how to grow kale, with sarah kleeger of adaptive seeds

Living and working in northwestern Oregon, garden designer Wesley Younie is no stranger to dealing with challenging environments. When presented with this garden’s elevation changes, drainage management, and extreme climate conditions, he devised a plan that addresses it all—along with a specific functional wish list from the homeowners. Want to know which plants he used? Here are the plant IDs for this beautiful, sustainable landscape.

1. Don’t skip the part about digging the trench, which one Cornell University bulletin describes as a W-furrow (illustrated below). Some people simply dig an 18-inch-wide by 12-inch-deep trench and spread the roots out flat in the bottom. In a W-furrow, a ridge of soil hoed into place down the middle (in this case of a shallower trench, just 6-8 inches deep) supports the spider-like roots.2. Don’t bury the crowns all at once, but rather fill the trench in gradually as the topgrowth develops through the first season.3. Don’t forget to water as the crowns make their way to establishing a deep root system. Details on planting and careare here.Picking4. Don’t pick too soon from a new planting. Some sources say you can pick a little starting one

The pre-Columbian Indians of the Andes domesticated more starchy root crops than any other culture, but only the potato caught on as a staple worldwide.“The others have seldom been tried outside South America, yet they are still found in the Andes and represent some of the most interesting of all root crops.…” said a 1989 report called “Lost Crops of the Incas: Little-Known Plants of the Andes with Promise for Worldwide Cultivation” from the National Research Council.“They come in myriad colors, shapes, and sizes,” the report added. “T

IN SOME THINGS lonerism backfires, like when the ladder needs steadying to get at the top of an errantly sprouting espalier, or a truckload of eight cubic yards of mulch is dumped by the far gate. Though ordering seeds is not heavy work, it is best not done alone, either; I have always had a companion for the task. My latest one, of considerable years’ duration, got it in his head to move to Oregon recently, for greener garden pastures, taking with him not just the in-person dimension of our friendship, but also access to the nearby greenhouse that was, of course, a perfect complement to the shopping we did together all that time.“I’ll buy the tomato seeds if you’ll grow them,” the conversation with Andrew would always begin, as if he needed my ten- or fifteen-dollar annual enticement, when of course we never really paid careful mind to who bought what or really kept a running tab of our years-long botanical barter. It hardly mattered; what counted was the chance to look together, to compare notes, to react collaboratively to the possibilities—ooh! aah! ugh!—and eventually to relish the harvest (or to commiserate when something was a flop and there was no harvest, or

She is someone I have often heard called a mentor and inspiration by some of my most respected garden friends, especially in the Pacific Northwest. No wonder, because Corvallis, Oregon-based Carol Deppe–also the author of the popular book “The Resilient Gardener”–is pragmatic, but also scientific in her approach, armed not only with precisely the right hoe for the job but also with a PhD in biology from Harvard and a long background in plant breeding.Read along as you listen to the March 30, 2015 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here). We talked about choosing vegetables to grow in combination (and when some crops are most productive and easiest grown alone); about strategic steps to avoid late blight

The evolving rainbow of peas at Peace Seedlings—with more colors to come—got its start with decades of breeding by Alan Kapuler, Dylana’s father, a longtime public-domain plant breeder and the founder of Peace Seeds.(More on him, and on some of the other combined Kapuler treasures, from marigolds and zinnias to edible Andean tubers like oca and yacon, to a rainbow of beautiful beets, is at the end of this story.)“We’re doing a lot of crosses and selecting ourselves now, too,” says Dylana of the work she and partner Mario DiBenedetto continue in collaboration with Alan and his wife, Linda, in Corvallis, Orego

While browsing the seed catalogs, I fell into a motherlode at Adaptive Seeds out in Sweet Home, Oregon, plus a comprehensive how-to article on the topic, by Adaptive’s co-founder Sarah Kleeger, all the way down to an analysis on a farm scale of how much it cost in manpower hours and supplies to grow them.Last year I intentionally grew dry beans for the first time in any semi-serious way, and it was so rewarding that this year the garden plan calls for more, more, more. Maybe you’ve been an accidental dry-bean grower like I had till then, leaving a tower of ‘Scarlet Runner’ standing until the big fat seeds spill

He also publishes what is “famously the world’s latest seed catalog” to drop each year, but he’s making no excuses. While other companies are sending out theirs, the Mortons are harvesting the seed those companies ordered from Wild Garden. I’ve gleaned a few of Morton’s plant lessons: about calendula, beneficial insects, and how home gardeners wanting to know just which lettuce to grow can set up their very own seed trial.FRANK MORTON, whose certified-organic Wild Garden Seed farmland is in Philomath, Oregon, grew salad for 18 years for restaurants, “and that’s when I did my breeding,” he recalls. “I had thousands of seeds and plants going and suddenly there was a red one—an accidental cross between a red Romaine and a green oakleaf. But when I saved its seed, I didn’t get red ones, but traits from both parents.”A lettuce breeder was born.“Basically I learned from the lettuce where new varieties come from.”

Bob was VP of Horticulture at Brooklyn Botanic Garden before opening Loomis Creek Nursery a few minutes’ drive from me about 10 years ago.  He has since relocated to Portland, Oregon, and debuted a new container-garden business in 2013 in South Portland. It’s a 4,500-square-foot indoor-outdoor pop-up shop specializing in great containers, ready-to-go pot designs, and plants for containers, too, in collaboration with the until-now-wholesale-only growers at Xera Plants. (Bob still designs gardens, too–in a pot or not!)‘keep it simple’ doesn’t mean boringLET GO OF THE “IDEAL” that is so often seen in books, magazines, catalogs—the notion that you can have 7 or 9 or 10 kinds of plants in one container “all perfectly blooming in unison and perfectly coiffed,” as Bob describes this semi-fantasy.Let go of the notion, too, that annuals are exclusively what belong in pots.

Now Joseph Tychonievich, the sought-after Michigan-based garden writer and author, has confidence-building advice for me in his just-out book, “Rock Gardening: Reimagining a Classic Style.” Joseph is also author of “Plant Breeding for the Home Gardener.”Read along as you listen to the Oct. 24, 2016 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).my rock-garden q&a with joseph tychonievichQ. How did you get the rock-garden bug? Did you catch it in your time working at Arrowhead Alpi

Carol, who was a longtime educator at the New York Botanical Garden and also worked for the Nature Conservancy, has looked beyond the obvious beauty of native plants and studied their life histories, lore, and even cultural uses. I knew she’d be able to answer my questions:our spring-wildflower q&aQ. I have easily and fairly quickly propagated a good number of wakerobin or Trillium erectum asexually (by division, as in the photo above) from three lonely refugees I found under my front porch 25-plus years ago. Some of the plants self-sowing, too now, Carol. How does the reproductive life cycle of a Trillium work?A. Trilliums are a favorite of many wildflower fanciers, so much so that in Europe, where there are no native trilliums, they are sometimes stolen from botanical-garden dis

And that’s where the seed for ‘Liebesapfel’—the pepper that began Sarah Kleeger and Andrew Still’s fast-growing Capsicum annuum collection—arrived from, or more specifically, Germany via Denmark.On their first Seed Ambassadors trip to search out potentially Northern-adapted seed from Europe in 2006, Sarah and Andrew carried ‘Liebesapfel’ (left) back to the New World themselves—tho