The Northwest Flower & Garden Show, Part 1: The Gardens

The Northwest Flower & Garden Show this past weekend celebrated its 25 years of existence by featuring display gardens inspired by the silver screens of Hollywood.  The best of the best included "A Hobbit's New Zealand Garden" designed & built by the creative folks at the Washington Park Arboretum.

A Hobbit's New Zealand Garden

I had no idea Middle Earth contained so many cool plants.

Every single plant in this display is indigenous to New Zealand and will become part of the New Zealand garden in the Arboretum (not sure if the hobbit hole is included).

Here are a few other display garden highlights from the show:

The Road to Oz

Dorothy, the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion on their way to the Emerald City.

A River Runs Through It

Beautiful use of an approximately 15' x 15' space

Aliens on Vacation

Odd yet interesting.  This was a very popular display.

Audrey's Roman Holiday

A nice Mediterranean-style garden that brings the indoors outside.

Urban Castaways

These palm trees were HUGE!

Honey, I Shrunk The Yard

Bonsai plants do sort of make you feel like a giant.

Sharing Stone

Renewal: Enchanted April in the Northwest

This is my new favorite type of fencing.

Finally, this next garden was designed by a friend of mine, Riz Reyes of RHR horticulture, and was inspired by the jungles in King Kong, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Jurassic Park.  He has a great eye for detail, color, balance & contrast.  When you add on top of that a ton of cool plants such as Schefflera macrophylla, Wollemia nobilis, Fatsia polycarpa, Nolina nelsonii, Cyclamen coum, Podophyllum delavayi, Cardiocrinum giganteum, and Rhododendron sinogrande well, you end up taking a good chunk of the awards.

The Lost Gardener: A Journey From the Wild to the Cultivated

Looking at it from the more "cultivated" side

The "wild" side of the same garden

Stay tuned for part 2 coming up later in the week!!

Going Twice....

Giving away a ticket to the Flower & Garden Show is getting to be tougher than I expected!  If you would like one ticket, good for this Saturday to the NW Flower & Garden Show, just be the first to leave a comment saying so.  You can either stop by my house and pick it up or we can arrange to meet at the show on Saturday to get it.  I will be there by 8:30am.  It is only good for Saturday.

Going Once....

The Northwest Flower & Garden Show is just about ready for showtime!  It will run Wednesday through Saturday from 9am-8pm and Sunday from 9am-6pm.  This show is the 2nd biggest of its kind in the country (after Philadelphia) and brings a healthy dose of spring to our wet, cold, and cloudy Seattle winter.

You can purchase tickets here or, if your prefer, you can win a ticket by leaving a comment.  This ticket is only good for Saturday, February 23rd (9am-8pm) and I only have one.  This is a $16 value.  Here are the rules:

1. Leave a comment for this post.  The comment must consist of at least one letter, number, or special character.  For example, you could write "I would like to win the ticket!!!!" or "T" or even "asdflkjdfalefkj".
2. You have until 4:00pm on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013 to enter.
3. One entry per person will be permitted.
4. At 4:01pm on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013, I will use the random number generator app on my phone to select the winner.
5. At approximately 4:05pm on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013, I will announce the winner on this blog.  The winner should e-mail me (jgalicic@gmail.com) with their name & address by 4:30pm on 2/19 if they want the ticket mailed to them in time.  Or, if you prefer, you can meet me at the South Entrance at 8:30am on Saturday to pick it up in person.

Good luck!

Tomatoes

I planted some 'Legend' tomatoes from Ed Hume seeds last Sunday (2/10) and a week later, as you can see, they're off to the races!

Tomato seedlings.  Interesting note: the seedling in the 2nd column from left, 2nd row from bottom has 3 seed leaves.

Today (2/17) the seedlings are each about 2 inches or 5 cm tall.  Growing tomatoes from seed is easy as long as certain conditions are met.  Here is the step-by-step process I am taking:

Day 1:
1. Plant the seeds in a plastic tray using peat pots and a seed starter mix (available at any decent nursery any time of the year or most hardware stores during the growing season).  Place 2 seeds in each compartment.
2. Water carefully, then place a cover over the tray in order to retain 100% humidity during the germination process.
3. Place the seed tray on a heat mat or some source of bottom heat in order to keep the seeds at a constant temperature of around 75 F/24 C.  If you don't want to go buy a heat mat, a couple strands of Christmas lights will do the trick. 

Day 5: (approximately)
4. Once the seedlings are about an inch tall, pluck out the weakest ones leaving one healthy seedling per pot.  If two look equally healthy, pluck out whichever one is closest to the edge of the pot leaving the one nearest the center.
5. Give them very bright, indirect light.  This is important because there is not enough natural light in winter to make tomatoes grow.  I use a florescent light fixture that gives off 12,000 lumens of light, placed about two feet above the tomato seedlings.  It is set to be on 14 hours a day.  Although the seedlings no longer need bottom heat at this point, they should be kept between 55 F/15 C and 75 F/24 C.

Day 30: (approximately)
6. After the first set of true leaves have appeared, I plan to transfer the seedlings into 6" pots and give them a healthy dose of fish fertilizer.

For about $10 in materials, or the cost of buying four or five tomato seedlings in the spring, I will end up with 30 tomato plants.  Stay tuned to see their progress as they grow!

Peas

With clear blue skies and temperatures pushing 60 degrees F/15.5C, spring was definitely in the air today.  Not that it's going to last.  Next week is supposed to be 10 degrees cooler with rain.  But now that I'm officially in the gardening spirit, it is time to plant seeds!

I like Ed Hume seeds because they are a local company and specialize in cool-climate varieties.

The plan is to start off all of the seeds pictured above either in seed trays in the greenhouse or directly out in the garden in the coming week.  I will do my best to share how I germinate & grow all the seeds I plant this year, starting with the first seeds to go in the ground...PEAS!!

I have found that germinating the pea seeds in zip-lock bags has resulted in higher germination rates vs. planting them directly in the ground.  To germinate the seeds, I put each variety in a gallon-sized zip-lock bag, along with 1/2 cup of water and a paper towel to help distribute the water evenly.  I kept them in the garage but keeping them in the refrigerator can also work.  After 2 days, the seeds were already starting to germinate.  In the future, I will probably just use the smaller zip-lock bags and fold the paper towels in quarters.

Three pea varieties: Tall telephone, Oregon Sugar Pod II, and Super Sugar Snap

Because today was so warm, I decided to plant some of the seeds in the ground even though they had just barely started germinating.  I left some in the zip-lock bags for later as well.  The pea scaffolding, by the way, is not complete yet.  These are all pole varieties.  I will wait a few weeks to plant the bush varieties just to keep them separate and spread out the harvest period.

I plant seeds closer together than what the directions say, then thin out as necessary when they start to grow.

I amended the soil with some organic fertilizer & mycorrhizae before planting the slightly germinated pea seeds.  I planted them about an inch deep and firmly packed down the soil to keep them in place.  Once I finish the bamboo scaffolding (which is 8 feet tall) I won't need to do anything else except water them once the weather starts heating up (this won't be necessary if we get an unfortunate repeat of the past two springs, which featured mostly cold and rainy weather -- peas are about the only thing that enjoy that sort of torment).  They will reach their peak harvest by late June/early July, and by mid-July the dying vines will be pulled out in order to make room for winter brassicas like broccoli & Brussels sprouts.