At the Garden Show, Ideas Abound, from Local Vendors to Seminars to Non-profits to… the Men’s Room
By Bill Thorness, Author, Edible Heirlooms
“Twenty-one years,” said Charley Yaw with his trademark welcoming smile. That was his answer when I asked how long his Mt. Vernon company has been exhibiting Charley’s Greenhouses at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show.
I stopped to say hi to Charley, whom I’ve often tapped at the show for advice. I knew he and his wife Carol had been there for a lot of years. They’re only one year shy of having exhibited an every one of the 22-year-old show.
So, what’s new, Charley? “We’re selling a lot of building materials,” he told me. It seems the do-it-yourself (DIY) craze has hit the greenhouse end of the gardening world too.
Carol and Charley Yaw of Charley's Greenhouse.
Since I was speaking on season extension techniques for vegetable gardening, I asked him if there was an alternative to PVC pipe for building a cloche. (The traditional Northwest gardener’s “hoop house” cloche consists of a series of white PVC pipes bent into a tunnel shape and covered with clear plastic. Some people don’t like to see the white PVC in their yards.) He said they’re now offering fiberglass poles, 60 inches long, that you can use instead of PVC. They also have ripstop poly sheeting that is much stronger than the traditional clear plastic. I’ll have to check that out.
If I needed a new raised bed, I could definitely use the services of some local garden builders who are making unique and attractive beds out of recycled or natural materials. The Orcaboard company from Redmond offers sturdy beds of nearly indestructible recycled plastic made of HDPE milk jugs. They’re now making benches, chairs and planters too.
If I wanted wood, I’d go for the rolling cart raised bed made by North Cascades Raised Beds of Sedro Woolley. They combine clear cedar frames with attractively colored aluminum side panels and nice big rolling casters.
I was already redesigning my yard with these cool structures, and I hadn’t even sat down for a seminar yet!
Ecological reverence
On a break from the booths, I learned some new terms and ideas in a fascinating seminar. I plopped down at the “Lucy Letterman Show,” where garden writer and designer Lucy Hardiman was hosting a panel discussion a la the late-night talk shows with some wise gardeners.
Valerie Easton shared the idea of “ecological reverence,” coined by a British writer, as “a better term than sustainability, which just makes me want to rebel.”
Cole Burrell tossed in another fascinating concept, the “biomass pyramid,” which of course has humans at the top (because we named it, natch) but, he said, urges us to think holistically about our ecological system.
“It is all linked together, from the garden to Mount Rainier National Park.”
The fourth panelist, Richard Turner, spoke of the “urban hedgerow” project in San Francisco, which encourages people to link their landscapes together for the overall ecological health of the urban environment. Easton equated it to the “pollinator pathway” project in our area that she wrote about recently in the Seattle Times.
Back at the booths, I decided I might need some more bendable flower stakes from Garden Works of Bellevue, which also makes the Soil Scoop and other great stainless steel hand tools with bright, recycled-rubber handles.
Curt Bingham, President of Garden Works,
shows off their Soil Scoop.
And I definitely want to celebrate the beauty of the garden with a great poster or two from Good Nature Publishing, which is ending a 15-year run of producing colorful, educational posters. They're having a buy-one, get-one-free sale, while supplies last.
Tim Colman with some of Good Nature's great posters.
I was attracted by the colorful ceramic Down Under Pots being sold by C. James Nursery out of Newburg, Oregon. Turn the glazed-ceramic pot upside down to fill with soil and start a plant, like a geranium or a tomato, and once the roots are established, flip the pot over and hang it from its integrated wire. The soil will stay in place and the plant will flourish out of the bottom of the handsome pot.
For all these raised beds and pots, wouldn’t it be great to get some supercharged soil? Some “Moo-Doo” from the Hy-Grass Farms dairy in Auburn would be just the ticket.
Mike IS community
But you can’t make a garden and practice ecological reverence with just materials--you also need some expert guidance. So I always spend show time in the Garden Resource Center, where volunteers like Mike Ewanciw staff the booths of useful non-profits.
Mike Ewanciw at the North American Rock Garden Society booth.
Mike is a bit of a serial volunteer at the show, and you might have seen him helping out one of seven groups over the show’s five days. You could find his smiling face at Plant Amnesty, Arboretum Foundation, King County Iris Society, Seattle Tree Fruit Society, Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation, Hardy Plant Society, or North American Rock Garden Society.
“I like it!” he claimed. “I want to inundate myself with everything that’s here. I always discover one new thing.” This year, he took vacation days to spend so much time at the show. Quite a commitment from a very generous guy.
But you don’t have to sit in the seminars or stop at all the booths to get the down-low on gardening. You can find it in the most unlikely places, like the men’s restroom. That’s where I overheard a conversation that went something like this:
Guy 1: “I really need to get my pruning done.”
Guy 2: “Cut out the dead wood and crossing branches first.”
Guy 1: “Yeah, that’s what I need to do, but it’s really overgrown.”
Guy 2: “Well, stand back and have your wife hold it and shake it, before you cut it off.”
At that point, I headed back to the show floor. There is such a thing as too much information.
Back to Edible Heirlooms |
