Planting Peas, Harvesting Peace

Posted on March 7, 2022 by Ann Lovejoy
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Mouse ear sized lilac leaves with budding bloom

Of Peas and Peace

Yesterday, I joined a peace rally in support of the Ukrainian people, sponsored by a local interfaith group, and over a hundred people gathered outside a local church. We can now meet outdoors without masks and it felt powerfully connecting to be able to see and hear each other in person again. Many hugs were exchanged and some tears were shed as we looked deeply into others’ eyes. After a bit of prayer we walked to a nearby park, fitfully chanting and singing as we ambled along. All We Are Saying Is Give Peace A Chance. Where Have All The Flowers Gone. We Shall Overcome. Not many people joined in, partly because it was largely an aging crowd, many of whom needed all their breath just to walk.

There were a few younger families there, some with toddlers in tow and babies in strollers, but the majority were my peers, in their 60s and 70s and 80s. It occurred to many of us that we’ve been singing these songs most of our lives, at rallies and protests all across the country. As is now usual, there were far more women than men. In my admittedly imperfect memory, the rallies of my youth were usually run by guys, directing the flow of events and yelling through megaphones. Back when, most women played subsidiary roles even in social justice organizations. I remember making coffee, running off copies of posters and manifestos, making and carrying signs, but I don’t recall ever being invited or permitted to speak at a rally.

A New Day And A New Way

These days, the social justice rallies I’ve attended often feature student activists, male and female and anywhere in between. I suspect the reason so few younger people were present yesterday is because by and large, younger activists are not connected through churches but through social justice groups. It was a good reminder that if we want to engage other generations in our activities, we need to reach out to them directly. Young people rarely use FaceBook, don’t often make phone calls, and emails aren’t usually answered briskly, but they all text!

It’s refreshing to see young women in particular stepping up and speaking out. The trend has influenced my generation as well, and our local social justice groups are mainly organized by women, who do most of the heavy lifting for and at all events, yet share any spotlight generously with others, knowing that the more voices heard, the stronger the message. Over the past few years, more people of all ages have been moved to get involved with equity movements and activities, big and small, local and national, a very hopeful sign for the future. Humanity is changing, though painfully slowly. We shall overcome, someday.

Peas And Peace

After the rally, I spent a few happy hours puttering in my nearby community garden patch. The deep freezes burned some of the elderly kales but the few remaining arugulas are still delicious and tender, as are the Italian dandelion greens and broccoli side shoots. I pulled the kales that were turning into leaning towers, harvesting the handsome top growth, each fresh leaf partnered with a crisp little sprout. The deep leafy mulch I heaped on last autumn protected the winter-planted garlic and walking onion from several rounds of freezing weather and sturdy green shoots are poking up. Thanks to a year of care and feeding, the once-starved soil is now loose and loamy, smelling fresh and earthy.

This week, our local lilacs leapt into bud, showing a generous mouse ear’s worth of green, with tiny, burgeoning blossoms already emerging as well. Given that guidance, I finally tucked my lovely pea starts into the rich, welcoming soil, giving each a battered but still useful wire cage to clamber up. The cages were reclaimed from the trash by a neighboring gardener who kindly lent them to me in turn. I like using tools with history, knowing other hands have used them for many tasks, and mine now have a place in their story too. After all that, I slowly stood and stretched my creaky back, feeling pleasantly weary, while a little flock of towhees warbled and chirped in a nearby apple tree. The softly tinted sunset formed a rosy backdrop for a big robin perched on a high branch, singing his heart song to a calm, peaceful world. Onward, right?

Posted in Birds In The Garden, Care & Feeding, Early Crops, fall/winter crops, Health & Wellbeing, Planting & Transplanting, Social Justice, Soil, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living, Winterizing | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Lessons From Braiding Sweetgrass

Posted on February 27, 2022 by Ann Lovejoy
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Plant for pollinators and for People

How To Love Our Planet

How many of you have discovered Braiding Sweetgrass, the remarkable book by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer? Scientist, professor, and parent, Dr. Kimmerer is also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and the Director of The Center for Native People and the Environment. Her much loved book, Braiding Sweetgrass, is used in homes and classrooms all over the country and the world. The subtitle is Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which made me read it immediately. Pouring through it, slowly and appreciatively, I found myself agreeing with pretty much everything Dr. Kimmerer wrote. As she explains, Indigenous cultures understand that knowing about plants can be medicine, just as the plants themselves can be medicine, good for people and the planet. And by people, she means plants and critters, for Indigenous wisdom considers all living things to be People, and their personhood is to be respected.

I first read this book 8 or 9 years ago, having been lent a battered copy that had clearly made the rounds many times, though it was almost new. Since then, I’ve dipped into it often, sometimes knitting along to the author’s gentle voice as she reads her own words on a library audiobook, bringing the ideas to life with tone and phrasing. This book has influenced many people and rightfully so, as it has a lot to teach. For one thing, Kimmerer talks about recognizing plants as elders and teachers, holding wisdom and knowledge. For millennia, people learned from plants, how to use them and how to nurture them in turn. That relationship is familiar to gardeners, who learn to care for plants by paying attention and being observant. Cherishing the Earth sounds woo woo to some folks, but it makes total sense to those of us who cherish the soil in our gardens.

Living In Reciprocity With Nature

Reading or listening to such ideas makes me deeply happy, feeling confirmed in that inner knowing that we belong in harmony with nature, not in mastery (the very word reeks of patriarchal hierarchy). Instead of a power-over relationship with the natural world, our most natural one is a joyful reciprocal friendship that enjoys and delights in each other. A friend recently passed along the link below, in which Dr. Kimmerer offers a brief synopsis of her book and discusses the ideas with students from Gonzaga University in Spokane. As she reminds them, Indigenous wisdom is not about the olden days. In fact, it’s never been more timely and cogent. Indigenous wisdom teaches that land is not a resource, it is a library, a pharmacy, a pantry, and a source of identity. Indigenous wisdom holds that we are part of the land, and Kimmerer notes, “the land is more than an ecosystem, it is our home and the home of all our relatives, those more than human beings who provide gifts for us and for each other and for the planet.” She reminds us that we are surrounded by “intelligences other than our own,” and if we are to preserve the planet, we need to be present to these voices and learn from them.

Over and over, Kimmerer stresses that our relationship with the Earth needs to be one of reciprocity. She tells stories about elders reminding younger students to think about how we can reciprocate the gifts of the earth with our own gifts, which may be gratitude, science, justice work, art, regenerative agriculture and circular economies, respect and education. Education is defined not as rote learning but as a way for us to offer our gifts to the land and all the people. As a Crow elder explained, “To be educated is to understand what your gifts are, and to understand how you can return them to the world.” When you think about that, what comes up for you?

Valuing Diversity

I love the acknowledgement that plant diversity and landscape diversity are as important as every other kind, of great value for people and People and for our beautiful blue planet. I’ve taken this to mean that when I plant a garden, I must consider the pollinators as much as the plants themselves. If I plant food for my table, I leave some plants to bloom and make nectar, and let some set seed for birds. Some may also self-sow, creating enough to share with neighbors of all species, making more abundance for all concerned. When I create landscapes for myself and others, they always contain native plants for critters as well as whatever ornamentals we may currently dote on. Planting this way is a kind of reciprocity, a giving back and an acknowledgement of all that we have been given. Last March, researchers “discovered” the sites of ancient Indigenous forest gardens along the coast of British Columbia and Washington and found that many plants had persisted for hundreds of years. Talk about sustainability! Though all the plants are native coastal species, there are far more kinds growing together than are found in nature (nowadays, anyway). When the scientists asked local Tribal people about the gardens, they were told that the Elders had planted the gardens to support people, birds and bears, a gift of relationship and reciprocity.

I’ve been asked many times recently about planting for climate change and again, I think the key will be paying attention and being observant. Nobody really knows what the changing climate will bring, though it’s already obvious that our plant palettes will be changing along with the climate, willy-nilly. Extreme weather events are becoming commonplace and even many native plants are showing stress if not dying outright. A neighbor who’s been tapping Bigleaf maples to make syrup realized this year that the sap is all brown. She contacted University of Washington scientists who told her that’s a sign of heart rot and all the sap must be discarded. Our iconic maples are fatally stressed from years of drought and heat, wind storms and deep freezes. So are many of the plants typically found in regional gardens, and as they die, we need to make different choices when replacing them. Will it be enough to look South for solutions? I don’t know, but surely anything we can do to heal and improve the soil will be helpful. Onward, because there’s no place else to go.

If you would like to hear Dr. Kimmerer talk about all this and much more, here’s a similar conversation Dr. Kimmerer presented:

Posted in Birds In The Garden, Care & Feeding, Climate Change, Garden Design, Health & Wellbeing, Native Plants, Plant Diversity, Plant Partnerships, Pollination Gardens, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living, Teaching Gardening | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Planting Peas By Lilac Leaves

Posted on February 21, 2022 by Ann Lovejoy
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Snow peas and greens are rarin’ to go

Saint Patrick’s Day, Maybe

Years ago, when I was just getting started with edible gardening, more experienced gardeners assured me that the proper time to plant peas was on Saint Patrick’s Day. However, that very year, there was a significant snow storm on March 17, which did not tempt me to heed the advice. Since then, we’ve had quite a few snowy or freezing Saint Patrick’s Days, but fortunately, I learned from PNW gardening guru Steve Solomon that no matter where we live, we should plant our peas according to the size of local lilac leaves. That probably sounds like just another piece of dubious folk wisdom, but like everything Steve suggests, it has a sound scientific basis. It turns out that lilac buds begin to swell when the average daily (and nightly) temperature reaches a certain point. I can’t remember just what that is, but it’s when night temperatures creep out of the 30s. By the time the leaves are emerging, the soil is warm enough to keep peas (and many greens) growing well.

While some plants sprout or bloom in rhythm with day length (notably pussywillows, alders and hazels, all blooming right now), others are spurred into action by changes in temperature. Same goes for tree frogs, which will strike up a collective croaking chorus in breeding season when the air temperature is just right, and cease abruptly in perfect unison as soon as the air gets too warm or cold. Prominent among temperature-sensitive indicator plants is the common lilac, which is such a popular garden shrub that most of us either grow one or at least know where one is growing nearby. Would-be pea planters are tipped off that the time is right when emerging lilac leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear. If you aren’t familiar with mouse ears, you probably don’t have cats to keep you up to speed. However, mouse ears are roughly the size of your pinky finger fingernail, which nearly everyone has at least one of. Of course, that varies with hand size, but when about half an inch of lilac leaves are showing, it’s pea planting time.

Soil Prep For Peas

Peas are a cool season crop and they aren’t fussy about chilly soil, but like most edibles, they prefer a well drained spot in full sun (or the sunniest place you can offer). Where rainwater tends to puddle, plant them in a raised trough or a mounded bed made with at least a foot of decent top soil blended with mature compost. Peas are healthiest and most productive when grown in soil that drains promptly yet contains enough organic matter that it also retains adequate moisture. This ideal combination is rare here in the Maritime Northwest (among other non-idyllic places), but we can create a beneficial growing environment by making mounds of sandy loam, then topping them off with compost and top dressing with aged, washed, or digested dairy manure. Mounded beds don’t need to be boxed in (bed siding materials all have issues, whether sheltering slugs and other pests or leaching chemicals into the soil). Instead, the sloped sides may be stabilized with carpeting thymes and oreganos, plants that will thrill your local pollinator population.

In heavy clay-based soils, peas tend to develop fusarium wilt or pea root rot, the biggest obstacles to bountiful pea crops. Peas flourish when they get a speedy start and are able to sprout and produce roots fast. If the weather remains cold and soil stays soggy, slow sprouting can lead to root rotting in just a few days. If your garden lacks space for mounded beds, consider planting in stock tanks or large water troughs instead. Drilled for drainage and raised up on bricks or blocks, troughs eliminate bending and stooping, a boon for less spry gardeners. You can also plant in huge plastic tree pots, which hold about a cubic yard of soil and warm up well before the ground will in a chilly year.

Edible Pea Greens

A reader asked about Petite Snap Green peas, which can be grown indoors or outside and harvested when just a few inches tall. Many early pea types offer tasty leaves and juicy tendrils that are delicious in salads and make a colorful, crunchy garnish. Petite Snap Green Peas have frothy, frilly tendrils that are especially flavorful, though they’re not great pod producers. Some snap peas, such as Feisty and Masterpiece, are also grown for their abundant, lacy tendrils but are also fairly decent pod-formers. For my money, snow pea pods and tendrils are best eaten raw or very lightly cooked. Among them, Speckled Snow Peas are especially pretty, with variegated burgundy and chartreuse pods that are delicious as babies or when plump with peas. Royal Snow Peas boast deeper purple pods that make a gorgeous garnish for soup or poultry as well.

Peas are nitrogen fixers and don’t really need much in the way of fertilizers, which can promote more leaves than pods and peas. To keep pea starts productive, work in some compost and a little kelp meal, or water in some liquid kelp (such as Maxi-Crop) to offer encouragement without excess nitrogen or phosphorus (which can build up to excess soil levels over time). Plant your pea starts 3-4 inches apart, marking the rows or patches with twiggy branches to support the young stems. Give them a blanket of mature compost and keep the soil moist if rains are irregular this year and you can start harvesting tendrils in just a few weeks. Now that’s something to look forward to!

Posted in Care & Feeding, Drainage, Early Crops, Garden Prep, Pollinators, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Promoting Pollinators & Welcoming Wildness

Posted on February 7, 2022 by Ann Lovejoy
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Pollinators love all kinds of alliums, edible and ornamental alike

Making Moves & Counting Bees



I’ve been realizing lately just how much ground I’ve given up to the pandemic. Compared with a few years ago, I spend far more time in front of my computer, writing and attending zoom meetings, and far less time outside. Partly it’s due to the continuing cold, but part is also the effect of the isolating and hunkering we’ve all been doing. It’s easy to get sucked into a sedentary life and hard to get myself back into a more active one. My new technique is to set a timer every time I sit down anywhere. At least once an hour, the pleasant chimes sound and I get up and stretch, do laundry or dishes, go outside, putter in the garden, refresh the bird feeders. Getting up and out has the added advantage of getting a lot of niggling little chores done along the way, from sweeping each night’s fircone deposits off the porches to planning a new garden path in our miniature back yard. Anytime the phone rings, I get up and pace around the house while the cats delightedly do their playful pouncing and chasing tricks. My aging body is happier and it’s feeling easier to move and stretch and bend again. I even creak less when I get up, perhaps because I haven’t solidified to stone by sitting in one place too long. Bonus!

Walking around the neighborhood, it’s easy to see that despite the winter chill, spring is definitely on the way. Golden catkins dangle from hazels (while regrettably shedding boatloads of pollen) and silky silver pussies are opening on native willows. Over the weekend I transplanted tight clumps of crocus into smaller clusters in our community entry garden. Usually it’s best to move bulbs in the green, after the flowers fade, but it’s very easy to forget to do that, so I’m doing it as I go and noticing that the chilly soil makes the bulbs less awake and they’ve gone on to bloom quite happily in their new locations. Snowdrops have been blooming for a few weeks, and some tiny species daffodils are poking up as well. The early blooms on Oregon grape are already attracting insects, from bumblebees to hoverflies.

Promoting Pollinators & Welcoming Wildness

Many gardens seemed quieter in the last few years, with fewer pollinators making the rounds. Anywhere a pollinator patch as planted to invite them, over the summer, there was a resurgence of pollinators coming to feed on the nectar. How do I know? The way to figure out if you have more or fewer insect visitors is to count the number you can see over a period of 10 minutes several times a day. As you do this, you get better at identifying different kinds of pollinators, and you can make note of that as well. Many bee species have distinctive markings on their butts and if you take a few closeup pictures, you can often determine who’s who in the garden. I was thrilled to find that my little patch remained lively with birds and at least a few bee and insect species right up until the freeze, feasting daily on the scarlet tubes of pineapple sage, late blooming rosemary blossoms, and the lingering hardy fuchsias.

Such offerings are more important that ever, since so much natural habitat has been and is still being destroyed. It’s painful to watch another pocket of native plants get rooted up to make room for a strip of townhouses with miniature yards or none at all. Those little scraps of wildness can host a surprising amount of wildlife, and every tangle of scrub is someone’s home. It doesn’t take an intact forest to house wild things, and even small ares of un-manicured yards can provide food and shelter for birds and bats, raccoons and foxes, insects and snakes, salamanders and yes, even slugs. To thrive, they all need a bit of the wild, and any touch of wild is in danger these days. When I work with homeowners, I often hear that they want to welcome birds and nurture bees, yet the first thing they want to get rid of is the messy tangle of blackberries and salal, huckleberries and wild roses that so often edge the properties. Even when I point out that such tangles are home and buffet for the very creatures they want to welcome, it’s clear that many folks can’t live with that lack of controlled appearance. Leaving some wild can be a hard sell, since our ideas about tidiness can be largely unconscious and deeply rooted. Thus, it’s hugely important to equally deeply consider why we may think that the appearance of control is more important than a healthy, intact habitat environment.

Making Pollinator Meadows

I’ve recently visited several large properties where owners want to convert existing big lawns into meadows that nurture native pollinators. Pollinator meadows are woven with annuals, perennials, bulbs, and grasses as well as some native shrubs. As with any sustainable landscape, the overall success of a pollinator meadow depends on good prep, appropriate plant selection and planting, and consistent (if quite low) maintenance. Success also relies on the owner’s tolerance for that touch of the wild that means life for small life forms. Meadows are not lawns and it can take time to adjust our eyes to see the natural beauties of plants through the year. One way to do this is to spend more time in natural grassland environments, which vary from savannah and prairie to mountain meadows. It’s easy to admire them when spangled with flowers, but it’s equally important to love the look during autumn and early winter. Choosing plants that live and die with grace is helpful, as they will support a wide range of critters in the armer seasons and birds will delight in their seeds in autumn and winter.

While some native pollinators are specialists, most are generalists that will appreciate a base of natives amplified with selected introduced perennials that extend the bloom season and hold their looks well. To identify natives that will flourish in your setting, check out native plant societies, the Department of Natural Resources, and the Xerces Society. Local independent nurseries (not box stores) are also good places to find pollinator pleasers. After spending time in wild places and researching, you may gain new appreciation for certain plants that may already be in place, such as stinging nettles and wandering wild roses, which tend to look straggly but support many small beings.

Soil Prep

Before planting anything, prep the soil. Where existing lawns are thin and mossy to start with, the scanty grass is easily overwhelmed by the addition of natives that thrive in such settings. There, we can remove strips of existing turf by cutting and rolling up the sods, which can be stacked green sides together, then root sides together. Top the resulting mound with root side up turf, then cover it with a tarp or deep wood chip mulch; in a few seasons, it will rot down into lovely soil. Where areas of tall, nonnative grasses are already established, planting can be more challenging, since they can overwhelm small native starts. Here your best choices are either to smother the grasses with deep wood chip mulches (12-18 inches or more) or till up the turf and rake out as much root mass as possible before planting anything new. Remember that you don’t have to do all the work at once; you can implement your plan in stages over several or many years, assisting the transition by careful weeding and invasive plant removal three or four times each year.

Pollinator Plants To Know & Grow

Whether your pollinator place is a patch or a meadow, native milkweeds will be manna for Monarch butterflies (Asclepias incarnata, A. speciosa, A. syriaca, A. tuberosa). Skippers feast on checkerbloom (Sidalcea malviflora), mountain avens (Geum macrophylla), and Phalaris arundinacea Feesey’s Variety. Our native bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa) fosters Swallowtails and Parnassians, as does Ceanothus sanguineus, purple willow (Salix purpurea Nana), Heraclum lanatum and its garden counterpart, Angelica gigas. Coppers, Hairstreaks and Blues love Ocean Spray (Holodiscus discolor, one of my personal favorites), as well as redtwig dogwood (Cornus sericea) and native peas (Lathyrus latifoilus). Native hardhack (Spirea douglasii), S. betulifolia and S. densiflora are important fodder and nectar plants for numerous native butterflies. If you grow hops near the meadow, it will also be highly popular.

Grasses appreciated by native butterflies include golden oats (Stipa gigantea) and Mexican feather grass (S. tenuissima), which can provide nesting material for many other critters as well. Globe thistles (Echinops ritro) are a favorite of Painted Ladies, while Spangled Fritillaries prefer to feast and nest on violets (Viola glabella). Quite often, native pollinators will happily visit cousins of their preferred native plants, so you may see the same bees and other insects on blueberries and huckleberries, various willows and ceanothus species, and many kinds of thistles. Herbs seem to attract the wisest range of pollinators, from rosemary and sage to thyme and oregano. Seed savers will find that flowering kale and lettuce, beans and peas, radishes and beets are also heavily visited, usually resulting in excellent seed setting. Onward!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments