Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

Snow on the ground, about 20 inches of snow in fact, atop a few inches of hard ice: time to contemplate this year’s best ever garden!

Successful gardening requires four inputs: desire, time, money, and energy.  Semi-successful gardeners will have limited amounts of desire (or “mania”, as we long-term gardeners call it) to efficiently garden, will have limited time (maybe two part-time jobs and some full-time children in the house), will have a limited garden budget which reduces some time-saving opportunities (drip irrigation can save time, but the equipment costs can be daunting), and limited energy causing untimely planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting.  Some of these limitations can be overcome by involving friends and/or family with garden chores, or by starting your own plants from inexpensive seed, or by reducing your expectations (smaller garden size = less time in the garden = more time for on-line games like Words with Friends).

If you have decided you really want to garden (there is that “desire” factor) again this year, then perhaps you can help a gardening neighbor who is just slightly overwhelmed with spring soil preparation, seed starting, and other related chores, thus learning while doing (an informal “gardener apprenticeship”).

If you have no neighbors who garden, you might attend meetings of us guys, the local gardening club The Elk-Camden Garden Keepers, who meet monthly from March to October in Camden Grange on the second Tuesday evening at 7 p.m.  There you will meet folks who garden as a lifestyle, and some who garden for inexpensive food, and some who grow flowers strictly for their bees and the resulting honey.  You just might meet someone who would really appreciate your help in their garden in return for friendship, gardening experience, and maybe some of the harvest.

Or perhaps volunteer to help in a nearby community garden effort:  our local food bank, the North County Food Pantry, has a large garden that produces food for needy neighbors.  Garden Manager Chris Stevens is always looking for helpers, experienced or not – you can call the food bank at 509-292-2530 – the food bank and garden are located at 40015 N. Collins Road, Elk.

Speaking of honey bees, our sister organization, the Backyard Bee Keepers will hold their monthly meeting on 21 March at 6:30 p.m. in the Deer Park Senior Center, located at 316 E. Crawford, Deer Park.  The Beekeepers offer information, training, classes, and sympathy for fellow beekeepers – and their meetings are pretty sweet, too.

On a related subject, the Spokane Conservation District is selling young trees and bushes again this year:  species such as chokecherries, concolor firs, blueberries, and more are available for reforestation, adding food sources for yourself and wildlife, or for simple visual/ olfactory pleasure (our mockorange shrubs smell delicious in the late spring).  Prices are right for the bareroot seedlings (the douglas fir trees are about 24 inches tall when you pick them up on 5 or 6 April) at about $2 each, sold in bundles of five or more.  You can call for more information or to order at 509-535-7274, or check out their website at www.SCCD.org.

GARDEN CALENDAR

On 12 March, our local gardening club will meet in Camden Grange at 7 p.m. for the first meeting of the 2019 gardening season.  We will be discussing our garden plans for this year, whining about our gardening mistakes from last year, and re-introducing ourselves to all the other local garden (I was going to say “garden maniacs”) aficionados.

We will also be revisited by Master Gardener Marge Helgeson, who apparently was so traumatized by her visit with us last year that she wiped that particular memory from her databank, with a class on container gardening.  Marge is a treasure, and a lot of fun, and has a bunch of valuable information to pass along, so be sure to attend this meeting.  You can visit our garden club blog here, or check in with us on facebook (Elk-Camden Garden Keepers group) for more details on our meetings.

On 14 March, Master Gardener Kathy Mallum offers a class on “Food not Lawn,”,which will focus on converting all that expensive-to-maintain turf into a productive garden.  The class runs from 6-8 p.m. at the Camus Center (1981 Le Clerc Road, Usk), and you can call the Pend Oreille County/W.S.U Extension office at 509-447-2401 for more information or to reserve a seat.

That’s it for now – I’m going briefly outside now to maleficently glare at all the snow and ice, in hopes of melting it away (but not into goopy mud!), thus ushering in a warm, productive, and memorable spring.