In January 2009, following 8 years in a house on NE 7th Avenue, a.k.a. The Purple Garden, TJ and I decided to purchased a new house. The house we bought was built in 1916 and is old, beautiful, and a major fixer-upper. It has lots of charm and character, but most importantly, it sits on a double lot in the city. Before we closed on the house, I started planning what I would do with the new garden space.  This was my dream come true to buy a house on a double lot in the city and create a new space.

The house is located in an area known as "The Dekum Triangle" because there are three streets that form the shape of a triangle. The beautifully renovated Dekum Firehouse sits right in the middle and we are located on the south side of the triangle.

My office in the new house is on the second floor and has a birds eye view of Dekum Street, the firehouse and their beautiful garden, and Mt. Saint Helen's in the background. Everytime I look out the window, I see the triangular shaped of the firehouse property and loved the rounded curves of how the streets, sidewalks, and landscape meet. This shape became the inspiration for the design of the edible garden at the new house, a.k.a. the Dekum Garden.

We think of leaves changing colors and the garden going dormant when Fall comes. I think of the toad lily, one of my favorite fall blooming plants.

This past winter, I started thinking more about bulbs and how magical it is when they suddenly pop out of the ground in winter. Like a beacon of hope, my Princes Irene tulips came up in all the cold rain and cloud cover and gave us something beautiful to look at in the garden when we were losing our will to live in February.

Last Fall, I pronounced my old, dry-rotted, corregated plastic, hand-me-down greenhouse dead. In addition to being too small, it was completely falling apart and not really an eye pleasing amenity to the garden. So, that all changed when I handed TJ a photo of my dream greenhouse.

Photo by Brian Libby

I walked outside this morning and not only did it feel like spring with bulbs busting out of the ground and leaves unfolding on the shrubs, but it smelled like spring. Thankfully, we’ve made it through another rainy Portland winter. Now that spring is here, it is time to start thinking about your garden.

Portland’s movement to grow more food than lawn is right on, and no one loves having a kitchen garden more than myself, but, this year, I am also promoting “grow more flowers for yourself and our pollinators.”

People always ask me which gardening and herb books are my favorites so I have started to compile the list below. It will be updated frequently as my obsession with books and helpless addiction to Amazon.com continues.

Today was my annual stinging nettle harvest day. Every spring, I wild craft nettles to make teas and food. Nettles are rich with vitamins and minerals such as iron, calcium, potassium, silicon, magnesium, manganese, zinc and chromium, just to name a few. These plants help to alleviate the symptoms of seasonal allergies. Since I have been drinking nettle tea for the past 5 years, I have not had to take any allergy medication. The only side effect are nettles mild diuretic effect.

Do you find yourself complaining that the mint in your garden is taking over? Are you wondering why you did not plant this invasive friend in a pot to better control it? My solution, use it more often. There is a long list of things you can do with mint but this summer, when you are searching for the perfect, cooling, non-alcoholic beverage, try something new like herbal mint tea!

The smell of earth and flowers is the first thing I notice as I walk into my backyard on this cloudy Sunday morning. I am quite pleased with myself because one of my goals for this year's garden was to have more color and fragrance. This of course meant planting less vegetables (leaving that up to the local, organic farmers in town) and planting more flowers.

Thankfully, the sun is out today. When the sun finally comes out, it feels like a layer of slim has been lifted from our cloudy, Northwestern lives giving us a glimpse into what it will be like when Spring and Summer are finally here. Speaking of Spring, I hope that you are all carefully planning your gardens, picking out what you are going to grow this year, and ordering seeds. Do you want to grow more flowers this year? Do you want more vines wrapping around your trellises? Do you want to try some new varieties of tomatoes? Are you planning a huge kitchen garden for the backyard? Whatever the case may be, plant sales are a great way to identify which plants you would like to grow in your gardens as well as purchase herb and veggie starts.

Happy New Year. New years resolution for Michele, WRITE MORE BLOGS! I know, it has been quite a while since the last entry, but, now that it has been way too cold to even consider doing anything outside, I am staying in more and have no excuses.

As we slowly start to get used to the sun setting earlier, the lack of sunshine, shriveled up vegetables in the garden and welcome our misty Northwest rain, we come to terms that Fall is here. Each Fall, I convince myself I was tired of weeding and watering anyway and wonder what I am going to do with all this free time during the dark, cold winter months.

Today, in the Purple Garden, was bath salt herb harvest day. I gathered lemon verbena, rose geraniums and lavender to dry and use in making bath salts. Lemon verbena is an amazingly fragrant herb. The herb grows in full to partial sun to a height of between 3-5 feet and produces tiny white flowers. When the leaves are crushed in your hands, the smell is divine. Rose geraniums, one of the many flavors of scented geraniums, are also very fragrant and have beautiful leaves. Other flavors of scented geraniums include lemon, lime, chocolate, apricot, peppermint and many more. I prefer the rose scented ones for bath salts.

This morning when I was watering my vegetables, I grew impatient looking at all the beautiful green tomatoes on the vine that have not ripened. They are starting to get their first hints of red, but, it will still be several days until they are ripe enough to harvest. So, I remembered the old, ancient recipe for fried green tomatoes and suddenly, I was thankful that those tomatoes had not turned red. I picked a few, brought them in the house and sliced them up to throw in the frying pan. With a generous amount of olive oil, either using flour or fine cornmeal to dip them in (experiment with both), and a sprinkle of salt and pepper (and of course, some cayenne pepper for spice), my summertime lunch was divine.

Just because it is dark outside does not mean that you cannot enjoy your garden. The garden is a beautiful place to sit under the stars. I have a beautiful, wooden bench in the furthest corner of my garden so that I can see the garden from a different viewpoint than my usual sitting area on the deck. I sit outside and get to observe the garden in the moonlight. I highly recommend placing a bench in your garden to give yourself a different angle of the plants. It is also nice to have a place to sit down in your garden.

This morning, I woke up and walked outside only to see that it had rained sometime during the night. It is rare that Oregon gets rain during the summer months as we usually get a much needed break from July through September. During the remaining nine months, the western portion of Oregon is buried under a thick cover of clouds and rains that are both misty and sometimes terential.

The summer in the northwest would not be complete without plants covering every inch of my yard, drinking herbal sun tea, lazy cats sprawled out on the deck, and tending to the garden and harvesting its bounty. I was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland and my earliest childhood memories were of growing plants in my summer garden. I remember every May, my father took me to the local garden center where we would pick out the healthiest tomato and pepper starts.