Category: planting

Seed Garden Update

Posted on by Brian Kerkvliet

So Much Fun this Spring!

Just wanted to give y’all a little update on the Salish Seed Garden project at Inspiration Farm. We have been having really fun productive days getting our beds prepared and transplants in the ground.

So far we have put in beets, two kinds of onions, peas, lettuce, spinach, favas, and fennel. We have prepared a lot of beds getting them ready for our main transplanting season coming up soon in May.

Starting in May we will be transplanting tomatoes, peppers onions, leeks and direct seating corn beans and some grains into our prepared beds.

We have been having weekly volunteer days for about three or four hours each week. They have been randomly selected based on the weather and what we have to do. There has been about 4-6 people attending each week. In the coming months we will start having regularly scheduled work days at the garden. This will allow people to plan and schedule to join us.

As the plantings get established it would be good to have people that can show up several times a week in small groups to do some maintenance chores like watering, weeding and just overall evaluation and enjoying the garden.

Let us know if you want to be a team leader and bring a small group out to do these things. We could set up several days on the volunteer sign-up list.

Our next volunteer day will be Sunday from 1 to 4 in the afternoon. Subsequent weekend volunteer days will probably be held Saturday mornings as the weather is cooler in the morning and more conducive to transplanting. Let us know if you want to join us we would love to see your smiling faces at Inspiration Farm!

First Seed Garden Gathering

Posted on by Brian Kerkvliet

It was a beautiful sunny crisp day for our first Salish Seed Garden gathering. A group of core organizers and friends came together for the first initial planting of few seed beds.

A group of about 9 gathered a give a blessing to the first event of the season for the new Salish Seed Garden project.

We planted three beds of crops. The first two were biannual plants that Krista had grown out last year and over wintered in storage. This year they are planted out and allowed to continue their cycle of growing on to flowering to produce seed this season.

Onions and beets are biannual. This means that they do not go to flower until the second year of growth. Sometimes you can leave the roots in the ground and let them over winter and continue growing the following year. While this is the easiest thing to do it is not always the most reliable. There is always the risks of them being eaten by critters of freeze so hard they rot in the field. It is safer to harvest them in the fall and store in a root cellar type situation to be planted back out the following Spring. So this is what we did to ensure we get a good seed crop this year of these two items.

We also direct seeded a bed of Fava beans. This is one of the few bean seeds that can germinate in the cold wet Spring soil we have this time of year.

While one group was working on planting these beds another group mixed up a wheel barrow of potting mix using on site compost, horse manure sand and some amendments of lime, rock dust and inoculated biodynamic biochar.

We sifted this mix into flats and planted tomatoes, basil, fennel, onions and leeks. These flats are now germinating in the house on a rack in the warm laundry room.

It was a good day with fun folks who love to play with soil and seeds.

We got a lot accomplished, had fun, and dreamed and schemed of how to proceed with the the Salish Seed Guild Garden Growing.