Capitol Tilth

It's been a pretty eventful couple of weeks out in my planting strip. Radishes are in constant delicious supply, providing spicy snacks as I run out the door in the morning. Salad greens are taking off and the weaker and/or more delicious looking plants are being thinned directly into my stomach.

My Raab bolted, probably because I squished too many plants into too small a space. Lesson learned for next planting. I've been staying on top of the bolting and it's starting to fill out a bit. Questionably, I interplanted fennel with the Raab, making the world far, far too crowded. Luckily, I have some oyster mushrooms and green onions that are dying to meet some of their outdoor cousins in my wok, hopefully providing some room for the best looking fennel.

I planted all my tomato's that's I'd been 'growing' (killing?) inside. They will probably not live, but the basil might. I'm still not sure what's wrong with my plant growing cabinet, but it seems to enjoy killing plants more than helping them grow. Wrong kind of florescent lights perhaps? I'm just using warm white CFLs -- I suppose something more in the 6000 degree / blue spectrum would be better. I need to find somebody who knows more about artificial light and tomatoes than I do.

Tonight I got to enjoy the largest meal from my garden yet. It was a sandwich piled high with spicy greens, a bit of store bought tomato, and a layer of crispy radishes, with some tofurky to give it that meaty chew you except out of a sandwich. It turns out the spiciness of the greens and the radishes (and the dijon mustard) perfectly mask the tofurky 'wet cardboard'-ish flavor that I consider its downfall (not that it's not good, but it's got a certain flavor in the background that just isn't right.) In this combination though, it was fabulous. I've never really been one to buy greens from the store, and I'm not sure I'll start either - they're easy to grow year round in Seattle, and incredibly delicious straight from the ground.

The City of Seattle finally did something that actually seems progressive and made a right-of-way permit for gardening in your planting strip free! That's good, cause I've got a lot of stuff growing in my planting strip. Pictures and a story soon.

I found out recently that in order to build any kind of structure in your 'planting' strip you in Seattle, you presently need a permit. A $225 permit. In theory you need them for just about anything of a substantial size - trees included. And not for ornamental gardens. But definitely for vegetable gardens - especially if you make raised beds to try and stay out of potentially polluted soil.

Thankfully, Richard Conlin's office is trying hard to reform the process somehow. They weren't exactly forthcoming on what they'd be doing, only that they thought they could negotiate a positive outcome. Maybe that means $200 permits. Or something.

I definitely understand that emergency services need to be able to access houses, and that people need enough clearance to be able to get out of their Landrovers. This much is obvious. What I don't understand is the kind of backwards thinking that makes grass okay but vegetables not okay.

Here we are, in the middle of a dense urban environment, sucking resources from the surrounding areas with a force and vigor that one can only imagine makes the loudest sucking sound nature has ever heard, and our city is requiring rather onerous fees for people to make use of the small amounts of possibly arable land in the city. If you walk around enough, you realize that in fact, it's not really a small amount of arable land - it's vast. The (grass)'planting' strips around the city could probably provide a lot of food for its residents.

I think the permitting process should be replaced with a pledge to donate a portion of your fresh, organic produce to a local food bank - that should fulfill the legitimate desire of the city to ensure that its shared lands are of benefit to everyone.

I hear non-linear stories are all the rage these days; also, my brain tends to be quite scattered, going back to topics of conversation long after everyone else has moved on. So, I'm briefly fast forwarding to today, where my very first direct-sown seeds are coming up in my salad bed. That would be bed number '1' from the large octo-planter (octo things are also all the rage these days, I hear).

I planted radishes, carrots, beets, onions, a mix of lettuces, and a bunch of kale. I read some book about companion planting, and supposedly, all these plants like each other or are at a minimum, indifferent. I really like the idea of companion planting, but I not certain it actually makes a difference or matters that much, in general. Certainly some things should not be grown next to each other, and, like the '3 sisters', there are cases where there is a true symbiotic relationship between plants. But in general, I don't know. I'd love to see some experiments be run on these kinds of things, but for now, I guess I'll rely on the wisdom and experience of others, and science be damned. At a minimum, the lists of plants that like each other at least give me some framework to solve the planning of my garden, which is otherwise an N-P complete problem for me - which is just to say, I would need to consider every possible configuration before deciding what to plant where, and that would take longer than the entire growing season.

I planted everything underneath a floating row cover, which is kind of like a security blanket for your plants. They can breath through it, stay warm, and get all the sun they need, but it keeps bugs and other scary things out, supposedly. I'm going to need to re-cut it though, which sucks, because it's moderately expensive. I tried to go with a one-piece, but I either need to actually sew some pieces together, or go with a three piece, due to my 'innovative' octo-design.

Anyway, I should be eating out of my garden in a month!

I meant to start writing about my garden plans right from the very beginning. But I've been so busy with the gardening that I just haven't gotten around to it until now. So I have a lot to write about. I want to write about my motivation for creating this garden, and this blog. And I will. But for now, I just want to get into the first project.

This project was inspired by the idea of a circular planter (from Gaia's Garden and probably elsewhere) and my lack of space. The goal was to make up for what I couldn't have in square footage in verticality and smart design.

I was doodling designs and almost immediately the idea of a planter based on overlapping octagons came to me. So I drew it up in Inkscape so I could go get the lumber and get started. This is the inkscape version of the final design, the initial design was a bit different - the numbers are so I can keep track of what's planted where.

One of the hardest parts of implementing the design was choosing what to make it out of. I settled on ACQ pressure treated 2x8's, which may or may not be a controversial design for an 'organic' garden, but I'll write more about that later. I borrowed my friend's compound mitre saw, and got chopping.

There were a lot of missteps making the first two layers - I assembled them completely by my garage, only to need to dissassemble them in order to move them to my parking strip. But I learned a lot and the rest of the layers went much more smoothly.

Upon seeing the partially completed first 3 layers, one of my friends excellently suggested that I might as well add another, and the result is the 4 layer design pictured at the start of the blog.

I initially assembled only the exterior portions of the planter, which left the entire inside open to the public. Some of my neighbors thought it was a burning man project. Neighborhood kids were looking at it, puzzled, before deciding to dance around in the middle of it. My roommate was utterly confused.



At this point, I realized I had positioned the planter the wrong direction for the light, and that really, I should be digging down a bit for added structural stability. So I dug a hole where the planter would eventually go, and then talked my room mate into helping me move and rotate the planter into place. Now all I had to do was cut the rest of the pieces for the interior and assemble them. This turned out to be about as much work as the outside, but I was much better at doing it by this point, so it went pretty fast. Here it is done (you can see part of the second planter in this photo, oops...):



So, I apologize for the lack of attention to storytelling or even an attempt at creating an interesting narrative. I'll try to do better with that next time. For now, I'm glad just to have gotten this up!