by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

Plum blossom season!

Spiritual Touchstone

Depending on where you live, it may be the first breath of spring. Where we are, in the East Bay, it’s been in the windy, sunny 70s the last week — nearly summer. (Thanks global warming. Okay not really, rain please?) In any case, it’s a good time of year to fertilize your garden. If you’d like a primer on how to fertilize, here you go: Garden Fertilizer Basics

To be honest, fertilizing intimidates me. I have this weird aversion to it. I wasn’t really sure why; it is, after all, good for the plants, good for the ecosystem. I know I should be fertilizing my own garden, but I can’t seem to drum up any enthusiasm for it, when really all it is is feeding your plants.

And then I realized: I am terrible at remembering to feed myself, so why should it be any different for my plants?

My life is really busy — I have two kids, work, friends, community. It feels like everyone needs something from me all the time. If the kids aren’t shouting, the cats are. And if everyone’s quiet, a friend is texting or my mom is calling. I love my community, but wow, does it consume my time and resources. As a consequence of that, self care can sometimes (often) go out the window.

The old adage of “Put your own mask on first” comes up a lot for me, but it feels trite when so many other peoples’ needs are greater than mine. My therapist admonished me this week though and reminded me that if I burn out, I’m actually going to be less available, less able to care for those who need it. So the question becomes: what next?

“How can we fertilize our own experience so that our future becomes sustainable?”

How do we take care of ourselves so that we can continue to sustainably show up for our communities?

For me, that looks like:

• Saying no a lot more often. I am quick to raise my hand for things, without thinking about the true cost associated with it. I need to carefully tend my own resources with an eye to sustainability.

• Rest. I often get frustrated when I want to just nap or read or watch something of no substance, but those activities replenish me.

• Spend my time with folks that uplift me, rather than drain me. Everyone’s going through it and certainly, I want to be helpful to people I care about, but I can’t continue to have folks suck me dry with their unmanaged drama.

“What does fertilizing your future look like? How will you tend to your garden of self in 2022?”

by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

Raised planters with drip irrigation (black tubes)

In the Garden

It’s been a pretty dry couple of weeks, and I was just thinking about turning on my drip irrigation again. If you don’t have drip irrigation installed yet, it’s a pretty straightforward thing to do and it has many benefits:

1. You save water — drip irrigation uses lots less water than sprinklers or watering with a hose. It also prevents evaporation. You can save 30-50% water using drip irrigation over conventional watering systems.

2. Much more focused watering — since drip irrigation aims water at the roots, your plants get a longer, more concentrated watering time. The water goes where it needs to go, without getting on leaves (risk of burning in the sun, or getting a fungal disease) or around the plant (more risk of weeds taking water, not your plant).

3. Very adaptable — more conventional systems are hard to move around. Drip irrigation can be moved easily and customized to whatever plant system you’ve got.

According to this guide from Green Thumb Nursery, there are a couple types of drip irrigation components:

• Porous Soaker Hose: these are made from recycled car tires, and are great because all the water goes right into the soil. They’re especially suited to plant beds and rows of shrubs.

• Raindrip Drip System: “The beauty of the Raindrip Drip System is that you just have to set it up and forget it. You simply attach the timer to the faucet, connect the supply line, lay it around your garden, and let the automated system do the rest. It distributes water more efficiently than traditional watering and saves water, time, and money. It is a great method to use to water your plants during a drought, and when there are watering restrictions.”

• Micro-sprinklers: these can mist or be run to specific plants, and they use much less water than conventional sprinklers.

Main line hose (black), with drip hose (brown)

You can get drip irrigation systems at all major home improvement stores. My system is from Dripworks and I really recommend them — it was an easy setup and has been very straightforward to maintain over the years.

Happy dripping!

by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

I’m a big fan of dahlias. I’ve even gone so far as to have them tattooed on my back. They’re my favorite flower, hands down. This past year, I cultivated a dahlia garden with ~16 varietals of dahlias, but now that winter is coming, it’s time to overwinter them!

The Bay Area is in the USDA Hardiness Zone 9A & 9B, so we don’t really have to dig up the dahlias — they’ll survive in the ground with mulch on top of their soil. But I do find that by digging them up and dividing them, I get more blooms the next year.

The process is pretty simple:

1. Cut them down to the dirt, and wait 2 weeks to let the tubers harden off

2. Dig up the tubers, brush off the loose dirt, and let them dry out for 2-3 days

3. Separate them with a sharp tool, making sure you keep the eye and neck of the tuber intact

4. Label them (either as a layer or clump, or individually)

5. Store in a plastic bin with vermiculite or peat moss, in a dark place consistently around 50 degrees Fahrenheit — the coldest part of your basement, if you have one, or an uninsulated garage

If you’d like to see how to do this, here’s an informative YouTube video on how to set all this up:

Happy dahlia-ing! May your tubers be easily divided and your flowers be plentiful!

by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

In the Garden

In Northern California, we don’t really have super defined seasons. We have basically:
Rain if we’re lucky
Rain and fog
More fog, and hopefully some rain
A couple nice weeks in April
Fog
A couple nice weeks in June
Festive Fourth of July Fog (fireworks look like balls of colored light)
Armpit August
Fire Season
More Fire Season
Really tired of Fire Season
It rains again, finally, and it’s Christmas

I’m not complaining. I really love the fog and our funky little micro-climates. But I do miss the more defined seasons in the east, where a lived for a bit.

Here are some recommendations from Fine Gardening on what we can be doing to prepare the garden going into fall and winter, from Fionuala Campion, the owner and manager of Cottage Gardens of Petaluma in Petaluma, California:

• Divide and transplant perennials. With milder temperatures minimizing transplant shock and ensuring a quicker recovery, it’s the ideal time to divide overgrown spring- and summer-blooming perennials. Prune back by half to reduce moisture loss through transpiration and carefully dig around the plant, leaving as large a root ball as possible. Gently lift the clump and check for obvious separation points, dividing it into several smaller ones. Discard older, weaker, or unhealthy parts of the plant, and replant the newly divided plants directly into the garden (or pots if you plan on sharing). Of course, you’ll have prepared the area beforehand by amending with organic compost and adding a handful of organic high-phosphorous fertilizer to help your new plants quickly become established. Water thoroughly and directly after planting.

• Add winter and spring interest now. Continue to source and plant spring-blooming bulbs and fall- and winter-blooming annuals to brighten up your borders and containers all winter long.

• Plant cool-season crops. Many vegetable crops thrive in cooler temperatures and some–like the brassicas–increase in sweetness when touched by frost. To get them off to an excellent start, plant transplants of your favorite broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, and kohlrabi varieties. They’ll be ready for the dinner plate by February. Transplants of leafy greens are even quicker to mature. You’ll start harvesting Swiss chard, spinach, mustards, and kales by December. Continue direct seeding peas, parsnips, turnips, carrots, radishes and beets. For more veggies to grow now and growing tips, read on here.

• Make sure to tidy up for winter. October means it’s time to reduce potential overwintering hiding places for slugs, snails, and insects by picking up overturned pots, dropped branches, and other garden debris in the ornamental and veggie garden. Continue to rake fallen leaves and pull weeds and spent annuals and vegetable plants. Add them all to the compost pile or your green waste bin if you suspect disease issues. Dig in rich, organic compost to any empty ornamental or edible garden beds.

Image Courtesy Fionuala Campion

by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

Image Credit: Jason Hickey

Spiritual Touchstone

As the drought in the west continues, it’s hard not to feel a lot like the land: dry, cracked, discouraged.  The wildfires make it all worse: less trees, less shade, less ground cover.  It’s all just feeling very parched out there, and internally too, as the pandemic goes on and on.

After the call went out to conserve water, I started researching dry farming as a way to understand how to keep my garden going and what I might need to do to strengthen it against more frequent droughts.

Dry farming is “a low-input, place-based approach to producing crops within the constraints of your climate. As we define it, a dry-farmed crop is irrigated once or not at all.”

Basically, you let the rain do the work, and don’t water through the rest of the season.  How do you do that?  “Dry farmers try to select a site with deep soil and good water-holding characteristics and then utilize a suite of practices to conserve soil moisture for crop growth. Some of the practices that support dry farming include: early soil prep and planting; selecting drought tolerant, resistant or early-maturing cultivars; lower planting density; cultivation or surface protection to prevent crusting and cracking of soil surface; diligent weed control; and improving soil health and water-holding capacity with practices such as cover cropping, rotation, and minimizing soil disturbance.”

This week, I yanked out the last of my tomato and cucumber plants that were pretty much done, and soon will be planting my cover crops for the vegetable beds.  As I wrestled with the overgrown tomato vines, I was thinking about how we can sow our own resilience to better make it through the lean times.

“Just like dry farmers put in a lot of work so their crops can survive the dry, hot season, we can prepare our minds, hearts, and souls to get through our difficult seasons as well. ”

We can yank out the weeds: the old stories, the not-great habits, and the old coping mechanisms that no longer serve us.  We can sow cover crops that help us retain moisture in the fertile soil of our hearts: creativity, meditation, friendships, community, and service to causes we care about.  We can cultivate the garden of ourselves to be tolerant, resilient, and able to not only survive, but thrive in this season of our lives.

And if we can’t do that, we can ask for help.  What needs pruning or weeding in your life?  Where do you need help cultivating?  What are you going to sow this week?

by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

Flowers I planted in my garden for the pollinators

From the Garden

Climate change is consistently on my mind, and often makes me feel a little powerless. We’re in a big drought and approaching a heat dome heatwave and it’s all just a lot right now.

Since I cannot control the weather or climate change, I’ve decided to focus my attention on things I can do right here and now. As I’ve touched on a couple times, my garden is a source of joy, spirituality, and peace for me. A garden can also be a force for good in local populations, specifically very small populations — pollinators.

Pollinators are animals who move pollen from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma of a flower. This allows the plant to reproduce, and creates, among other things, the edible fruits and vegetables we all enjoy. Nearly everyone knows about bees at this point, but pollinators can also be butterflies, hummingbirds, moths and bats.

Sunflowers, zinnias, and amaranth

Pollinators are also in trouble: insecticides; invasive species; parasites and diseases; and climate change all have put a dent in pollinator populations.

“A lot of these pollinators have evolved to emerge exactly when their plants are flowering,” says Deborah Landau, a conservation scientist for The Nature Conservancy in Maryland. But climate change messes up the timeline. “If a flower blooms too early or an insect hatches from its egg too early, they could completely miss each other.”

So what can we do to help pollinators? There are a couple things:
1. Plant native species in our gardens. When pollinators emerge, the plants that they rely on will be there, ready for them. Visit the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center at wildflower.org and choose the “Native Plants” tab to find flowers that will work for your area.

2. Support controlled burns on forestry land. Fire is a natural part of the ecosystem and when a landscape is burned, you often see a resurgence of native plants. This also helps with wildfire season, making sure the fires aren’t as devastating.

3. Plant a wide variety of flowering plants. Choose plants with various flowering seasons so that pollinators will have access to nectar and pollen the length of the flowering season.

4. Place flowering perennials and annual in drifts, groups of at least three plants, rather than dotting them individually around the garden. This makes it easier for pollinators to locate plants and they don’t have to work so hard to get what they need.

Drifts of pincushion flower, strawflower, daisies, and milkweed

5. Put a water source in your garden. Especially on hot days, having access to water will help sustain pollinators as they do their hard work. Put rocks in the bottom of a shallow fountain or water dish to allow insects to perch and drink without falling in.

6. Minimize your use of pesticides, even organic ones. These chemicals can hurt pollinators. Learn about different kinds of plants and companion planting to cut back on damage to your vegetables and showcase flowers.

Thank you for considering what to do to help our local pollinator populations. Our tiniest friends are grateful for your work.

Bee on a borage flower

by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

In the Garden

I’ve had a garden for many years, but this was the year I decided to get serious about it. It both was and wasn’t because of the pandemic — I’ll admit, it’s nice to have something pleasant to focus on when the world is falling apart; but also, I come from a long lineage of green thumbs, and maintaining a garden feels grounding for me in a way that little else does.

Amaranth, sunflower, cucumber, squash, and zinnia bed - The Good Table At Home

Something new I’m trying this year is Companion Planting. Simply put, Companion Planting is putting different types of plants together in a way that maximizes their harvest in yield, flavor, or pest reduction.

The most often stated example is the Three Sisters Trio: corn, beans, and squash. The corn provides a strong base for the beans to climb, the beans make nitrogen for the soil that helps all three plants to grow, and the squash shades the soil at the base, helping the plants retain moisture and reducing weeds. Squash is also prickly, which keeps away raccoons and other pests.

In the bed in the above picture, I’ve put the taller plants in the back row — amaranth (purple), sunflower (tall), and a crookneck squash in the back right corner. There are cucumbers in the first row, which the taller plants will shade. I’ve also planted zinnias in this bed to attract pollinators. There were nasturtiums in here too, which attract pests away from the vegetables, but they got sun-stressed and didn’t like the denser soil, so they’re in a pot off to the side in a succulent blend soil.

Little Gem Lettuce, Tomato, Parsley, Borage, and Cosmos

In this bed above, I’ve planted tomatoes next to borage, a flowering plant that attracts bees and tiny pest-eating wasps. Parsley also attracts insects away from tomatoes, so I’ve put these plants in between each tomato plant. I’m also going to transplant some dill in here in order to detract aphids and mites. The cosmos attract pollinators.

More parsley and tomatoes, onions, swiss chard, daisies

In the last bed, we planted onions by taking sprouting onions from the grocery store and plunking them in the soil. It’s an experiment. But onions “are thought to protect against borers, mites, slugs, and cutworms, as well as maggots of all types.” We’re planting them with Swiss Chard, which they like, and more parsley and tomatoes. There’s also a watermelon in there. It’s kind of a grab bag because I got a little overzealous with my seed starts this year.

If you’d like to learn more about Companion Planting, here are the two resources I used:
Companion Planting Guide by Farmer’s Almanac
Companion Planting Chart by Live Love Fruit - this one has a map of how you can lay out your beds as well!

Tender seedlings poking through the soil

From the Garden

Around this time, my thoughts invariably turn to my garden and the promise of spring. Thankfully, we’re getting some rainy weather as I write this, but all the more reason to start your seeds indoors and plant them outside later.

I was cowed by my lack of knowledge at first. Every time I’ve tried to start seeds, I’ve only gotten good results from the hardiest of plants. But as it turns out, it’s pretty straightforward.

You need:

• Seed starting trays of some kind (I’m using peat for now)

• Good soil, preferably a seed starting mix but generic potting soil will do

• Seeds

• A sunny, warm spot — I’m using my greenhouse window

First off, read the instructions on each packet of seeds. For most of them, you just make a small hole, gently cover them, and water. But some, like my Strawflower seeds, only germinate with light. It’s like reading the recipe all the way through before you start cooking; know what you’ll need before you start.

I filled up my trays most all the way with potting soil, made a hole with my finger, and put 3 seeds into each hole. It’s good practice to put multiple seeds in so that if one is a lemon, you still have the chance for the other two. Some seeds are super teeny and I got a bunch in there, but I did the best I could. Then I very gently covered them with soil, basically brushing the dirt gently back into place, and watered just a bit. You want the soil moist, not drowned.

For the Strawflower seeds, I sprinkled them on the top and then put their tray on a non-draining tray and bottom watered. Bottom watering is where you put water in the tray and let it soak into the soil up from the bottom. Watering from the top can displace the seeds when you’re trying to light germinate them.

Is there anything more hopeful than sprouts?

Oh, and don’t forget to label them! Very important — you don’t want to forget what each thing is, unless you like a mystery garden.

Keep your soil moist. Depending on your light and heat situation, that could mean watering gently every day or every couple days. I ended up getting trays for all and bottom watering mostly, because I found it pretty effective. I also used a spray bottle for misting for the more delicate seedlings.

I planted a mix of flowers and vegetables. I like to mix up my raised beds to attract good pollinators and keep pests away.

The seed packets should tell you how much time each seed takes to germinate. My flowers came up pretty quick. The vegetables are taking longer, but that’s totally okay. Because I’m in California, I can really start at any time and transplant when they get big enough because we rarely get a frost here. If you’re in a place where you get below freezing, the seed packets should tell you when to start and when to transplant.

Once you have several seedlings coming up in each section, it’s time for the sad part: trimming. In order to have the strongest plants possible for transplanting, you’ll need to find the strongest looking seedling in each pot, and then lop off the heads of the ones sharing its pot with sharp scissors. It’s very depressing, and I hate doing it, but if you don’t, the plants will crowd each other and become scraggly and weak. Trimming the tops off the others allows the strong seedling to grow without competing for resources with its pot-mates.

This is my basic set-up, complete with cat enjoying the sun. Once your seedlings are a couple inches tall and seem sturdy, it’s time to transplant them out into your garden. Rather than paying for starts, which are more expensive and limited in selection, you can grow nearly anything this way.

I have to admit, I’m a little addicted to seed starting and watching my plant babies grow. Is there anything more hopeful than a seed sprout?

I wish you success in anything hopeful you start this spring.

by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

Spiritual Touchstone

It’s winter, and while I’ve been appreciating the recent rain, I also can’t get fire season off my mind. This year’s fire season was the worst on record in many places, and caused trauma for a lot of us. The destruction and anxiety rests heavy for me, at a time when I should be looking forward to spring, growth, and new beginnings.

That being said, California’s ecosystem has a relationship with regular fire. Many of our trees have adapted to a consistent fire pattern, known as a “fire regime.” My college biology professor often spoke fondly of the Ponderosa Pine, a tree with a thick and latticed bark that easily withstands a low intensity fire.

This poster by Nina Montenegro has been on my mind a lot lately:

Image by Nina Montenegro, of The Far Woods

Some seeds only germinate when exposed to fire. That seems so crazy, but it’s true.

“...the actual seeds of many plants in fire-prone environments need fire, directly or indirectly, to germinate. These plants produce seeds with a tough coating that can lay dormant, awaiting a fire, for several years. Whether it is the intense heat of the fire, exposure to chemicals from smoke or exposure to nutrients in the ground after fire, these seeds depend on fire to break their dormancy. ”

— Your National Forests Magazine

It got me thinking about how fire in a spiritual context is often thought of as purification. When a fire sweeps through the land, it burns up all the dead undergrowth, purifying the landscape. In an environment that has adapted to fire, it can be a regular and natural cleansing process.

What seeds have germinated for us in the fire of 2020? In my life, I’ve definitely felt “fired up” to go deeper into activism, into my own commitment to social justice and compassion. I think some of us may have been dormant in different ways for a very long time, but the events of 2020 showed us that we can’t afford to be asleep to the realities of racism, the wealth gap, healthcare access, and lack of worker protections any longer.

Certainly, we all want the world to get better. It’s been a dismal time, there’s no doubt about that. Many of us are suffering in the wake of the pandemic, the wildfire season, the recession, while under the emotional and mental load of waiting for a vaccine.

But maybe, if we can find a little room, a little grace, the fire may have ignited that seed and something new and precious is coming. Maybe we’re kinder, more compassionate, more aware, more patient, more neighborly than we were before. Perhaps the fire burned up our pettiness, our cowardice, our willingness to look the other way when bad things happen to folks in our communities. It certainly seems evident that enough people were tired of the horrible mismanagement of the pandemic by former President Trump (as well as his corruption, greed, and narcissism) to vote him out, and for that, I am very grateful.

What other blessings have been germinating in your life? What other seeds will you plant?

I wish for you the seeds of peace, comfort, and compassion. May we all be healthy. May we all be safe. May we all be loved. And may we all find purpose as we work for a better society with equitable access to all of these things.

by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table

My garden sign by The Victory Garden of Tomorrow

Spiritual Touchstone

When it comes to religion, I am a mutt: a crossbreed of several different theologies and practices that resonate deeply with me.  One way I connect with my spirituality is through gardening — the cycles of birth, growth, and death in the garden are a lens through which I contemplate the seasons of my life.

As I prepared my garden for winter this year, I thought a lot about what a gigantic mess 2020 has been.  If it were a garden, it would be overrun with weeds, choking out the seedlings we planted with the best intentions.  For some of us, it would have been either too hot and dry, or too wet and cold.  Sometimes my worries about the pandemic, fire season, and our country’s contentious politics have felt like annoying garden pests: showing up when I least want them and refusing to go away until I apply heavy evasive maneuvers.  

That said, the garden has given me so much joy this year.  In a time when everything stays the same day after day, it is a dance of endless change.  In order to observe it, we have to slow down and really look, really experience our plants growing, worms tilling the rich soil, bees tending to each flower.  

Garden, ready for the winter

Our lives benefit from this moment-to-moment mindfulness as well.  When we are really present for what is happening, we are more aware of the moments of grace we may miss if we are not tuned in.  Yes, the pandemic has made showing up for life a lot harder — there is, inarguably, more anxiety, more sadness, more pain, more loss this year.  But given the human propensity to remember negative experiences more than positive ones, this tuning in can give us back the good parts of our lives by bringing our attention to them, no matter how small they are.

As I was pulling out the weeds and spent plants, I felt grateful for the air in my lungs and my body’s ability to tend to my garden.  After a long, hard pregnancy, a difficult birth, and a complex recovery, any movement feels like a miracle.  I put what I’d pulled out into the compost bin, and as I did, it occurred to me that winter is a great time for some spiritual composting.  

I think it’s healthy and maybe even necessary to compost what we no longer need, both physically and spiritually.  When we return what we’ve used but need to let go of to the compost pile, it can rest, and then as it is turned over and over, become something rich and fruitful that nourishes new growth.

What might go into our spiritual compost bin?  Things like long-held but no longer useful beliefs, lingering resentments, relationships that have become toxic, and anything else that weighs our soul down.  A lot of the time, when we let these things go, we find ourselves a lot lighter.  I often visualize a real compost bin and putting my worries and old ways of thinking deep inside.  When intrusive thoughts emerge, or I want to ruminate on an old memory I’m still hanging on to, I think about turning it over and over in my compost bin, and then imagine walking away.  It’s a conscious effort to not get sucked in to anxiety and rumination, but when I can let things sit on their own, I feel much better.

One of my many composting systems

This practice of letting go, of spiritually composting, has also meant that what comes out is much richer.  Processing trauma and examining what is and isn’t useful to us anymore can often provide a fertile ground for self-growth and reflection.  When I look at why I was holding on to something, I often find some small revelation about what I need in this current moment, and then I can tend to myself with care.

The next time you feel like 2020 is unsalvageable, give spiritual composting a try.  Make a list of the things you’d like to let go of, and then imagine burying them in deep soil to decompose and become the next stage of growth for you.  

What seeds will you plant in this fertile ground?