Spring Strawberry Care
It’s spring and chances are your strawberry patch looks like this: Strawberry bed rejuvenation is very straight forward but it is also an essential part of strawberry care. The bed pictured above is an example of a ‘matted-row’ planting system, but the following guidelines apply for most home-garden strawberry patches. Remove all dead foliage, thin plants to 4-6 inches apart, and add fertilizer (ours is 4% Nitrogen(N), 4% Phosphorus(P), 3% Potasium(K), but any all-purpose organic vegetable garden fertilizer will work). After you clean up your strawberry patch should...
Read MoreTrain Your Peas!
Believe it or not pea plants do actually have a sense touch. It is a response to touch or physical contact with a solid object called thigmotropism that causes the pea tendrils to coil. When the tendrils feel the solid object, growth is stimulated in the side of the tendril opposite of the side of contact. The non-contact side of the tendril begins to elongate faster than the rest of the tendril resulting in the coiling form we see on our pea plants. So help your pea plants out by making sure they make contact with the trellis you have set up for them. Don’t be afraid to...
Read MoreSpring Spinach and Beyond
Spinach is a annual that grows to maturity in about 40-50 days in the Pacific Northwest. It is a hardy cool-season crop that does best at temperatures of 60 to 65ºF, but can withstand temperatures as low as 20ºF. Spinach is intolerant of temperatures above 77ºF, these warm temperatures combined with long days initiate the plants reproductive stage, causing it to bolt or flower prematurely. That means right now is a good time to seed spinach for a late spring harvest. To do this, simply direct seed into your garden bed. Once the seeds have germinated and are an inch or...
Read MoreFirst Transplants of the Year!
Garden Peas (Pisum sativum) It can be easy to forget that the sweet crunchy peas we enjoy on warm summer days are actually a cool season crop. This means they grow best at temperatures of 50 to 60ºF and should be planted early enough that they have a chance to mature before temperatures are consistently above 85ºF. Luckily for Pacific Northwest peas it is rare that temperatures around here remain consistently above 85ºF. Even at 75ºF pea yields will drop rapidly and pod fiber and seed starch content will increase leaving you with pithy peas encased in stringy pods. We started our...
Read MoreGarden Show 2011
We will put up some new photos of our display at the 2011 Northwest Flower and Garden Show ASAP….In the meantime, here is a link to the video of our 2010 Display “Crops For Clunkers” which is approximately 22 minutes long, entertaining, and informative…
Read MoreCultivation Conversation
A few weeks ago Sky Nursery hosted our first garden seminar of the season and from what we hear it was a success! Close to 50 people joined us to discuss “Garden Design and Planning,” and in a few hours we were able to cover everything from site selection and materials to soil testing. This was just the first of many talks we will be giving throughout the spring, the next of which will be the first in a two-part series on growing veggies, hosted by the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture. These talks are a great way to get motivated to get out in your...
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