Autumn news/letter

Lots to share, as we hit peak spider & smoke season 2/3 of the way through October without a drop of rain or the faintest threat of a frost! I'm eagerly anticipating the coming rain and softer ground so I can do some planting and moving. I stopped watering most of my gardens once we started having dewy mornings again, but the ground is so hard and dry that I am planting my garlic into little pots for now. While the late warmth has made hiking and soccer games more enjoyable, it actually puts me behind schedule with some fall tasks. Fall is a busy time as we wrap up one growing season and prep for another, and I very much identify with the notion of the veil between life and death being thinner now than other times of the year.

But looking toward spring and new growth, because we must continue to plant food and flowers and make beauty wherever we can — I will have bulbs and seeds up in my online shop soon along with several workshops, where I hope to see some of you in real life!

One will be a wreath workshop with everlasting blooms and other fun botanicals and one will be a hands-on sustainable floristry workshop.

I’m contemplating a holiday centerpiece workshop as well, Let me know what you’d be most interested in!

I have been collecting seeds for my own 2023 garden and to share with you. All my pockets are permanently gritty with dried plant bits, and my work surfaces are crowded with muffin tins and glass yogurt cups filled with these various drab colored, funny-shaped life capsules of future color (a.k.a. SEEDS).

This year's sweet peas had finely picoteed blossoms just like 'Wiltshire Ripple', which must have been a cross between my favorite dark burgundy 'Beaujolais' and a very light blue 'April in Paris'. Without knowing which traits to fill a Punnett square with, the second year of "bee's choice" on the sweet peas will probably be just as much of a surprise.

Last year was the first time I saved Dahlia seeds but not many of my "bee's choice" seedlings were special enough to hold onto, as they can really only reach the pollen from the single petaled blooms and a couple that blow open too quickly to be useful as a cut. I am very much looking forward to next year's Zinnias however! I bought some seeds from Dawn Creek Farms where they are breeding new strains in lovely blush and honey tones, and since I can't isolate them here I'll have to see what colors arise from blush + huge salmon + petite lilac + limey orange parents. Could be mud, could be incredible.

If you've been receiving bouquet subscriptions this year you've already been enjoying some of these new gems from my garden! I am so appreciative of everyone who supported my small business and helped spread my flowers beyond the edges of my cutting garden. I pour so much love into each bundle of blooms and I hope you can feel it.

It was also gratifying to design with bucket-loads of homegrown blooms alongside the bounty of blooms from other Whatcom County flower growers for my summer weddings. Planning ahead and planting for these bouquets and weddings justifies my seed purchases and experiments with new varieties -- which is honestly what keeps me hooked on growing flowers. It's refreshing to see all the new varieties from larger breeders and very fun to see what grows out from the bees' handiwork in my own garden, too. I highly recommend saving seeds to save yourself some $$ and introduce another layer of surprise and chance to this adventure called gardening.

Speaking of chance, I want to make a plug for note taking and journaling so that some things won't get left up to chance a second or third growing season in a row. I can't trust even my memory with revelations or edits that seem most obvious at the moment because there are so many possible versions of my garden being overwritten in my mind all the time. So if there are any lessons you learned the hard (or easy) way, or changes you want to make to timing/spacing/succession/colors... THE TIME IS NOW! Write it all down before everything dies back and the seed catalogue-fueled winter daydreaming sets in. I definitely made some slip-ups with height arrangements in my rows which resulted in some awkward light competition. I staked and tied some things but forgot other things till it was too late and they had already flopped. I planted too many of some things and not enough of others, and my best calculations and most generous plantings were foiled by the armies of slugs during our cool, wet spring, especially in the sunflower and zinnia departments. And there were more aphids, thrips (new to my garden this year!) and yellow jackets than ever before. But still, the cutting garden produced so much beauty and we ate decadently succulent lettuce, sweet tomatoes and crunchy cucumbers.

Two more things before I go:

First, we got the most wonderful CSA boxes all summer from Springtime Farm in Everson, WA and I highly recommend supporting a local farm in this way AND simultaneously cutting your water bill and eliminating stress from trying to grow beautiful vegetables (in a dry summer, in the right succession and quantities, that the chickens don't destroy, that aren't pocked with worm holes, in an array of varieties that would require a much larger garden). It felt both luxurious and efficient and was definitely delicious. They have pick up spots in Bellingham and Seattle!

Second, my sister sent me this quote from the introduction to The Fruit Forager's Companion, by Sara Bir (Chelsea Green, 2018), which I loved for so many reasons:

"I'm attracted to fruit because plants developed their fruit to be attractive to animals, and I am a curious animal following their lead. I don't generate any income from foraging, and the food I bring home represents a tiny sliver of my annual diet. But even if I come back from an outing empty-handed -- which is most of the time -- I return enriched, because there's always something new to see. I don't just gather food. I gather observations.

"This book is about fruit and foraging, but it's really about walking and noticing, activities that create a lens through which the world around us comes into clearer focus. Walking is a huge part of what makes us human. It's how we get from one place to another, even if the distance is only from the front door to a car door. On foot we absorb information differently. Our contact with everyday living things is more intimate. We can hear the leaves rustle. We can hear insects hum. We can look fellow passersby in the eyes and smile.

"We can see things grow."

This resonates so beautifully with my sense of delight and purpose as a gardener, teacher, urban designer, landscape designer, floral designer, mother, friend, hiker, dancer, human...

And all of you who know me know that I can’t pass up a good berry or nettle patch.

It also jives with sage parenting advice from Janet Lansbury (in her podcast "Unruffled: Respectful Parenting") that is simply: "Acknowledge." I take this to mean: Really see. Take stock. Go light. Be here, now. Feel your place in the wild tangle of parenting, foraging, and everything in between.

So when I think of the morels we found on our first camping trip of the year; the many pints of blackberries I consumed this August; my awkwardly bulging pockets of apples I often come home with; and the alpine blueberries that stained my hands and teeth crazy colors and smelled like sun baked pie (this land is so incredibly generous!), I also think of the walks that brought me to where I could cast my eyes about for those treats. I, too, believe in walking as a superior pace and perspective with which to take in the world.

And —it's the whole deal! Each piece is worth noticing: the struggle getting out of the house and across that invisible threshold by the big fir tree where I can take deeper breaths and snagging my sweater on a twig as I push deeper and the smell of fermented blackberries and the garter snake I scare up and the sound of crows chasing an eagle and my kid sneaking off with my pocket knife and the sweet distance I feel from my clanging thoughts and to-do lists.

Here's wishing you fresh air, soft soil and some time to take your curious self for a walk.