Virtual Northwest Flower & Garden Show
The Virtual Northwest Flower and Garden Show starts on Friday! We are reminiscing on last years show with photos of our display, "Alice's Woodland". Paying tribute to Alice Eastwood, a self-taught botanist and women of science. Designed by Juli Bertucci and the other strong women at Urban Earth Nursery.
Recipient of the City Living People's Choice Award
The Virtual Garden Show runs from 2/19-2/22. We are offering a special discount to everyone who shops with us during the show - simply search Urban Earth for the promo code.
“Alice’s Woodland” a dedication to Alice Eastwood
As a young girl, Alice Eastwood spent her family vacations rambling the hills of Colorado gathering botanical specimens; the first step of a mania for collection that would net hundreds of thousands of samples stretched across six decades.
Her early botanical work was part of California’s storied age, when the only way to get rare desert plants was to load up a horse and ride into the unknown. On those excursions, she collected specimens and discovered several plants, including Eastwood's willow and Hickman's potentilla.
In 1894 she became the Curator of Botany at Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, a post she would hold officially until 1949. In 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake set the city ablaze. Eastwood ran into the burning Academy of Sciences to retrieve the treasure trove of specimens she has spent her life collecting and organizing for the institution. Having saved 1,497 crucial specimens from the fire, she then set about the task of rebuilding the remainder of the collection. Within four decades, the 1,497 specimens she saved grew to 300,000.
Eastwood wrote over three hundred botanical articles and books that gave the shrubs and flowers everyday life personalities, that let people see the charm in plants that she saw, creating a city-wide enthusiasm for flora that spawned a Fuchsia Society, an Orchid Society, a Mt. Tamalpais conservation society, a wildflower society, and which transformed Golden Gate Park into one of the world’s most enthusiastically maintained botanical sites in the country. Along with several buildings and gardens named in her honor, in 1903 Alice Eastwood was one of only two of the few women listed in American Men of Science, as being considered to be among the top 25 percent of professionals in their discipline.
Breaking Down Fall Composting
Fall is a great time for composting. Not only for building your own bin with colorful fallen leaves, but also for top dressing your garden! Spreading compost over a garden bed, then covering it with mulch will encourage growth of soil organisms that will be super beneficial come springtime!
Break-down of Benefits:
• Encourages the growth of earthworms and other macro-organisms, whose tunneling makes room for water and air, making way for optimum root growth
• Provides nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur and micro-organisms that are essential for plant growth • Acts as a glue, holding water and soil particles together, and makes soil resistant to erosion
• Binds itself to polluting metals, pesticides and other contaminants to prevent them from washing into waterways or being absorbed by plants
• Suppresses soil-borne diseases and plant pathogens (a number of plant and lawn diseases are suppressed by micro-organisms found in compost!)
Practice a technique called "side dressing". Apply a layer of compost a few inches away from the plants, protecting delicate plant stems from active microorganisms. This way, the compost is applied as a mulch and it reaps multiple rewards!
Seacoast Compost
Made in Oregon, certified organic and biodynamic. They make use of “waste” from three major Oregon Coast Industries. Fish, shrimp and crab from seafood processing, along with cow manure and bedding from organic dairies, as well as Red Alder hardwood from the lumber industry. They add in some homeopathic preparations like yarrow, chamomile, nettle, oak bark, dandelion and valerian to enliven the whole mix and stimulate plants to reach their full potential in their environments.
Malibu Compost
Made in California, certified organic and biodynamic. Their farm-made compost combines organic dairy cow manure, straw, wood chips, and biodynamic concentrations of yarrow, chamomile, valerian, stinging nettle, dandelion and oak bark. They proudly do not use products with synthetics, greenwaste, pesticides, hericides, growth hormones, and sewage sludge.
Sources:
King County Composting
SeaCoast Compost
Malibu Compost