Here we go! Life with the Shibaguyz…

One of the more popular parts of our recent classes and presentations has been our resource list.  Among the categories on our resource list is what is on our bookshelf.  What exactly do the Shibaguyz reference when we don’t now what to do about our soil amendments, when we need a fresh idea for a space or when we can’t quite tell what in the heck that bug is?

In the spirit of sharing and education, we’ve gathered together our library list and we’re going to tell you about each of them over the next few weeks.  We’ll talk about the books we can’t do without and the ones that were just a waste of time.  Although… the last part of that last statement is kind of misleading since we LOVE our books and find something useful in each of them or we wouldn’t have them in the first place… right?? Right…

Was that enough set up?  Because we’d like to get on with it now… Good… here we go!

We’re in the groove right now in our growing season here in the Pacific Northwest… at least here in the Seattle area we are.  The tender greens of spring have all but gone as have most of the sugar peas and overwinter broccoli.  Right now, we’re watching our tomatoes grow heavy with fine, green fruits and counting the potential mounds of sweet corn and green beans we’ll be eating in a few weeks… YUMM!!

If, like us, you are growing your own food in the Pacific Northwest, there is one book you MUST have at your disposal at all times.  That’s where we’ll start…

Seattle Tilth puts out the Maritime Northwest Gardening Guide.  This book is, as we stated, at our side throughout the entire year.  From ordering seeds to the basics of composting to the resources and tips for identifying that bug in your soil, I don’t know how we would ever get along without this as our companion.  We’ve always said that someone who had never picked up a garden tool in their life could probably still produce a fair amount of food if all they had in their dirty little hands was this book.

The basic format of the book is broken down month by month January through December.  The first page of each month has some interesting and fun facts about that month including gardening history and such tidbits as when to celebrate the ancient Incan Feast of the Moon (September).

Next, the books lists crops appropriate for seeding outdoors, indoors or under a cloche.  This list includes edibles as well as flowers… yes flowers… this serves as a good reminder to not forget your friendly neighborhood pollinators in your food gardens.  Without the birds and the bees there wouldn’t be any… well… birds and the bees going on!

The best part of the crop list for each month is how specific each one is broken down by name for ease of ordering seeds.  For example, in February under soup peas we find Capucinjer’s, Bill Jump’s Soup and Holland Brown.  Track back a couple of months to when you’ll be placing your seed orders, cross reference with your favorite seed ordering website (we’ll cover those later) and you are set up for success… big time!  The varieties listed on the pages of each month are varieties that specifically do well here in the Maritime Northwest growing regions.  It is, thankfully, a no brainer.  I KNOW we aren’t the only ones who turn into drool-sopped zombies while perusing catalogues or websites and dreaming of harvests to come.  With this guide, we stay on track with our ordering and even try some varieties we haven’t heard of before… mostly with yummy results!

This is the third year we’ve used this guide in our pursuit to grow our own food.  The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide has become so common around Chez Shibaguyz any question of “what do you want to plant today” is always answered with “I don’t know… check the book.”  As in our example before, ordering seeds is a no brainer with this guide.  We simply turn ahead to the months we are ordering for, see what crops we can plant in those months and we order those seeds from our favorite websites.

Now that we have our own edible landscaping business, we are using our guide not only for seed ordering but as a reference for when to start our crops under our lights and when to sell them to our clients.  This is the best resource guide you can buy for the mere $14.95 listing price from Seattle Tilth.

The original receipt from the day we purchased our guide is still wedged somewhere in the pages like a souvenir.  The cover has been thoroughly chewed by the Shibagurl and the pages are dirty and smudged.  Once, we thought we’d lost our copy.  We spent a couple of days frantically tearing apart every nook and cranny of our house and garden as well as retracing our steps through our other plots thinking we’d left it behind.  We found our beloved Maritime Northwest Garden Guide… under the mounds of seed packets on our dining room table.  We had been using it there to divide and bag the seeds by months and it was the casualty of an avalanche… no harm… We joked about fitting it with one of those beepers for locating your lost keys… it was only half joking… This book is well loved around here…

Yes, the Maritime Northwest Garden Guide is only for… well… the Maritime Northwest gardening zones (very well explained in the opening pages of the guide).  We are sincerely sorry if you are reading this in another part of the country or the world that doesn’t have such a concise, exquisite handbook for your gardening journey.  Without it, we would be compiling all of these resources ourselves through exhaustive research and trial and error.  Fortunately, for those of us in one of the Maritime Northwest, Seattle Tilth has come to the rescue and used their fount of knowledge to give us this guide.

We love it… we recommend it… and, often, we give away copies of it at our classes.  If you live in the area and you are going to purchase one book… the Maritime Northwest Garden Guide is the one to buy.

On a scale of one to four, we give it four paws up!

talk to you soon…
The Shibaguyz

*note: we are not being paid for any of our book reviews we give here on our blog.  This is our opinion.  In some cases, we have contacted the publisher to ask them for a review copy of a book we have used or have been interested in using in exchange for the review.  As you may know by now… we’re not the type to pull punches… if we didn’t like one of the books for some reason… we’re gonna let you know… There… that should be all the disclaimer stuff out of the way.  Thanks…