Determinants of Health

Yesterday I saw a film about social inequality and health. The gist was basically that poorer people live shorter lives than wealthier people, blacks live shorter lives than whites, people in positions of subservience live shorter lives than people at the top, etc. The figures given were stark.

Most relevant to this blog, however, was a thought I had about plants and people. Bare with me, this is kind of obvious, but it's just SO obvious that I need to say it. The reason poorer, black, and disenfranchised folks live shorter lives is that they have poorer access to resources and opportunities. Blaming folks for this is like blaming a rose bush for looking bad when it is being grown in the shade, in poor soil, with sporadic watering. You can pour all the fertilizer on it you want, but it won't thrive unless you move it or do something to improve its conditions.

Of course, if it's already spent most of its life in the shade with its roots scrabbling for nutrients or going leggy in search of light, it may not transplant well. To some extent, the damage may be done. But it would do better. And if it self-seeded in its new location, the little roses would do as well as any rose grown in optimal conditions, or at least have the opportunity to do as well.

What startles me is how obvious this all is and yet we're not taking responsibility for it. Not really. People tend to accept that this is the way it is. We walk past that sorry rose every morning and say, "Ugh, what an eyesore," or, "Someone really needs to water that poor thing." We throw some fertilizer at it and hope for the best.

Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describes an invisibility device used by aliens when they visit earth. It's called an SEP field, and it cloaks their ship. When people look in the direction of the ship, the field makes them atuomatically dismiss it as Somebody Else's Problem.

Building a Raised Bed

[Note: All the highlighted links in this article provide additional information or helpful resources and I recommend exploring them.]

There are a number of reasons to grow vegetables in a raised bed:

1. In the Northwest, veggies like the drainage.
2. In the Northwest, veggies like the warmth (sun beating on the side of the bed)
3. It is easy to build custom cloches that fit the bed perfectly, thereby extending your growing season.
4. In urban yards, a raised bed is tidy and attractive, and may fit in better with ornamental plantings.
5. In urban areas, our soils are often contaminated with arsenic and lead. A raised bed that is high enough will keep your plants' roots out of the contaminated ground soil.
6. If you don't enjoy stooping, you will find that a high raised bed is easier to work.

There are a few drawbacks to raised beds as well. A permanent bed of any sort means your veggie garden will be in the same place every year, and many experienced Northwest gardeners say this can result in a nasty build-up of soil-borne plant disease. A raised bed also involves a greater amount of initial work, and raised beds made of wood won't last all that long in this climate.

That said, for the urban gardener, there are probably more ups than downs to using a raised bed. If you want to play it safe in regards to soil-borne plant disease, consider using one (or a couple) of your beds for several years, and keeping an equal number of beds planted with grasses. In a farm setting, these would be grazing grasses, but I imagine you could find some ornamental grasses to do the job in the city. After a few years, switch the beds.

Building a raised bed is a perfect do-it-yourself project (though if you want a particularly attractive bed, are short on time, or just want to support your local craftspeople, you could hire a professional). Assuming you are going to be involved at least in the planning process, there are some considerations:

First of all, you want to consider placement. A raised bed should go in the sunniest part of your yard. If this means digging a rectangular patch in the middle of your lawn, I recommend doing so.

Secondly, you want to consider materials. How much money do you have to spend on materials? The simplest raised beds don't involve any materials at all; the bed is "raised" simply by mounding the soil up a few inches above the general soil level. I waxed romantically about a mounded bed in a prior blog post. These are the easiest, the oldest, and in many respects the best kinds of raised beds. However, they are very farm-like (not what many people would consider pretty, though I love it), and they don't address the issue of contaminated soil.

To find out for certain if your soil is contaminated, you can test the soil and send it to a lab.

If you are going to build a higher raised bed, you might use cedar boards, brick, stone, cinder block, or other materials you find lying around. My housemate recently made a 7" high bed with our old cedar decking boards, which isn't going to last long but was free.

Bricks are long-lasting and often found lying around. However, it takes a lot of bricks to build a bed, and you'd want to use mortar if you were building it high. Moreover, if you don't find used ones for free, they can be a bit expensive.

Be careful about using certain materials as not all materials are safe. For information on this--and for the closest thing to the definitive word on whether or not it's safe to use pressure-treated lumber for building raised veggie beds--refer to this King County report. Interestingly, the report debunks the idea that store-bought pressure-treated lumber is unsafe.

I've seen very nice beds built out of large cedar planks. My guess is that they last anywhere from 4 -7 years in the Northwest before they completely fall apart (anybody have any data on this?), though if you treat them with a natural product like boiled linseed oil you may get an extra year or two out of them.

I've seen many wooden beds built by screwing or nailing the planks into 4"x4" corner posts. I don't recommend this. I would recommend what my brother did: using metal "L" brackets inside the corners, with holes for bolts that run all the way through the planks.


I recommend this because my understanding of rot is that it generally begins at the ends of boards and around screws or nails. Moisture condenses on metal quicker than on most materials, and will rot the wood out around the hardware. The only question is whether the wood will rot quicker than the screw will rust. A bolt, on the other hand, will provide a secure connection until the plank rots out completely.

Another thing to consider with wooden beds is that a bed of any length, especially the standard 8 feet, will tend to sag out in the middle as the soil settles over time. You can address this by pounding a post (or rebar) into the ground outside the boards at the midpoint of their length, but this will not necessarily be pretty.

You might, instead, pound a nail stake into the ground on the inside of the boards at the midpoint of their length, and attach them to the stake with skinny bolts.


I built a raised bed out of cinder blocks last year, and am mostly happy with it. Stacked three blocks high, it is two feet off the ground, which keeps the plant roots completely out of any contaminated ground soil.

The process is pretty simple: lay the first run of blocks out in a perimeter, lift them up, dig a shallow trench (only an inch or two deep, and barely wider than the blocks), pour in some sand, level the sand, and lay down the first run of blocks. Use a level to level them from one to next and build up the wall. Cinder blocks are heavy enough that you can just stack them dry, without mortar. Unless you back into them with a car or kick them ferociously, they will hold their shape.

One thing to be wary of is keeping the bed square, as an un-squared bed will come together poorly, resulting in a corner that is not flush. Though not the end of the world, it's unnecessary and annoying. Square the bed ahead of time by running string between posts to mark the perimeter. Measure the length of the diagonals between opposite corners ("kitty corner"). If the measurements of both diagonals are the same, you're good to go.


Finally, if you've made a high raised bed, you will need to import a lot of soil. For my 4'x9' cinder block bed that is 2' high, I imported a yard and a half of topsoil from Pacific Topsoils, and brought in nearly a full yard of compost. The veggies performed swimmingly.

If you're the solo weekend-warrior project type, making a raised bed can be a great way to spend time outside and play with practical and aesthetic design considerations. If you're more of the group-project type, or want something the whole family can be involved in, a raised bed is of sufficient scale to occupy a handful of people for half a day or more. Remember: it doesn't have to be perfect and it's not rocket-science.

It's spring! Get out there and get dirty!

Ready, Set, GROW!

The vegetable gardening season is heaped upon us and nary a word from this blogger! Lo siento, my apologies, my computer was stolen and it threw me for a loop.

But I'm back, and full of scheming.

Right now, you could be planting peas, lettuce, spinach, Asian greens and mustard, if you haven't already. My housemate got some peas, lettuce and spinach in the ground a couple weeks ago, and though the peas were dug up by something, the lettuce and spinach--despite the brief snows and cold spells we've had in the last couple weeks--are sprouting. It is not too late to get these crops in the ground.

Other things you can do right now: Weed (as mentioned in the last post) before your weeds get big and/or go to seed.

If you've had Kale over-wintering, eat it right after a frost and it will be sweeet. This is, I found out, because the plant creates sugars in its cells to keep its leaves from freezing when the temperature drops.

If you've been growing a cover crop over the winter, you will want to chop some of it up with a hoe (or you can use snips for a real thorough job) and till it under so that it a portion of your bed will be ready to plant in a couple weeks. You want the "green manure" to have already begun to decompose by the time you plant. In a couple weeks, turn it again, rake it level, fertilize lightly, and plant!

Don't chop up ALL the cover crop unless you plan on planting the whole bed at once (which is a bad idea--you want to stagger your plantings to get an ongoing yield). Prepare the bed bit by bit a couple weeks ahead of your planting schedule.

Remember: I am no expert. Mostly, I am re-hashing information from reading and talking to "experts", and interpreting it all with a dash of common sense. I have grown vegetables for two years in this climate, which means I have a bit of experience, that's all.

Helpful regional books include Steve Solomon's "Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades" and Seattle Tilth's "The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide". Other good general gardening resources that I've been using are the friendly folks at City People's, my dad and brother, my peers, the regular columnists for the Seattle P.I., and random web sites found when googling specific topics.

Get out there and good luck! If you have any questions, feel free to email me and I will do my best to concoct an answer. If you post a comment, you may even get a more experienced gardener to weigh in on the subject.

p.s. I am preparing an article on building your own raised bed. Coming Soon!

A Timely Tip

I was out at our P-Patch today and realized that among all our fava beans, which we planted as a cover crop last fall, are a rabble of weeds, and they are flowering. This is not to be taken lightly. I recommend getting out there now and weeding them out before they go to seed. Do this consistently enough, year after year, and it's possible the weeds in your garden may even begin to diminish. Or at least get demoralized.

Onward from the 2009 Northwest Flower and Garden Show

Well, more than a week has passed since I visited the show, and I'm still trying to process the experience. It was so big, and so much. Plus, I got in on a media pass (my first time, courtesy of this blog!) and thus I feel responsible to deliver a masterwork of reporting. But in the end, I think I have this to say: It was inspiring and it was overwhelming. I would like to go again. It was not terribly relevant to my gardening, as I lack the resources to implement any of the ambitious ideas put forward in the display designs, but it was a lot of fun. It was like the Sundance film festival must be to a kid who's shooting movies in his backyard with an old digital camera. Nice to see what others are doing; a little daunting.

So I am turning my attention back to my own, current reality. Spring is fast approaching in Seattle, the winter-bloomers have been active for some time (Hellebores, Witch Hazels, etc.), and swarms of Crocus are erupting out of the ground.


The Forsythia in my front yard is on the verge of bursting with a thousand suns and the daffodils are standing at the ready.


At my house, we have planted several bare-root fruit trees, including a plum, a persimmon, and a peach (courtesy of City People's). We have built a fence to keep the chickens out of one half of the backyard, as they were turning the whole yard into a chicken-scratched wasteland. We now let them out regularly and have found that they put themselves back in their coop at dusk, so we need only close it up nightly before the raccoons come prowling.

At our P-Patch, my housemate planted peas, mesclun, and spinach, then it snowed. Hopefully the seeds hadn't sprouted yet. I dragged home a discarded window from a nearby curb and have put together an impromptu cloche for starting lettuce and peas at work. That, hopefully, is today's project.

The sun has arrived. Oddly, that is not unusual these days. They don't make winters like they used to.

Thought #3 on the 2009 Northwest Flower and Garden Show

Something that was definitely missing among the display gardens was a backyard urban farm garden. Turns out Seattle Urban Farm Co. built one for the show in 2008, complete with chickens and a chicken coop with a green roof. The photos look beautiful (scroll to the bottom of the linked page to watch the slideshow).

Thought #2 on the 2009 Northwest Flower and Garden Show

There were several vendors offering extraterrestrial life forms for sale. I don't know if these were legitimately acquired or poached illegally, but surely the Flower and Garden Show Space Alien Regulatory Committee looks after the interests of vulnerable backwater planets, at least when sustainability is the theme.

This strange creature, which its vendor called a "Wind Chime," was a little spiky, I thought, to be a good indoor pet. Its vendor suggested that it be kept outdoors and hung by a string, which struck me as a little cruel.


Another species for sale--a round, wooly little creature called a "Snooter-doot"--seemed much better suited to indoor pethood. Yet looks can be deceiving! Many of them were cunning enough to have escaped, and had gone native among the display gardens.