NW Native Plants After the Freeze

After three days of below freezing, and several nights in the teens (unusual for us), the natives in the planters and in one area are doing ok. Surviving, some green left, only real sign of the freeze is the fading leaves on the salmonberry.

Here we have the highbush cranberry started last March showing leaves turning gold. Below is the fringe cup, leaves still green, beach strawberry, leaves still dark green, blue-eyed grass, oak fern & salal, barely visible but there.

Will try to take another similar shot of this one every month till May.

Here's another natives planter, with deer fern, evergreen huckleberry, a bit of sedum spathulifolium, more salal, and a cedar seedling.

Finally, here's a patch of natives, with early blue violet, salmonberry, sword fern, blue-eyed grass, sedum oreganum, bunchberry , maidenhair fern, and others.

No More Buying Cheap Salmon

Economical shopper that I am, I rarely buy salmon if its over 6.00 a lb, and I haven't asked recently where it comes from, but odds are its raised in a crowded pen on the edge of a body of salt water, mixing with the oceans. My daughter tells me what's wrong with farmed salmon. Not only does it lack much of the nutritional value of wild salmon, the farmed salmon & their diseases are moving from the farms to the open waters, directly threatening the wild species. Read more about it at Save Our Wild Salmon and Why Wild Salmon , a very informative site from Trout Unlimited. So far, I've learned: -- Its good to eat wild salmon if its caught responsibly, encouraging that fishing industry -- Not good to eat farmed salmon of any kind, shouldn't support that industry --There is no more salmon farming in Puget Sound, or anywhere in the US. It was outlawed due to disease in the fish and other factors. --Salmon is farmed on Vancouver Island, and in northern European...

Spring in January 2010

Been so warm outside these days, really feels like spring. Grass is starting to grow, daffodils are up a few inches or more in places, primroses blooming and for sale at all the groceries, weeds growing, and we hear they are worried about getting enough snow for the Olympics next month up the road in Vancouver, B.C. And no, this warm winter in the Puget Sound Convergence Zone has nothing to do with Global Warming, or as we should call it, Global Climate Change. What I don't understand at all is why so many people who have learned to read and write and supposedly understand what they read have decided not to use their abilities to discern what scientists keep telling us. The glaciers are melting, that's a fact. But don't take my word for it, or the National Geographic's word for it. Go read for yourself. Ok, so now we just call it Global Change. Not just climate, or maybe not even climate, and certainly nothing to do with the weather. Changes in the global envir...

After the Heat Wave

Now that we have survived the worst heat wave in Seattle history -- only 4 or 5 days really, but enough to make some of us wish we were anywhere else -- we take another look at the raingarden. Today it is lush and green, although I have barely watered it. We had one day of rain in July, I think, so some drain water was available. I may have turned the hose on it occasionally when I was passing by to water the vegetables planted nearby, but no regular watering in the swale of the rain garden. Yet we have lush croscomia, yellow twig dogwood, pieris, hellebore, solomon's seal, sedums, and not too many weeds. The load of arborist wood chips I had dumped in the nearby parking strip overflowed into the raingarden, so thick layer of the chips covered over everything there. No damage, just a thick blanket (3-4 inches) of protective mulch.

The Convergence Zone

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