Vashon's Home & Garden Section 2013

plants • building supplies • garden art • home loans • water features • furniture • flooring • garden tools • landscaping • rock walls • horticulture• Vashon’s 2013 Home & Garden

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Beth de Groen

The sun has almost hit the beach!The days got longer last weekend, a harbinger of spring lifting the

shade on the darkness of winter! New growth bursting from the ground, the branches on every bush and tree proving how many

shades of green exist, bulbs pushing their colorful topknots out of the earth, forget-me-nots and flowers, frogs, ferns, and figs---the time of a

new beginning is upon us!

In three weeks the world will be a warmer, brighter place (unless it rains until June!) and taking the dog for a walk will be even more pleasant

than it has been. Gardeners, walkers, bikers, parents everywhere, are you ready for the sun to shine?

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Greg Rabourn lives and breathes native plants. He works for King County as Vashon’s basin steward. He also is on KUOW’s gardening show once a week, pushing his passion. And recently, he gave a talk at the Vashon-Maury Heritage Museum called “Why aren’t you planting these plants?”

His message? Sure, there’s salal and Oregon grape, solid natives for the Northwest gardener. But there are also many others, some of which look good in a carefully cultivated garden, including sev-eral graceful perennials, lovely sedums and gorgeous vines.

All of them, of course, are perfect for the islander who wants to support birds,

bees and butterflies with his or her garden. Most of them are easy to grow. He also says it’s important to realize that plants support birds, bees and butterflies not just by providing nectar and seeds but also by providing habitat. Butterflies, for instance, need certain plants to lay their eggs, and their larva need fresh new leaves to munch on.

“When we see the butterfly larva eating something, you think, ‘Oh my God, my plant’s being eaten.’ But without the larva, you don’t have the butterflies,” Rabourn notes.

Here’s a list of his “Top 10 Native Plants.” Note, however, that Rabourn isn’t exactly the best counter.

1. Shinyleaf spirea (Spirea lucida)2. Vanilla-leaf (Achlys triphylla)3. Maidenhair fern (Adiantum aleuticum)4. Tapertip onion (Allium acuminatum) 5. Goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus) 6. Common camas (Camas quamash) 7. Oak fern (Gymnocarpium dryopteris)8. Yellow monkeyflower (Erythranthe guttatus)

8. Penstemon sp. and Lewisia8. Spreading stonecrop (Sedum divergens) 9. Henderson’s checker-mallow (Sidalcea hender-sonii) 9.25 Yellow-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium californicum) 9.25 (part B) Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium ida-hoense) 9.5 Pioneer violet (Viola glabella) 9.75 Orange honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa)

10. Devil’s Club (Oplopanax horridus)

Plants you might love How to help bees

Camas

Steve Rubicz has been raising honey bees for a few decades, a challenging prospect in this chilly maritime climate. So it matters a lot to him that when those bees emerge each spring and summer, they find wonderful flowers to feed on.

Over the years, he’s found a flower they particularly love — anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), a prairie flower that thrives in sun and well-drained soil. The perennial herb (shown above), which

covers a slope at his sunny, west-side home, has all kinds of medicinal uses. The Cheyenne drank a tea made from it to cure a “dispirited heart,” according to one website, and the Cree included its flowers in medicine bundles.

For Rubicz, the herb is a delight. Bees cover it during the summer — so many, he says, that “they’re mesmerizing to watch.” And the honey those bees produce is the best — with just a hint of anise.

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plants • building supplies • garden art • home loans • water features • furniture • flooring • garden tools • landscaping • rock walls • horticulture • Vashon’s 2013 Home & Garden

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By SALLY FOXFor The Beachcomber

Someone puts gardening dust into the Vashon water. I’m sure of it. How else could a self-proclaimed

non-gardener move to Vashon and be transformed into a digging maniac within three months?

Breaking ground was my way of gaining a sense of place. But gardening also intro-duced me to a community of similarly obsessed souls.

My new friends warned me: Start small and have a plan. Alas, with five garden-able acres and the promise of lots of fun, the temptation proved too great. I’d pull out invasive weeds and then, voila! — I had a new bed to plant.

My first beds measured 50 square feet. Soon they measured 500. Within a year we reached 5,000. With the addition of an orchard and vegetable garden, we topped 10,000 square feet. After that, I stopped counting.

If I could have afforded a therapist after buying so many plants, she’d have coun-seled: Don’t try to outrun mortality. But I ran faster. I planted 20 trees the first year, hoping to someday see them grown. Time was not on my side.

I created ornamental beds, a shade gar-den, native areas, ornamental grass beds and a farm area. My husband and I put in a small pond. Low on budget, I adopted plants. I should have wondered why friends were so happy to give me plants like purple toad flax, until their seeds exploded on our property. A friend gave me her mother’s hybrid tea roses in order

to lower her garden’s maintenance. Not me. “Bring it on!” I cried.

The pinnacle of excess was Vashon Allied Arts’ Garden Tour. My husband and I were honored to have our garden selected for the tour. We were assured that we didn’t need to do “anything special” to get ready, which, roughly translated, meant — on your mark, get set, go! We were given nine months to prepare. I could have had a baby. Instead we launched five years’ worth of projects.

The first morning of the garden tour, we were fussing with details at 5 a.m. But the moment people flooded the garden, some-thing unusual happened. We sat down.

Smiled at the people from our lounge chairs. Listened to music and didn’t lift a finger to weed. It was a blast!

After everyone left, we collapsed. In my post-tour stupor, I heard one word ringing in my head: maintenance. I had created a monster: 24 beds, each one requiring at least a day of my life or more — every year. For me, putting in beds is fun, but endless weeding is not. I had a backlog of projects, from my beloved horse to my writing, waiting for me. That summer, I let the weeds grow and enjoyed the garden. The following year shot weed declared victory.

And then the truth descended: I had to scale back. My garden is not fussy, and I use many natives and drought-tolerant plants, but it is far too big to be sustain-able by one over-enthusiastic soul and her tolerant husband. So this year, I’m scaling back and developing, at last, some new rules for lowering maintenance.

Here’s my list:1) Let nature select: Plants that can’t

survive a February freeze or August drought aren’t coming back. I am tired of hose-therapy.

2) No prima donnas. Hybrid tea roses smell yummy, but are they self-sufficient? And what about the gorgeous dutch irises that can’t be mulched? Each year they are invaded by weeds. Do the math: Three min-utes to weed each iris times 100 irises. Gone.

3) Give each plant an allowance. Calculate the weeding, pruning, dead-heading and care it requires each year. Put big spenders on notice.

4) Trust myself. The Seattle garden columnists suggest taking out lawn. Have

they ever tried to weed an acre? Yes, straw-berries are easy to grow — and equally easy for voles and raccoons to eat. Let the great Bob Norton grow strawberries on Maury. This year, I’m buying!

5) Befriend evergreens. They look good year round, don’t need to be pruned, come in small sizes and don’t bellow for help at the height of the spring.

6) Buy art. Garden art is beautiful, drought resistant and never needs weed-ing. The cost, if pricey, can be amortized against years of avoided labor.

7) Rethink vegetables. I usually plant too much. It’s no more work to sprinkle in extra seeds once the hard work of preparing a bed is done. But who wants to eat 20 heads of broccoli in June, 30 squash the week of Aug. 7 or wash 100 soggy green tomatoes in November? And this year I’m letting a neighbor share the work and harvest!

8) Take out beds. Ouch. They’re like my kids — I love them all. I just reduced seven beds of ornamental grasses to six — a small start. My consolation: The plants have a good new home.

9) Keep the favorites. The peonies stay.10) Do not wear bifocal sunglasses.

When I walk through a friend’s garden, weeds do not bother me. I see the big picture. When I sit in mine, I have to be chained to my chair. Sometimes it’s better to be farsighted.

11) Embrace imperfection. I have too much else to do to fuss. This year, I’m taking a laughter class. It’ll be good for my garden.

— Sally Fox, a speaker and leadership development consultant, is past president of

the Vashon-Maury Island Garden Club.Steve Brown and Sally Fox, in their beautiful but sometimes overwhelming garden.

When a passion for gardening takes over your life, it’s time to scale back


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Vashon’s 2013 Home & Garden • plants • building supplies • garden art • home loans • water features • furniture • flooring • garden tools • landscaping • rock walls • horticulture

By JANICE RANDALLFor The Beachcomber

Follow a long and winding drive bor-dered by Northwest native salal, towering alders and lush mounds of sword ferns. Scattered metal spheres add artistic inter-est, and soon the entrance opens to an expansive meadow on the left below the Maury Island home and garden of Linda Weiss and Ron Gawith.

Seeking to downsize, the couple pur-chased property on Vashon’s west side and planned to build there until they discov-ered the perfect house and property in the Point Robinson area. The couple moved from their shady Cedarhurst-area home, which was on the 2000 Garden Tour, to their current sunny property in 2004.

A blank slate when they arrived, the weathered cedar, one-story, many-win-dowed contemporary house is now flanked by a white flowering Oleria hedge and blends beautifully into the arid landscape. Of their five acres, the south-facing quar-ter acre is fenced to protect plants from over-zealous deer.

Architectural in style, the garden boasts outdoor rooms suitable for a lifestyle that includes frequent entertaining. The garden design’s cornerstone, an inviting outdoor dining pavilion with sturdy metal dining furniture, is defined by 8-foot-high, metic-ulous gabion walls (welded wire structure filled with rocks) and boasts Gawith’s famous wood-fired pizza oven.

Grasses, yucca plants and native shrubs accent many varieties of tropical ivy, and a row of eight fruit-bearing fig trees pro-vides a favorite pizza topping. Vigorously blooming climbing roses outline the fenced perimeter. Bamboo, sedums and euphorbia rise from various levels of rockwork.

“Ron studied sculpture in college and loves creating levels and rooms,” Weiss said.

And a water feature graces the outer

edge of the dining area where Weiss floats glass balls and grows colorful begonias.

“This house was much what we had hoped to build. There wasn’t anything around it to start, which was perfect for us,” Weiss said. “It’s always been about entertaining and eating outside, and the gabion walls radiate heat.”

Their large vegetable garden in semi-raised beds, primarily Gawith’s purview, greatly benefits from early starts in the greenhouse. They grow everything from fava beans, summer squash and lemon

cucumbers to tomatoes, kale, chard and raspberries. He loves to cook and adds much of the garden’s bounty to his pizzas.

Outside the front door and the graveled entranceway, there are beautiful container plantings and defined areas for many Australian and New Zealand drought-tolerant plants, including hummingbird-friendly orange flowering Grevillea, euca-lyptus, varieties of boxwood and brilliant yellow-flowering acacia.

“The textures and silver-green color pal-ate have always been among my favorites,”

VAA GARDEN TOUR PROFILE: LINDA WEISS AND RON GAWITH

A garden to live inOn Maury Island, one couple has created outdoor ‘rooms’

Linda Weiss stands next to one the gabion walls in the garden she and Ron Gawith created. The walls add a sculpted feel to their many-roomed garden, a place where they often entertain.

Grevillea blooms in the garden.

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Spring is nearly here, and so is the 23rd annual Vashon Island Garden Tour, a two-day opportunity — Saturday and Sunday, June 22 and 23 — to explore five fabulous Island gardens. The event is a fundraiser for Vashon Allied Arts. Weekend festivities begin with the Sunset Garden Gala at 6 p.m. Friday, June 21, where guests can enjoy garden splendor, cocktails, a catered dinner, wines of Palouse Winery and live entertainment in a festive waterfront paradise. Tickets are $125 per person and are limited. Call 463-5131 to reserve.

The gardensThe tour, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, offers gardeners of all persua-sions the opportunity to experience five outdoor island sanctuaries. On the tour this year are gardens owned by Cindy and Steve Stockett (Burton Hill), Kerri Goodman Small and Miles Small (Upper Gold Beach), Linda Weiss and Ron Gawith (Point Robinson area), Nancy and Chuck Roehm (Point Robinson area) and Cindy Ward (just south of Vashon town). What might you find? • A sunny Mediterranean- style garden of ceanothous,

viburnums, hebes and rock roses. • An intimate garden with shady corners and harmoni-ous colors around meticu-lous rockeries. • A Northwest formal spread on three of 17 acres — a mixture of defined, structured areas, the casual disorder of a perennial cot-tage garden, a water feature, a labyrinth, a rose pergola and more. • An architecturally sculpted garden, defined by drought-tolerant plants, a spacious outdoor dining pavilion, an expansive vege-table garden and prodigious gabion walls. • And finally, an oasis of forest tranquility on five acres of Douglas fir and madrona, featuring climb-ing wisteria and a rocky waterfall, perfectly suited for outdoor gatherings.

Tour tickets include multiple daily talks to inspire and enliven the gardener in everyone, live music in the gardens, discounts at local merchants and more.In addition to works by fea-tured artists in each garden, a Garden Art Market, located in front of the K2 building, will showcase affordable,

original art to enhance outdoor spaces, plants and other garden-themed prod-ucts created by local artists. It will be open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days and also feature entertainment.Garden talks presented by landscape professionals and garden hosts will share a wide variety of gardening topics. Learn how stone can play an important role in landscape design with Jan Nielsen, project manager at Marenakos Stone. Melissa Schafer, a landscape design-er and certified professional horticulturist, will share her secrets to fantastic container creations. Sara Van Fleet will intro-duce a pallet of plants that promote year-round wild-life habitat. Local blogger Tom Conway, of Tall Clover Farm, will talk about his gardening adventures. And Terry Hershey, a landscape designer and the author of “The Power of Pause: Becoming More by Doing Less,” will discuss how to create sanctuary in one’s garden.

Tour tickets are $20 per person through May 31, $25 after June 1. Visit VashonAlliedArts.org to reserve tickets and for a complete schedule.

Weiss said.Beyond the fence,

they encourage natives such as Pacific madrona, Douglas firs and evergreen huckleberry to flourish. Rhododendrons and hel-lebores round out the native backdrop view from their floor-to-ceiling living room windows.

Weiss hails from a fam-ily of avid gardeners. The couple, who owned an upscale Seattle furniture store until 2006, moved to Vashon specifically so they could garden. “Ron and I are both ‘putterers.’ We don’t go on weekend trips; we just putter in the yard. I love being outside a lot, having projects and watch-ing things grow.”

And indeed, it’s a year-round passion for the couple. Enter Weiss’ green-house on a cold, windy winter day and find a tropi-cal paradise with lemon trees, blooming rosemary and hardy succulent ice plant.

“This is a manageable garden that we can enjoy and maintain for many years to come … and pro-vides the privacy we love,” she said.

— Janice Randall is Vashon Allied Arts’ director of

communications.

VAA’S ANNUAL GARDEN TOUR | JUNE 22-23

Take a walk on the sweet side

Gardens on the tour include, clockwise from top, the Roehm’s garden, the Goodman-Small garden and the Stocketts’ garden.


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“The place is like a mosaic. It has all these layers,” he said. “As a whole it’s beau-tiful. And then you add Clare.”

Clare Dohna, 56, is a well-known Vashon tile artist. Sunset Magazine once featured her intricate work— colorful mosaic bird houses and bird baths, ornamented bugs, birds and reptiles, installations that are found in artful homes throughout the region.

Her house is a showcase for her work. But it’s more than that. It’s also a place rich in Vashon history — a place where stories seem to abound.

Consider, first, the story of this fire-house. For years, Fire Station No. 3 served the Everett fire department, sitting on pilings on the waterfront, with doors facing Norton Avenue. When the water-front street was slated to be widened, the beloved structure “faced the ax,” as a 1967 issue of the Everett Herald sadly noted.

But some in Everett wanted to save the historic building, known as the Bayside Station. And in 1969, Plumb — an inveter-ate collector who obsessively read classified ad listings — saw a small ad for it in the newspaper. Looking for a home to place on her 10 acres off 236th Street S.W., she and her daughter drove up to Everett to take a look. And in 1969 she paid $6,000 to have the structure — replete with its three-story hose tower — barged to Vashon, according to Gene Rosford, the son of Plumb’s long-time boyfriend, Harlan Rosford.

It wasn’t an easy move, Gene Rosford recalled. The two-story, 40-by-60-foot building had to be chain-sawed in half, vertically, before getting barged to outer Quartermaster Harbor. It sat at Shawnee for a few weeks, spawning rumors that it

was about to become a “hippie commune,” Rosford said.

When the two men who sold it to Plumb finally moved it, one of them — a Norwegian named Oscar — got electro-cuted when a wire he was hoisting out of the way with a fiberglass pole slipped off and hit him, Rosford recalled. He survived the accident, but it delayed the project for several months.

The two halves of the fire station finally got situated on Plumb’s property and were joined back together, becoming Plumb’s half-finished home for several years. But as she grew older, Kay Plumb wanted to be closer to her sweetheart, Harlan Rosford, and that’s what led her to Dohna and Weber.

Weber and his business partner at the time, Tom Bradrick, were remodeling a bungalow on the highway near Judd Creek — a house that happened to sit next door to Rosford’s home. Plumb walked up to the house one day, wondering if the two would sell her the bungalow.

Weber and Bradrick declined, but Plumb was determined. A year later, she returned, this time offering to trade her old firehouse for the newly remodeled bungalow.

Clare Dohna, a woman with an eye for vintage beauty, was intrigued, and she and her husband decided to take a look at what was then little more than a rugged outpost. There was no landscaping; the basement was a dirt floor; the windows were Plexiglas. Even so, Dohna said, she instantly saw the beauty of the place. So they agreed to the deal, swapping deeds for the respective houses.

“No money ever traded hands,” Dohna said.

Initially, the firehouse was owned by Dohna and Weber and Bradrick and his wife, Julie Jaffe. Neither couple moved in right away, however; instead, Weber and

Bradrick began the work of rehabbing the old place.

Once it was ready, the two couples rented it to others for a few years, and the old firehouse began yet another chapter in its storied history. Among those who rented it was the Brulé family. They not only lived there, but Mo Brulé also ran her Montessori school, Thumbprint Preschool, in the home’s expansive living room. One night a week, the Brulé family pushed the school furniture against the walls and turned the high-ceilinged room over to Doug and Jackie Dolstad, who used the space to teach ballroom dancing to Vashon teens.

“I have so many amazing memories of that house,” said Annie Brulé, Mo’s daugh-ter and now an illustrator. Ticking off the names of well-known Vashon families, Annie recalled the number of teens who learned to dance in what she called “that spectacular middle room.”

“There were a lot of first romances,” she said. “A lot of first kisses.”

Eventually, Dohna and Weber bought out their friends’ share, and when they finally moved in with their two young chil-dren — Aedan and Mia, now young adults — the house took on another life. Slowly but gradually, Dohna and Weber restored and remodeled the old firehouse, a 17-year project that resulted in the home that blew Serko’s mind two years ago.

It’s a place of beauty, a work of art. Take the kitchen, remodeled five years ago. Wide open and country-style, it has fir floors painted a seafoam green and cabi-nets a dark shade of teal blue. Dohna’s blue and white tiles form a backsplash behind the sink, next to a small collection of vin-tage blue bottles. The wall above the stove is a large tile installation — a simple sage green pattern framing one of Dohna’s sig-nature tiles, a flower-like mosaic in greens,

blues and purples. At first glance, it looks as though there’s no refrigerator; that’s because the fridge, waist-high and hori-zontal, is a part of the teal-blue cabinetry.

The “spectacular middle room,” as Annie Brulé called it, is the family’s living room, wide open and awash in southern light from the huge doors that once opened up for the fire engines. The wainscoting is painted sage green, the walls above it white. The antique furniture — straight-backed rockers and chairs — are softened by pillows, cushions and throws, most of them the color of tea roses and creamed butter. Braided rugs adorn the floor.

Old fir doors, recovered from a Beacon Hill mansion that was about to be torn down, separate one room from another, adding to the home’s vintage charm.

And of course, Clare Dohna’s artistry imbues the house. Her handcrafted tiles line the walk-in shower. Each riser of the stairs boasts three differently patterned mosaic tiles in shades of plum, crimson, blues and greens. And if one steps out on the wrap-around porch (added during the extensive remodel) and looks down, one sees a garden path in the form of a snake — a 60-foot diamondback rattler, made, of course, out of colorful tiles.

Dohna’s studio is downstairs, a light-filled room adorned by various works in progress. Sitting on a rug in the middle of the room is a pile of small mosaic pieces — flowers and spheres in vibrant shades and ornate designs. Her kiln, where she fires her hand-cut mosaic pieces, sits in a room next to her studio.

Asked what it’s like to live in a place of such beauty, Dohna laughs and notes the house didn’t always looked the way it does now. But then she adds, “I really love it.”

“I go up to the tower every now and then and just look out,” she said. “It’s hard to believe I get to be here all day.”

CONTINUED FROM 13

See our Home and Garden Section online at our website

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18025 Vashon Hwy SW, Vashon Island

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Vashon Island

Throw in some pillows

Reflect your style

Giraffe, Vashon’s fair-trade gift shop, is known for its colorful and exotic offerings. It doesn’t fail to disap-point with this large mirror. The detailed frame was hand- painted in Peru.

Add rustic charm to any room with a mirror from Starving Artist Works (SAW). Vashon artist Gabriel Blake has several wood-framed mirrors at the shop, all made with scraps from his father’s lumber mill.

Pillows abound in all colors and patterns at Bergamot in Burton. Textile artist Kassana Holden, who owns the shop, designed these pillows. She also designed and printed the floral fab-ric of the chair.

A handcrafted mirror can be both functional and artful. Mirrors also brighten spaces by reflecting light and can make a small room seem more spacious.

Pillows may be the easiest way to freshen up a bedroom or living room. Choose your favorite and toss it on the couch or bed.

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Vashon’s 2013 Home & Garden • plants • building supplies • garden art • home loans • water features • furniture • flooring • garden tools • landscaping • rock walls • horticulture

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By SUSAN RIEMERStaff Writer

When winter’s short days begin to lengthen and spring shows its promise,

many minds turn to gardening. For most island gardeners, that means heading to the backyard to the family garden, but Vashon also has gardens — and dedicated gardeners who tend to them — that feed not just a family, but the wider community.

Just south of downtown behind Vashon Lutheran Church are 14 raised garden beds, surrounded — since this is Vashon — by deer fence. These beds, each 25 feet long, are filled in the height of summer with raspberries, garlic and an abundance of vegetables, all intended to feed clients of the Vashon Maury Community Food Bank.

James Dam, the current property man-ager of the church, is the primary gardener and has been involved since the garden’s beginning, nearly a decade ago, when the sunny stretch of lawn behind the church was converted to a higher purpose.

“We thought we could make better use of the space than grow more grass,” he said.

At the time, the food bank did not have any gardens of its own, but now Dam and fellow garden volunteers plant vegetables to complement what the food bank grows and, with an eye toward keeping the labor reasonable, items that do not need to be harvested weekly.

Still, there is plenty of work at the gar-den, Dam said, and volunteers are always welcome. During harvest time, people gather on Tuesday mornings to pick what is ripe and then take it to the food bank for distribution.

Dam does not know how many pounds of food the garden has given away, but he is clear on its other rewards.

“It’s gratifying to do it,” he said.

It used to be that when food banks offered vegetables, they were often well past their prime, having been culled from a grocery store shelves then sent along the free food distribution chain, where their quality declined even further.

At the food bank now, wilted vegetables are a thing of the past, and produce —

fresh from the food bank’s 6,000 square-foot garden and one-acre farm — are a staple.

“We want to be able to provide healthy, nutritious food so people can work toward ending their poverty,” Yvonne Pitrof, the food bank’s executive director, said. “Fresh produce is some of the most nutritious food we could provide.”

When families receive food stamp ben-efits, they receive $24 per week per person, Pitrof said, which does not stretch very far in the grocery store, often leading people to choose less nutritious — and less expen-sive — food over fresh produce.

In recent years, the food bank farm on Wax Orchard Road and the garden next to the food bank have provided 6,000 pounds of food, a welcome addition to the larder, as the food bank is still serving high num-bers of islanders, including roughly 1,500 people in 2012.

Feeding that many people is not a one-person job, and volunteers, including food bank clients, play a vital role in the farm and garden. Last year, Pitrof said, roughly 100 volunteers contributed more than 450 hours at the sites and are welcome again this year. Gardeners of all levels are encouraged, she noted, and can learn a lot

GARDENS THAT HELPOn Vashon, some find meaning

in growing food for others

From left, Sarah Drew, Emily Scott and Jenn Coe work at a garden next to the food bank.


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about various gardening techniques from the farm and garden manager, Jenn Coe. Plus, she added, “It’s so much fun.”

Six years ago islander Julia Lakey was visiting the community care cen-ter and noticed something important missing.

“I thought if I were a resident there, I would want to come out and see vegetables,” she said.

So Lakey, a gardener since her teen years, set about creating a vegetable garden in the round, and as the gar-den enters its seventh season, she has big plans for its future, including creating a food safety plan that will make the harvest available for all residents, raising funds for a produce washing station and working toward creating a garden that requires no tilling, water or crop rotation, inspired by the much-respected Back to Eden garden in Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula.

Over the years, Lakey said, com-munity donations have supported the garden, from vegetable starts and seeds to the 8-foot fence and orna-mental gate surrounding it. Lakey

and volunteers have grown a variety of vegetables — potatoes, squash, beans and peas, to name a few — but because the garden lacked a food safe-ty plan, VCC’s kitchen could not offer the produce, and the harvest benefit-ted only staff, visitors and residents who could pick and prepare the food themselves. Now, with the help of the Vashon Island Growers Association, she is completing such a plan, and she expects that the garden fare will soon benefit all the residents.

Necessary for that plan, though, Lakey said, is raising $1,000 for a produce washing station, with a two-basin sink, faucet, bowls and hosing. She would like to raise that amount by May 1, she said, because the peas are planted and will be ready for eat-ing later on that month.

In addition to the garden in the round, Lakey also helps residents with the center’s raised beds just out-side the dining room. Set at nearly waist height and designed for people in walkers and wheelchairs, the raised beds make it easy for many seniors to work in them, but it is hard to make them water wise, Lakey said, and last summer residents spent a considerable amount of time water-ing. This year, she said, she would

like to set up an irrigation system and hopes an island gardener might have enough extra irrigation parts on hand to donate to the cause. Garden tools are also welcome, she said.

Come harvest time, Lakey said, she hopes VCC can host a celebratory meal, with the main ingredients all having come from the gardens just outside the doors.

All the island gardens welcome vol-unteers. From April through June, VCC and the Lutheran church will host work parties from 10 a.m. to noon on the first Saturday of the month, alternating locations, with April’s meeting at the church. For more information about volunteer-ing or donating to the garden cause, leave a message for Lakey at VCC at 463-4421. The Vashon Lutheran Church garden is open each week in the summer to volunteers on Tuesday mornings. Call James Dam for more information at 567-5279. To be put on the weekly email volunteer list at the food bank, call Yvonne Pitrof or Jenn Coe at 463-6332.

When Deborah Teagardin moved to the island seven years ago, she didn’t know anybody. So she attended a meeting of the thriving Vashon-Maury Island Garden Club, and now, she counts dozens of like-minded gardeners as her friends.“It’s just a wonderful group,” she said.The group meets at the Lutheran Church from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. the second Monday of the month. Most meetings involve a guest speaker and a brown bag lunch. About 45 people — nearly all women — attend each meeting, Teagardin said. The main focus of the group is community service. The club puts on an annual plant sale on the Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend that draws hundreds of shoppers and raises money for its high school scholarship fund. But the club is also a way to learn more about plants, swap stories and enjoy the company of other gardeners. Says Teagardin, “I get inspiration from going.”

THE VASHON-MAURY ISLAND GARDEN CLUB

The garden club’s Greenhouse Nuns plant tomato seeds in advance of the annual Mother’s Day weekend plant sale.

Vashon's Home & Garden Section 2013

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