| HeraldNet - Snohomish County's online news source |
 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2010 1:10 am |
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 Oh, my. I've got gardening fever. No, I'm not on fire because of the amazing and wonderful Northwest Flower & Garden Show. I have other reasons. This is the first spring I've experienced at our new house in Edmonds and I just can't contain my excitement. We bought the house partly because of the huge sunny backyard and now we are finally going to get to use it to the fullest. This past weekend, we laid the groundwork with six large raised beds. Check out the pictures, including a side-by-side version of before and after. On the advice of seasoned veggie gardener and fellow Mudraker, Debra Smith, we splurged on cedar from Dunn Lumber, which smells beautiful. Though I did a lot of weeding, my husband, bless him, did all the hard work, including carrying, hammering and pounding into the ground. I adore raised beds. Sure, we could plant in the ground, but I like organization and boundaries, a lot. Yes, I'm a type-A veggie gardener, all the way. Plus, they warm up faster and drain better than the good old ground. Now we just have to come up with the money, time and energy to fill them. Not wanting to buy material in bulk just yet, I bought some bagged planting mix and compost at the new and improved Sky Nursery in Shoreline. (Wow, have you seen Sky's brand new, amazingly huge greenhouse and storefront? It might be my new gardening heaven.) Of course, we also need to fill these beds with seeds and plants and what a joy it will be deciding what to do! We've never had a garden this big, not by a long shot. Every night since the completion of the beds, we've been dreaming of what to plant. In addition to the raised beds, we have many other areas to plant, too. We are even thinking of a pumpkin and melon patch for our son, who will turn 2 in May. Yay. With all this mild weather, surely we won't be lucky enough to have a hot summer … or will we? Cross those fingers. What are you going to plant this spring? Write me here or comment below. ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment
Results from the judging at the 2010 Northwest Flower & Garden Show — going on now through Sunday in Seattle — are out, and Snohomish County garden professionals won. Big. Jessi Bloom, 31, with N.W. EcoLogical Landscapes of Mill Creek, swept the show with her creative garden, “A Family's Little Farm in the City.” Bloom designed the display garden with help from Seattle Tilth and her 8-year-old son, Noah Kenney. It won the American Horticultural Society Environment Award, the Pacific Horticultural Society Award, the Sunset Western Living Award, and the 425 Magazine Award, all in addition to a gold rating, the highest given at the show. Featured in the Jan. 28 edition of The Herald Home & Garden section, Bloom's garden plays directly into the theme of the show, Beauty and Functionality. It includes raised beds and containers for growing organic food, goats that nibble weeds and produce milk, chickens that aerate and enrich the soil with their mobile coop and multiple water-saving elements, including a rain barrel, a cistern and a rain garden. It also features solar panels, whimsical art, a tunnel for kids to crawl through, plus an elegant sitting area. These are big-time awards in the gardening world given this year by a distinguished international horticultural professionals, led by Fergus Garrett, head gardener at Great Dixter, London; Roger Swain, author, gardener and former host of PBS's “The Victory Garden;” and veteran San Francisco-based landscape architect, Andrea Cochran, Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture. Brent Bissell, owner of B. Bissell General Contractors of Snohomish, won the prestigious best-in-show award known as the Founder's Cup for his work on “Ahead of the Curve,” a sophisticated, dramatic garden designed by Karen Stefonick of Le Jardin Home & Garden Design. Bissell's garden also received a gold rating, along with Pacific Stone Co. of Everett, which presented a stone-filled garden titled “Meditation from Within.” Judges gave seven gold ratings, six silvers, seven bronze and two crystals. Sunnyside Nursery of Marysville won best use of recycled materials in the container gardening competition. See my Flickr photostream here for more pictures of show gardens. Have you attended the show yet? Which display garden is your favorite? Write me here. ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment Flower show pictures are here! See more than 30 photos of the 2010 Northwest Flower & Garden Show display gardens on my newly created Flickr page here. Captions are coming this morning! ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment
The Northwest Flower & Garden Show, celebrating its 22nd year and its first run under the ownership of O'Loughlin Trade Shows, is just the thing to get you in the mood for spring. Get ready, gardening fans! This year's 23 show gardens opened for two hours on Tuesday to the media only, and I can honestly tell you they are full of creative tricks, fun design ideas, hot trends and – Ciscoe said he agreed with me – even surprises! Sure, every year garden creators come up with pretty cool stuff, but this year's show – maybe it was its near brush with death – seemed to really push the creative envelope and go beyond expectations. Dinosaurs, goats, chickens, compost socks, weather-proof board games and Pierce Brosnan are all in the gardens this year, along with gigantic trees and stone, swaths of yellow tulips in full bloom and enough outdoor furniture to outfit the poolside of a Vegas casino. Recycled materials, food crops and water features dominated many gardens, too. No matter what you're really into, it's probably here. One garden is a home splattered inside and out with living walls. You can actually walk on top of it to see a stunning green roof at eye level, too. Yes, some of the gardens were duds. Predictable. Uninspired. Hurried. But in my almost 10 years of covering the show, these gardens hold their own. Garden creators, including numerous Snohomish County designers and landscape builders, were just putting the finishing touches on their works of wonder during the tour as the horticultural paparazzi breezed through with local garden author, Marty Wingate, leading the way with fun facts about each of the gardens. Rain barrels, cisterns and other water-saving devices seemed to be everywhere in the gardens, which ranged from extremely formal and European to down-on-the-farm rustic, including this truck (pictured), planted with vegetables and outfitted with a chicken coop that allows hens to roost and lay eggs in the cab. And yet, even that garden – “Crops for Clunkers” by the Seattle Urban Farm Co. – was sophisticated and inspired, not sloppy. Watch this space for more NWFGS news and a link to a photo gallery … today … if technology will cooperate. ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment
In my second attempt, I finally made the strata. Delicious! I will definitely be making this again. I used the basic recipe from Brittney's post but modified it a bit to fit what we had around. I baked the bread in our handy bread maker, using flour from Fairhaven and the lovely butter from Bow. For the rest of the ingredients, I used leeks from Washington (Skagit County, I believe), eggs from Monroe, milk butter and cheese from Bow and sausage from Eastern Washington. The sausage was the farthest traveled food, but I was glad we had it. The flavor was great, and it went really well with the strata. I also had a chance to talk with the woman who was selling the sausage, and she had nice things to say about how it was made and the animals raised. Sadly, I forgot to write down the name of the farm, but I'll be looking for them again the next time I'm at the UW farmers' market. ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | Comment |
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| CONTACT THE HERALD |
Elaine Helm, New Media Editor
ehelm@heraldnet.com |
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