Gowans and Tinker Cavallaro September 11  1:00 to 3:00

Directions to Quimper Grange

Thimbleberry Garden Workshops

Irrigation

It’s easier than you think. We’ll discuss the irrigation system design, and demonstrate installation for all kinds of gardens and landscapes - including drip, mini-sprinklers and T-Tape. Learn how to identify the water needs of your plants, how to tell which plants are being over-watered and which plants need more water.

May 29 1:00 to 3:00

Perennials

The best perennials have a long period of bloom, are easy to care for, and fill a unique niche in the garden. We’ll also discuss maintenance and how to combine compatible plants for special effects in the garden

June 12 1:00 to 3:00

Berries

Plant berries before you plant fruit trees. They’re easier and produce fruit sooner. We’ll cover the who, what, where and why of raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, lignonberries, and currents red and black.

July 10 1:00 to 3:00

Bulbs

We are fortunate to live in one of the best bulb growing regions in the world. While it’s easy to plant a few bulbs for Spring color, it’s trickier to get the best bulbs in right place. All too often bulbs get buried by their neighbors, lost in the shuffle, or end up leaving dead zones in the summer garden. Includes in a group bulb order.

August 21 1:00 to 3:00

Fall Flowers
We’ll look at late blooming flowers for more color in the garden. We’ll demonstrate dividing perennials, the basics of collecting flower seeds, transplanting, mulching the garden and which perennials to cut back.
September 25 1:00 to 3:00

$20.00

For more information: jhnbrr@gmail.com

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