The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

It’s still technically winter, but the cherry blossoms have blossomed and it feels like an early spring. We have started some seeds inside, and some of the plants that were dormant are emerging from colder months. In order, below are photos of Swiss Chard and Pea starts inside, garlic coming up (planted in late December), rhubarb, and the new Egyptian Walking Onions.

A friendly fellow gardener named Maya posted some extra onion starts she had on the good old Seattle Urban Farm Co-op listserv, and I was intrigued by the name: Egyptian Walking Onions. They are a pretty interesting plant:

“Egyptian Walking Onions are very unusual, heirloom onions. They are top-setters, which means that they produce onion seeds from the flowering green tops of the onion. They are called walking onions because the top-setters fall over and re-root themselves; literally ‘walking’.”

Apparently they are great to use like green onions when they’re small, and they also grow nice shallot-like bulbs. In addition to taking a walk around the garden. I’ll post some photos when I plant them.

There is a post on Craigslist right now for some free composted manure in our neighborhood, so of course I’m all over that. Turns out a truckload was given to the Jesuit house up by St. Joe’s by a farm in Enumclaw, and there was a ton (probably quite literally) left over after they used all they could. When I pulled up the pile was probably 10 feet in diameter and 4 feet high. While I was filling bags and loading up the back of the car, a truck backed up. Between the two of us we barely dented the pile.

At some point, one of the residents came out and was joking about how you know the garden nerds when they are huddled around a steaming pile of manure, shoveling in the rain, and exclaiming “I can’t believe how much God loves me!”

We got some of those apparently compostable spoons on our last trip to IKEA (they’re made of corn and feel like soft plastic). I thought it would be fun to see how long they take to break down, so I threw them in the compost as I was turning it today. Might as well see how they do; I saw on someone else’s blog that they tried to compost one of those “compostable” plastic bag, and it wasn’t going anywhere after a year.

The most fun part of turning the compost is seeing all the worms at work… there are so many of them. I know this photo probably looks kind of disgusting to some of you, but it is an amazing sight to see hundreds of worms in each shovel-full. They seem to show up and as time goes on, there are more and more of them. By the time the compost is ready to put on the garden, we’re adding nice fertilizer plus a ton of worms.

Our garlic is looking happy and healthy in the ground for next fall’s crop.  This is the only successful propagating we have done so far this year (or ever).  We used last year’s garlic to plant this year’s and so had no need to buy anything to get another crop.  Having a self propagating garden is our sustainable dream, but apparently reading one library book on the subject did not give us enough understanding to pull it off.  Hopefully this year we can choose better varieties and see if anything sprouts next spring.