~Feb 6 Fruit Varieties for the Pacific NW . 1 – 3 pm. UW Botanic
Gardens. $20/$15 (members).
Sam Benowitz is the owner of Raintree Nursery, a nursery specializing
in fruit trees
and other edibles. Whether it’s plums, apples, pears, or berries, Sam
knows what varieties
do best in any particular situation. He will discuss the best fruits
for the
Northwest, why rootstocks are important, and how to determine how big a
tree will grow.

~Feb 20 The Art of Espalier. 1 – 4:30 pm. UW Botanic Gardens.
$30/$25 (members). Dave Conners, former president of the Seattle Tree
Fruit Society,
has been training 18 different antique apple varieties on his
city-sized lot for more than a
decade and has been teaching “The Art of Espalier” at the UW’s Center
for Urban horticulture for many years.

~Mar 6 Pruning Grape Vines 9 am – noon.
Phinney Neighborhood Association and neighboring site with grape vines.
$20/$15(members). Learn to prune and train grape vines and get tips on
growing
grapes for best production. Larry Davis is a Master Gardener and
teaches grape and other fruit production
classes for the WSU-King County Master Gardener program. Mar 20
Planting and
Caring for Young Fruit Trees 10 am – noon. Orca School Environmental
Learning Center. $20/$15 (members). Find out how and where to plant
your new fruit tree and
how to keep it healthy. John Reardon, vice president of the Seattle
Tree Fruit Society, teaches tree care classes
for Plant Amnesty, Seattle Tree Fruit Society and City Fruit.

Fruit tree care classes are also offered by the following organizations.
See the City Fruit Calendar at www.cityfruit.org, or their websites for
details.
Community Harvest of Southwest Seattle, Friends of Piper’s Orchard,
Seattle Tilth Seattle Tree Fruit
Society, Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation.

Take note of what is blooming out in the neighborhood. A big complaint of new gardeners is that little is happening in their garden at the end of the season. A few of my favorites who are strutting their stuff right now there are Japanese Anenome, Salvia (Sage, both ornamental and culinary) Echinacea, TRUE Geranium, (not your grandparents geranium…) Penstemon, and of course SUNFLOWERS!…all going strong well into fall. This names but a few…

Mulch…The Free, the Cheap and the Stupid!

Free or Cheap:

Compost: If you make your own, and make a lot of it, it is free! If not, go to Pacific Topsoil and and fill a garbage can or two or three and it is quite cheap. OR BETTER yet… Get a truck load delivered and share with your neighbors!

Grass clippings: When fresh, they have high moisture and nitrogen content and can get smelly. The solution: apply a thin layer. Don’t use when grass is going to seed, otherwise it can germinate in your beds to create a grassy weed problem. Mixing with leaves can reduce smelly problem.

Fall leaves: While they are best chopped (machete, weed wacker in a garbage can or lawnmower…) otherwise they can mat and stop air and water movement into the soil. OR, I save them in big wire bins and use them as Leaf Mold in the spring.

Straw: Keep your eyes peeled for bales around town for autumn decoration because straw makes great mulch for vegetable gardens and also excellent winter protection. Hay is full of weed seeds, so don’t mulch with it.

Pine needles: Long lasting, light and easy to come by if you have pines – each fall they drop a pile of needles. Don’t use in veggie beds, too slow to break down. Too much carbon.

Stupid: Not my favorites:

Cocoa bean hulls: Good for perennial beds, I guess. Now only use if you have no dogs, and if you can get it at Theo’s chocolate. Otherwise, really, do we need to be shipping cocoa hulls for gardening.

Coir (Coconut hull fiber) See above, but dog’s don’t eat it. But… it is better than Peat! See below.

Peat Moss- Not sustainable. Takes about 17,000 years to make. Also hydrophobic. (when too dry, the water doesn’t absorb.

This is really about one of my many obsessions… catching water. That and canning. But that is another post to be sure….

Seattle gets 280 Cloud Cover Days a year, according to Extensions old friend George P. That is a lot o’ cloud, but not really a lot of moisture through our growing Season. We generally get about 2 or so inches from July 5th- Oct. 1st. Yet veggie gardens require a lot of water. So, if it doesn’t rain regularly, through the summer, what do you do? Funny you should ask, build a water catchment system.

Water harvesting can be as simple as a rain gutter directed into a barrel or as sophisticated as a buried tank pump systems. Diverting a drain from the gutter to a barrel is easy. I had one on each corner of my old house, that meant 200 gallons and no plumbing required.

For every square foot of roof, you can collect a little more than a half-gallon of water per inch of rainfall. COOL! Seattle gets around 40 inches of rain a year. That means if you live in a small house, like a 1,000 square foot roof, you can collect 20,000 gallons. (.5 x 1000sf, x 40) I know what you are saying, I don’t need 20,000 gallons of water, especially when the ground is already saturated in the Seattle winters.

There are two really important things to realize in the above, 1. How little rain you need to collect a LOT of roof water and B. What a HUGE problem surface water management is. The Puget Sound forests used to be a big sponge that filtered virtually all of the rain before it hit the Sound, now with roofs, roads, etc, it collects all the pollutants and dumps unfiltered into the Sound. So…lets catch it, use it and filter it through our gardens!

A basic system involves a series of gutters connected to conduits and as big a tank as you want or can afford fitted with a faucet. You can let gravity do its work provided the tank is on a stand, or you can use a submersible pump. It’s not a bad idea to empty and clean the tank each year. Be sure you support the tank adequately – just one gallon of water weighs around 8 pounds. An average Barrel is 50 gallons, so you do the math.

Moss, bird poop, general detritus from your roof needs to be filtered. Downspouts, gutters, or the tank opening can be fitted with screens to keep large debris out of the system.

Considerations:

Mosquito Dunks (a bacteria that kills larvae) or a screen that prevents Mosquitoes is a must. Over flow also needs to be managed. I have had drains near the top that have drained into another barrel, and then onto a soaker hose spread throughout a bed. I have also had it drain into a French Drain.

I know! I know it is hard to even think about winter when the days are starting at 4 and lasting until 10 pm and frankly, after last winter, I would rather not think about winter again for a long time. But alas, it is time to plan and plant for Fall and Winter if you want to maximize your harvests throughout the year.

There are several things to keep in mind. Soil building and health is on top of the list of what needs to be understood for success generally, but especially now as you plan your garden beds for the rest of the year. Some of your garden you will likely want to plant a cover crop in, other beds you may want to lay down leaves, compost, organic matter, and other beds be in production. Keep in mind, things slow to a snails pace in winter. So, keep in mind that some of what you are doing now and in the fall is getting a jump start on spring. Generally, plants of the same family, for example, Brassicacae, (cabbage family) attract the same pests, (cabbage butterfly, root maggot, club root, etc) and can all be protected under FRC (floating row cover material like Remay) They also all need a fair amount of nitrogen. In order to avoid propagating pest problems, rotations, rotations, rotations.

Now for the fun part… Here are just a few things that you will easily have success with for late gardening abundance.

Top Favorites:
Beans- fabaceae or legume
Bush beans can be planted until late July and usually produce a good crop before frost. The bean plants develop more rapidly in the warm summer months than in early spring. Pole beans require more time to develop and should be planted the second week of June for November harvest.
Beets- Chenopodiaceae
Beets can be planted until about August 1 at the latest really. If you want just the tops, you can plant them later, but the beet root won’t amount to much. I’ve had good success with Lutz or Winterkeeper for winter varieties.

Broccoli- Brassicaceae or Cruciferae
Broccoli can be direct seeded until mid-July and transplanted until mid-August. A fall broccoli crop will usually continue to produce December. Keep slicing off the side shoots and they will produce, slowly but surely, through to Spring.

Carrots- umbelliferae
Fall carrots can be stored in the garden. Handy. Plant carrots by mid-July for fall and winter harvest. Grow under floating row covers (Remay) if carrot rustfly troubled by rustfly.

Chard- Chenopodiaceae
Generally the same as beets but a little more giving as you are not looking for a large root to get established before the days are cut short.

Salad Greens: Asteraceae or Compositae
Sow salad greens one more time. Through July is fine. Winter greens in the Brassicasea family should not be continuously grown in the same bed in order to prevent the nasty clubroot disease.
Garlic- Allium
There is an old Farmers Almanac type saying about garlic, plant on the shortest day, and harvest on the longest. Well… that doesn’t quite work here. Planting before the first serious frost and harvest in mid summer when the tops start to die off. November first is a good day to shoot for.

Kale- Brassica
Dinosaur Kale and collards are terrific fall and winter vegetables. Plant seeds in July and transplant until mid-August. Frost may cause sweetens many members of the Brassicasae family, as well as Beets and Chard.

Shenandoah is a red-feathered hen nestled under the right arm of Anna Mae Conrad, who is 10 and lives in Takoma Park. “When you hold her for a long time,” Anna Mae says, “you can feel her relax; you can feel her putting pressure on you.” Anna Mae strokes the stole of plumage around Shenandoah’s neck, and the bird closes her eyes in a moment of chicken bliss. “This is actually my chicken.”

The announcement is to distinguish Shenandoah from the four other hens clucking softly in the back yard of the home where Anna Mae lives with mom Mary Cush, dad Kevin Conrad and sister Zhania. The family got its first bird six years ago, and the hens live in a converted greenhouse in a corner of the shaded lot, which is in an established suburban neighborhood inside the Capital Beltway.

The Conrads are at the vanguard of a resurgent interest in backyard chicken keeping, especially in distinctly nonrural settings. In cities across the United States, raising backyard poultry has suddenly become as chic as growing your own vegetables. It’s all part of the back-to-the-land movement whose proponents want to save on grocery bills, take control of their food supply and reduce the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture.

The urban homesteading movement got a huge symbolic boost this spring when the first family installed a 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden at the White House. Poultry is the natural next step in the sustainable back yard; chickens produce eggs, devour kitchen scraps and add manure to the compost pile.

“Chickens are America’s cool new pet,” said Dave Belanger, publisher of the magazine Backyard Poultry. When he launched it three years ago, “we were thinking 15 to 20 thousand” subscriptions, he said. The print run for the bimonthly is now 100,000.

Belanger’s magazine is published in Wisconsin, where five years ago chicken activists in Madison succeeded in getting the city council to reverse a ban on chicken coops. Madison’s ordinance is typical of other cities’. You can raise chickens for eggs, not meat; they must be enclosed in a coop or run; and it’s strictly a hen party: Roosters who crow day and night are prohibited.

In Baltimore, you can keep up to four hens (no roosters, ducks, geese or, darn, ostriches), in a coop no closer than 25 feet from a neighbor’s residence. A one-time fee of $60 is required for the permit.

Whether the Obamas could join the ranks of chicken fanciers may be a more difficult question. The District does not permit backyard chickens, said Michael Rupert, a spokesman for the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. You can have racing pigeons and captive-bred species of cage birds, meaning parrots and the like, but you can’t have chickens.

The District’s ban stands in contrast to other cities in the nation that have either permitted poultry all along or succumbed to pressure recently to allow them once more. In and around Washington, the convergence of so many jurisdictions each with its own rules has clouded the question of whether chickens are allowed. The resulting confusion has produced two types of chicken owners: Those who raise poultry openly and lawfully and those who do so in the shadows.

Kevin Conrad is confident he meets the requirements of Montgomery County (see sidebar on local ordinances), but elsewhere in Takoma Park another owner, fearing the loss of chickens his daughter views as pets, is willing to talk only anonymously.

He started keeping the chickens early last year and has three hens. Two of the chickens he raised turned out to be roosters, and they were given to a friend in a rural area. His neighbors have been supportive and share in the eggs, he said. Chickens “are easy pets, and the eggs you get from them are spectacular,” he said. Two close neighbors also keep chickens, and he is about to allow another neighbor’s daughter to keep some hens in his coop in exchange for chicken-sitting when needed.

I am walking along a block of rowhouses on Capitol Hill to meet a young professional who is also flying under the chicken radar. She offered to show me her coop, but anonymously, because she feared that her enterprise was unlawful. She leads me through the house to the back yard, where three Rhode Island Red hen hybrids live in a homemade coop and adjoining run, which is enclosed with chicken wire. “I bought a circular saw to make it,” she said. The coop is lined with newspapers (try doing that with a laptop), and the base slides out for cleaning.

When she returns from work, she lets the hens out to roam in the garden, which includes newly planted fruit trees and raised beds with lettuce, beans and strawberries in growth.

“It’s been fascinating,” she said. “All my neighbors know about them, and some of the neighborhood kids love to come over and collect the eggs. They’re really curious about them, and they love to feed them.”

She got the hens — named Dree, Dot and Fluffy Bottom — in March as 1-year-old egg layers and says they are quiet and their coop is easy to keep clean. “I named them after my grandmothers. Well, not Fluffy Bottom,” she said.

“I really like producing my own food,” she said. “My father always had a vegetable garden.”

The District’s anti-chicken stance troubles activists such as Liz Falk, who ran an inner-city vegetable garden on Seventh Street NW before moving the enterprise to the former playing field of the shuttered Gage Eckington Elementary School in LeDroit Park. “Other cities are more welcoming of urban agriculture than us,” she said.

To those who would say chickens should be raised only in the country, Falk would say no. “Why don’t we grow food where the people are? It’s so much more sustainable,” she said. She’d like to keep poultry at the garden, called Common Good City Farm, but “we are unclear as to the law.”

So what’s it like to keep chickens? From what I gather, they are exasperating, dumb, funny, beautiful and so hopelessly ill-equipped to survive on their own that you have to love them. They also have a distinct social hierarchy. In the Capitol Hill garden, Dot rules the roost and poor Dree is last in the pecking order.

Whether in the country or city, unprotected birds will usually fall prey to an array of predators, including hawks, owls, raccoons and, of course, foxes.

Until this winter, Robin Wedewer’s coop in rural Calvert County was ruled by a black feathered cock bird named Johnny Cash. The second banana was a white rooster, T. Boone Chickens. Late one afternoon, as the light was fading, she returned to her 22-acre farm in Huntingtown to see a pile of white feathers on the front lawn, another pile on the back lawn. Johnny had vanished in what may have been an eagle attack. T. Boone was gravely injured, with talon wounds on his sides. Wedewer’s 18-year-old son, Benjamin, had dug a grave behind the chicken coop, not expecting him to last the night, but the plucky bird pulled through.

T. Boone still walks with a pronounced limp, but he now rules the roost. He crows a lot, but he has a lot to crow about, both as protector of his harem and as its lone lusty prince. He guards the hens while they take dust baths behind a lilac bush, and if Maude and Myrtle, two red starters, wander off, he will call to them and go racing off to retrieve them. With a limp. When he finds food, he will offer a low, repeated cluck, which is his way of telling the hens to dig in.

Wedewer gets about half a dozen eggs a day and raves about the flavor, the size and color of the yolks, and the stiffness of the whites. The chickens live in an Amish-built playhouse and a caged run that Wedewer and her husband, Harry, put together from lumber and chicken wire last year when they got the birds. “I make my own cheese, my own wine vinegar, my own wine,” she said. “Why not have chickens?”

In the evening, the Wedewers like to sit in lawn chairs by the vegetable garden and watch the birds scratching around. “We call it chicken TV,” she said.

For the Conrads in Takoma Park, the chickens have been a way to introduce their children to the joys and grimmer realities of the natural world. One of their birds was taken by a fox, another by a raccoon. “It’s like a big science project,” Mary Cush said.

For her most recent birthday, Anna Mae had friends over for a slumber party. “When we woke up, we all got to go into the coop and pick our own egg for breakfast,” she said.