 We are offering FREE CLASSES at CHOMP!! August 18 - 10am - 6 pm Marymoor Park CHOMP! is a new kind of County Fair. Join us August 18 at King County's Marymoor Park for a day of local food, live music, green living workshops, and activities for the whole family. Meet and interact with local farmers, community organizations, chefs and musicians in a family-friendly, completely free celebration of what makes King County great! CLASS #1: Delicious Rain Garden Plants – 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM Learn From Stone Soup Gardens Permaculture Designer, Marco Downs about how to incorporate delicious and beautiful plants into rain gardens at your home or community space. Our plant palette focuses on how to fulfill our clients’ needs with edible, native and wildlife habitat plants. We will talk through our favorites in those categories and provide space for questions about how best to work rain gardens into your plan. Great class for homeowners, contractors and designers who are looking to expand their palette. CLASS #2: Greywater 101 with Patrick Loderhose - 12:45 – 1:45 PM Greywater, water from sinks, showers, and washing machines, is a great source of irrigation and can greatly reduce your outdoor water use. Greywater systems are especially important in times of drought. Come learn about popular greywater systems from Patrick, who is a level 3 California trained greywater installer and designer. He'll teach you about design considerations, water saving potential, costs, regulations, health and safety, soaps and products, and how to choose a system that is a good match for your home and landscape.  With Seattle being hilly, yard space is often sculpted around unusual terrain. We see this fairly often, and find many owners that are at a loss on how to take full advantage of these uneven spaces. As well as being difficult to envision, the spaces are generally hard to tame, manage, or manipulate into something worth enjoying. Stone Soup Gardens loves these kinds of challenges. Whether you have a steep slope, a soggy pit, or a hilly blackberry divide, we can turn your unused space into something for you and your family to enjoy. We can create a functional area for growing edible plants, or create a level retreat for those sunny spring and summer days. One of our clients in Columbia City has just such a space. While the yard area itself is fairly level, it is raised up sharply on a hill overlooking the street, and the backyard was a bramble patch. Seeing the unused potential of the area, our client contacted us to see what we could do. Hence, the great berry wall came into play. The great berry wall was built using downed timber from a local contact. We had the majority of the logs cut to a specific size, while others we trimmed to create easy step access in and out of the raised bed. This allows for ease of picking as the berries come into season, as well as for watering and pruning once summer and fall roll around. We planted the raised bed out with different types of raspberries, strawberries, gumi berries, lingon berries, thimbleberry, chilean guava, lavender, and sage, as well as espalier apples and pears, chives, and red flowering currant in other parts of the yard. This means that there will be a good selection of plants that stay green throughout the year, as well as those that will shed their leaves during the winter. It also creates a nice color palette for the eyes, as well as flavors for the mouth! For a bit of flare, we also included a bike wheel arbor along the front wall of the house, which was a great way to add interest, while providing a surface for things to climb on. We installed a laundry to landscape greywater system in the front yard which will water the espalier trees and herbs, and in the backyard we installed a cistern to side sewer which will provide water for the raised bed in the backyard. Take a look at the project beforehand: And here it is now: |
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