My thirty-fourth farm was Weslie and Saul’s Vegan Garden on Vashon Island, near Seattle.
The Farm
The farmers are Saul and Weslie. Saul is from New York and came to Seattle in 1977. He met Weslie at a food co-op in Seattle. Both of them are vegan. Saul has a business selling vegan supplements. Their property has both a forest and a large garden with two ponds. They have two cats who are also vegan.
My Experience
After a few weeks at Maury Hill Farm in rural Vashon, I came to Weslie and Saul’s place just off the business district of Vashon. I wanted to stay local so I could celebrate my 60th birthday with my family who were in Seattle.
Weslie’s garden was in between harvests in the middle of August. The garden sill had some kale, cabbage, lettuce, squash, and the ever-abundant zucchini. The 
tomato plants, whose fruit I was looking forward to, wilted for some reason. Weslie is starting to grow vegetables in pots. I liked this idea until I had to water the garden. The pots take longer to water and it’s easy to miss one, or two. One of my first projects was to transplant seedlings for a fall harvest of greens. The soil was so dry that I worried the small plants either wouldn’t get enough water or would be washed away when I watered them.
My bigger project was to prepare the garden beds for planting garlic in the fall. Saul, like Holly, is quite into garlic. His favorite is a hardneck called Music. To get nutrients back into the soil, I planted a cover crop of fava beans. It was a multi-step process. I took out the weeds, tilled the top layer by hand with a fork, watered the bed well, tossed handfuls of fava beans onto the soil and covered them, watered well again, and waited for them to sprout. The fava beans will fix nitrogen into the soil from the nodules on their roots. Before the garlic is planted, the beans will be tilled into the soil. Preparing these beds was especially satisfying.
My little jobs were planting succulents around the pond and giving the nettle patch a haircut. Nettles supposedly have a number of health benefits. I wonder what they taste like. A little prickly? There was also endless weeding. I enjoy weeding. While pulling out the unwanted plants, I listened to NPR. They had a series of reports on the Grand Canyon because of its centennial in 2019. I was looking for something special to do for my 60th birthday. By the second report, I’d made the decision to go to the Grand Canyon in October and backpack to the bottom. Seeing Phantom Ranch and stepping into the Colorado River had been on the bucket list that I’d forgotten about. Thanks NPR!
Gardens on Vashon have ten-foot fences to keep the deer out. In fact, a deer family hung out each afternoon under a tree next to the garage. It was important to keep the garden gate closed. Surrounding the garden on two sides is a forest, on the other two sides blackberry bushes had encroached and were reaching through the fence. I was asked to clear a path so one could walk the outside perimeter of the fence. This seemed like a daunting task. Yet there is something especially satisfying about chopping out annoying plants. The long canes of the blackberries quickly disappeared. The dark forest had a tangle of giant shrubs with high, dead branches going every which way. As I started lopping out the branches, I discovered artifacts, a wheelbarrow and garden tools. Once I was done, the dark forest wasn’t as dark anymore, and the garden was safe from leafy infiltrators for a while.
Weslie and Saul are vegan. Weslie makes yogurt and cheese from nuts. The cheese is delicious! She also prepared the evening meals which were also delicious. On the days I was on my own for meals, I walked to one of the two breweries on Vashon and had a beer and dinner. One evening I walked to the brewery that was farthest away, got there and realized I’d forgotten my wallet, went back to get it, and returned to the brewery just in time to get my food order in before they closed the kitchen. I’d worked up an appetite!
One afternoon I got introduced to the red wigglers in the two worm bins. The wigglers job is to eat up food scrapes and yard waste, and turn it into Black Gold, their bacteria and nutrient rich excrement also known as worm castings. Every few months it is time to harvest the castings. My job was to move the worms and their castings to one side of the bin and put the vegetable matter on the other side. In need of food, the worms will move out of their castings and hang out in the vegetable scrapes. Then the Black Gold can be harvested without taking out the worms. Squeamish people might not want to work with a worm bin. The thin, red wigglers were undulating in thick clumps in the dark castings. I was pleased to give them a fresh, clean bed of food.
The day of my new decade arrived. I went into Seattle to see my 89-year-old mom who is contentedly bedridden in an assisted living apartment. She was shocked to have a 60-year-old daughter. For something special on my birthday, I chose May Kitchen, a renown Thai restaurant on Vashon. My brother, his wife, and my 89-year-old father joined me. The menu was an overwhelming collection of items I’d never heard of. Luckily, my brother’s wife is a foodie and she jumped right in with recommendations and handled the order. I thought ordering phad Thai was a little pedestrian considering all the other choices, but it turned out to be a showcase with the waiter putting it together at the table. It was a perfect evening and a good start on a new decade.
At the end of my stay, Saul put on his best clothes in preparation to restack the compost bin. The microbes that are busy turning the garden waste into soil need 
oxygen. Turning the compost so the top of the pile becomes the bottom and the bottom becomes the top, aerates the pile so the microbes stay healthy. Saul took the fence off the compost pile and I started pitch forking the dry top of the pile to the empty compost bin next to it. As we restacked the pile, we needed to make layers. One layer contained nitrogen-rich garden waste called ‘greens’. The other layer, called ‘browns,’ is carbon-rich dead leaves, twigs, or branches. I collected sticks and brown leaves to add to the carbon layers. Each layer needed watering. Moisture is another key to a successful compost pile. As we moved towards the bottom of the pile, the smell rose. So did the heat. A well-percolating compost bin will reach temperatures of over 130 degrees Fahrenheit. A couple hours after starting, we came to the smelly, brown, bottom of the pile. Saul put the fence back up, readying a new place to toss yard waste, and put a sprinkler on top of the pile to get it thoroughly moist. Turning compost bins is on par with cleaning animal stalls. It was time for a change of clothes and a long, hot shower.