April meeting rocks Camden

Our garden club's April meeting was a huge success: 32 members attended, including three new members, for an evening of fun and information.  Pend Oreille County Master Gardener Marge Helgeson held forth on the subject of container gardens, complete with a container potted on the spot, lots of brochures and information sheets, and Marge's unique sense of humor (which completely matches our club's sense of humor!).  We also watched a hands-on fruit tree pruning demonstration, and gossiped about everyone not present that evening, and we ate most-excellent snacks provided by thoughtful club members.

Be sure to mark your social engagement calendar for our next meeting on Tuesday, May 14, at 7 p.m. in Camden Grange.

See you there!

jim

Tomato plants at Tuesday's meeting

Hello again garden keepers,

 It has just come to my attention that former club president Barbara Midtbo will be bringing a variety of tomato starts to our meeting on Tuesday.  They are priced at $3 each or $2.50 each if you buy four or more.  She has reds, yellows, and oranges as well as small, medium, and large fruit.   As always, Barbara is donating the proceeds to the Garden Club so bring cash or check and get those healthy tomato starts for this years "best ever" garden.

See you Tuesday at the Camden Grange.  Doors open at 6:30 pm.  Donations of snacks are always welcome.  Coffee, tea, and cocoa provided by the club.

Jim

Garden club meeting warning notice!

We will be meeting at Camden grange this coming Tuesday, the 9th of April, at 7 p.m.  Marge Helgeson will talking to us on container gardening, and we will have a short (but informative!) class on fruit tree pruning.  Members are asked to bring their favorite snacks to share, and the club will provide the usual seasonally-appropriate (meaning hot!) beverages.  I don't expect a lot of snow and ice to block access to the grange, this month, but we never know!

See you there, 

Jim

Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

Spring is officially upon us, and all around us:  the garden here at Rancho McGinty is mostly snow-free, and even the mud is firming up into actual garden soil.

Time to amend the garden dirt if you are going to do that, before planting.  I like to add a layer of tree leaves, or pine/fir needles (NO! Pine and fir needles do NOT acidify the soil), some livestock poo (horse, cow, goat, rabbit, chicken, etc.), and maybe some barnyard waste (straw, NOT alfalfa as it contains the seeds of your garden’s destruction).

I rototill the goodies under once, and then again a week before planting to loosen the soil (the old “Troy-bilt” tiller is excellent at fluffing up the dirt). 

My gardening partner, and full-time wife and supervisor (believe me, I need constant supervision!) Pat and I have already laid out the 2019 “Best Ever” garden on paper, and have started the seeds indoors under grow lights for early, cool weather plants:  cabbage, broccoli, spinach, chard, and kale.  We also started the seeds for those warm weather plants who need extra time and babying:  tomatoes and peppers.It’s also time (oh, my pre-ache back!) to start wheeling loads of chicken poo (great fertilizer – just don’t place it in direct contact with your tender, young transplants, as the poo is pretty acidic when raw) into the raised beds.   

As the local garden club members learned during the March meeting (our raised bed class from Master Gardener Jim Conrad – remember?), those raised beds tend to warm up and dry out earlier than the open garden soil, so we can transplant into them earlier, provided we place some kind of frost cover over those precious seedlings – flannel sheets, commercial row cover (Ree-May®, or Agribon®, available at “Northwest Seed and Pet” in Spokane), light blankets, etc.  I like to stretch the frost cover over short hoops (made from wire coat hangers, PVC pipe, old back scratchers, etc.), to keep the fabric just over, but not touching, the tops of the baby plants.

Out in the fruit tree orchard, now is the time to finish your early spring pruning (out with all those diseased, damaged, or inward-pointing branches, and be sure to remove most of the water sprouts/suckers, unless some of them can be trained to fill in an open spot in the tree’s canopy).  Once you have pruned those trees, there’s still time to spray dormant oil (also called supreme oil) to kill the scale insects burrowing in your tree’s bark – just be sure to NOT spray after the leaf and fruit buds crack open (you’ll see cracks in the bud, showing the colorful interior), because you don’t want to smother your leaves and fruit – right?!If you have woodstove ashes from the previous ice age (I mean the winter of 2018-2019), your fruit trees will appreciate you lightly sprinkling some ashes at the canopy’s drip line – where the drips would fall onto the ground beneath the tree, at the outer edge of the branches.

If you are growing rhubarb plants, now is a great time to throw a shovel or two of manure into the center of the plants, as these guys are hungry – just look at the size of the dark green leaves later in the spring – and a dose of manure is good for your aspiring asparagus plants as well.

Compost bins, piles, and containers will appreciate some water and fresh nitrogen in the form of grass clippings or fresh livestock poo, in order to reactivate all those hibernating bacteria, worms, and insects so you will have usable brown gold to plunk into each transplant hole at planting time – once you have watered, and added some nitrogen, you will want to turn the compost to aerate the interior.

In the berry garden, now is the perfect time to prune out last year’s brown bearing canes (the ones that produced fruit in 2018) – be sure to leave this year’s bearing canes (they are probably green or purple) if you want fruit in 2019.  Be sure to destroy or remove the pruned canes, as they may contain the evil cane borers that will decimate your plants, and berry plants love the taste of woodstove ashes as well, so be nice if you want sweeter berries this summer.

GARDEN CALENDAR

On the 9^th of April, our local garden club will meet in Camden Grange at 7 p.m. for an evening of jollity, prevarifications, and instruction.  We will have two short (but informative!) classes:  one on container gardening from Master Gardener Marge Helgeson, and, due to an overwhelming number of requests, a class on fruit tree pruning.We will also talk about you if you are not present, and we’ll likely eat delicious snacks and drink too much (non-alcoholic beverages, of course).  You can obtain further information on our club and our meetings by accessing our club blog, here, or by checking our Elk-Camden Garden Keepers group page on Facebook (thanks to over-achieving club members Su and Laurie).

On the 18^th of April, at 6:30 p.m., our sister club, the Backyard Beekeepers, will meet in Deer Park in the lower level of City Hall (316 E.Crawford, Deer Park) for an information and fun-filled evening – bee sure to bee there!

On the 27^th of April, those mischievous madcaps, the Pend Oreille County Master Gardeners will hold their annual plant sale at Stratton Elementary School, located at 1201 Fifth St. in nearby Newport, from 9 a.m. to noon.  Lots of high-quality plants, with lots of selections, at great prices, and you can talk with, and question, people who actually know what they are talking about – so stock up!  Please remember that we do occasionally suffer from early spring frosts, so buy (or raise) extra plants, on the off-chance that you lose your first planting to the evils of below-freezing temperatures.

Also on the 27^th, just after the conclusion of the Master Gardener Plant Sale, the contributing writers for the “Elk Sentinel” newspaper will gather in Inland Grange (37411 N. Conklin Road, Elk) for a “meet and greet” afternoon with the public and subscribers from 1-3 p.m.  There will be desserts offered, and your favorite monthly writers will be there to answer questions and offer (probably good) advice on their topics of concern.  Embarrassing selfies and illegible autographs are distinct possibilities, while apologies for previous bad advice in the columns and articles will be limited.  I hope to see you there.

That’s it for this month – time to oil the wheel bearings on the wheelbarrow, and time to sharpen the shovel, in anticipation (?) of moving chicken poo (I’m guessing 30 loads) out to the garden raised beds – yay?

Garden season opens with March meeting

Our first garden club meeting for 2019 was held at 7 p.m. on March 12 at Camden Grange (21 Camden Road, Elk).  Seven inches of new, heavy snow had fallen that morning, but 27 HARDY local gardeners were in attendance, to include 12 (!) new members.  We commiserated over the long, snowy winter, and then talked about what we were going to grow, and not grow, this season.  

Master Gardener Jim Conrad, from the Washington State University Extension Office in Pend Oreille County, presented information on spring garden soil preparation, and showed homemade models of his favorite garden raised beds.

We also talked about the benefits of Hugelkulture (or Hugelculture) used in the bottom half of raised beds: improved soil moisture retention, time-released nutrients, and a cheap foundation for a taller (less back-breaking) raised bed. Good information on Hugelculture may be found at the Washington State University Extension website http:/www.ext100.WSU/Clallam/hugelkuture.

We had a lot of fun that evening: we socialized, whined about the snow levels on our former garden sites, and dined on cookies, chips and dip, and much more.

Be sure to note the date of our next meeting on the 9th of April - see you there!

Jim

Garden club meeting warning notice!

Warning, warning, Will Robinson!!  (I know some of you will GET that television series reference from the 1970's?)

We will meet in Camden grange at 7 p.m. on the 12th of march, for our first club meeting of 2019. We will have two guest speakers from the master gardener group in Newport, speaking on the subjects of container gardening, and raised bed gardening.  I'll also be querying members on what they will be planting or doing differently in the garden, this year – so bring some snappy answers, please.

If you have unwanted seed and/or gardening catalogs, please bring them along to distribute to other unsuspecting gardeners, and if you have unwanted seeds or plants, you could bring those along as well – we'll have a freebie table set up for the purpose.

The club will provide drinks for the occasion, and club members are encouraged to bring along their favorite snacks/treats to share (legal snacks/treats, only, please 😃).

Also, club member and Camden Grange member MaryLee asked me to remind club members of the grange fundraiser auction on the 16th.  if you have something you want to donate to the auction, you can bring it/them along to our meeting, and leave it/them in the grange.  Donations of bratty children, misbehaving pets, and uncooperative spouses will NOT be accepted, though they could form their own club, since there are SO many of them!

see you there!

jim

292-0326

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.