Happy August, Gardeners!
This year I challenged myself by incorporating more gardening swaps into the schedule, and I am hoping to close out the Sandy Seed Library Series of programs with a final swap: Share Your Bounty. With how popular our annual seed swap is, I thought about trying a seedling swap in the spring, and a harvest swap in the late summer. The seedling swap was on the smaller side but a hit with attendees, and feedback to make it an annual event. As I thought through what a harvest swap might look like, I decided it would be nice to keep the seedlings coming for folks that would like some late-season crops or even some plants that will overwinter.
There is room for this to grow as we get more experience under our belts and feedback from our seed library community.
Upcoming Events
Edible Gardening Group - Growing and Enjoying Fruit in Our Region
Discover which fruits thrive in our growing zone, which ones are more challenging, and how to keep your plants healthy with the right pruning practices and pest and disease management. We'll also discuss unusual fruits that local gardeners are successfully growing and share practical ideas for preserving your harvest.
When: Monday, August 24, 6:30pm - 8pm
Where: Hoyt Community Room, Sandy Public Library
Bee City, USA Action Group Meeting
Would you like to get involved with plans to help the city become more pollinator friendly? Join us at our quarterly Bee City Action Group meeting and hear about our past community projects, and have a say in our future projects!
When: Tuesday, August 25, from 6 - 7pm
Where: Sandy Community and Senior Center (38348 Pioneer Blvd, Sandy)
Join the Sandy Seed Library for our very first Share Your Bounty event! Bring your extra late-season harvest produce, garlic bulbs and starts for fall and winter crops, fresh eggs, and even flower bulbs to swap with others! Of course we always encourage any seeds that you may want to bring.
In addition to edibles, do you have any extra garden supplies and hand tools laying around that you would like to pass on to the community? What about favorite recipes for some of your home-grown produce? Bring those items along as well!
For liability reasons, do not bring any homemade preserves or prepared food of any kind. Only your home-grown produce and plants, please. Be sure to label and date all edible items.
Any leftover food items will be donated to the Sandy Action Center’s food pantry.
When: Saturday, August 29, 2 - 3:30pm
Where: Hoyt Community Room, Sandy Public Library
What I've Been Reading:
The Permaculture Garden: A Practical Approach to Year-Round Harvests by Huw Richards
Since I have read through many of Huw Richards' books, I had to pick this one up too. I will probably have to check it out again, because it is filled with a lot of really cool information and practical steps towards creating a permaculture garden. And, of course, being a common practice in Huw Richards books, wonderful images to help illustrate how the gardens looks and works.
A simple definition of a permaculture garden, provided by the University of Utah, "is a design concept for sustainable, food producing landscapes mimicking the diversity and resilience of natural ecosystems."
Huw Richards even has a short on YouTube that gives an overview of what permaculture is and how he guides you through it in his book: What is Permaculture
And to take it a little further, please check out this slide deck put together by OSU: Permaculture Basics for Master Gardeners
Rick's Corner: One of My Favorite Plants
When I worked at a wholesale nursery in northern California just after college, we had an area of large shrubs in 15-gallon pots that swept up a gentle rise that topped out at the big old silver-weathered barn where the owner kept his 1948 Ford coupe “Super Deluxe” and where Moon, the round and wooly elderly farm dog, liked to sleep in the dappled shadows of the derelict horse stalls through the warming afternoons. During those spring mornings, when I was tasked with watering, early, with the light still rising, I would work my way up that section of the nursery, in and out among the rows of pots, and my eye would inevitably stop on one particular shrub, a beautiful mix of white, pink, and red flowers on sharply angled branches with large, threatening thorns–the plant was almost all geometry, its leaves either not yet emerged or just budding out.
It was a Toyo Nishiki Japanese flowering quince (Chaenomeles speciosa 'Toyo-Nishiki'), and has since then been one of my favorite plants, even though I have never actually seen one planted in the ground. When I ended up in Portland, years and years later, my wife and I were at a random plant sale we’d stumbled across, and I found a Toyo Nishiki quince offered in a gallon pot and snatched it up and took it home–an act of pure nostalgia, really, as we didn’t have a proper place for it, but I transplanted it into a larger patio pot and tried to coax it to grow. In the ground, in proper conditions, they can grow into six feet tall or more and just as wide, but in my pot it never managed to grow more than two-and-a-half-feet tall and less wide; still, every year in spring it would bloom, not the full bloom of a mature specimen, but just a hint of that, a few red, pink, but mostly white flowers on a naked branch, and that was and is enough, as I continue to be smitten: it reminds me of those glorious mornings at the nursery, long past now, just me and the hose and the dog and the silver barn on the hill outlined against the sky. Someday I hope to actually get mine in the ground.
Good News for Bees in Oregon
The Oregon Bee Project is highlighted in a report that shows fewer Oregon bees are dying from pesticides, per the Oregon Capital Chronicle:
After 25,000 bees in 2013 died in a Target parking lot in Wilsonville following exposure to pesticides, the Legislature established the Task Force on Pollinator Health to address increasing reports of bee deaths associated with pesticides, charging Oregon State University scientists with developing statewide educational materials aimed at reducing pesticide exposure, improving bee habitat and slowing the spread of invasive bees, pests and diseases impacting bees…
Since 2018, the bee project has trained more than 12,000 pesticide applicators on pesticide labels, provided K-12 youth with educational booklets about Oregon bees and established bee protection protocols for land managers growing critical state crops such as clover seed, blueberries and western vegetable seeds.
The bee project has also bolstered training on bee health and partnered with experts at Oregon State to train the public about pollinator landscaping…
“Oregon has built one of the strongest bee survey and education networks in the country,” said Andony Melathopoulos, a pollinator expert at OSU’s Extension Service. “The public value is that we can now give people better information for protecting bees, improving habitat and making informed decisions in every part of the state.”
Do you have a favorite plant? We’d love for you to share it with us!
Write a paragraph or so detailing the what and the why and send it to us at bchase@ci.sandy.or.us. And let us know if it’s OK for us to share your favorite in a future newsletter.
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