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After a couple of years we have completed many of the urgent developments to our property, so it was good to take time off for a pre-Easter walk along the Puyallup river near Orting. We celebrated our outing with an excellent Mexican meal at Los Pinos restaurant.

Annie sleeps a lot, but still wakes up barking during the night to take her out. But we enjoy her snuggling with us on the sofa, We often remember our Good Boy Flip who isn't with us any more.

Brown Goldring has dark green, crunchy leaves with bronze tips and slightly frilled leaf margins. It's an unusual lettuce having xcellent sweet flavor.It is cold hardy, needing little protection to overwinter and it grows fairly well in the summer, too.

Brown Goldring is our sandwich lettuce - tasty and with lots of vitamin C.

Doesn't bolt in the summer and survives cold weather. This is our salad lettuce - not the tastiest though with good sweet flavor, Cerise is unusually attractive!

}We added two panels and moved two existing panels to add about 600 square feet to the east side of the garden. For more see Garden expansion.

And we added raised beds to grow more like those we grew with in 2025 from Vego Garden.

And with more space we sowed an entire raised bed corn seeds. Growing corn requires a significant quantity of stalks with tassels to fertilize the silks of the corn ears.

Now we can devote an entire bed to a trellis for plants such as pole beans and squash.

We used a cattle panel from Wilco, the farm store, as a trellis.

Some gardeners take such a long cattle panel, bending it to create an arch from one bed to another. Our garden layout didn't allow the extra space required so we cut one in half and mounted each in a raised bed.

We intended to grow pole beans, and “something else,” which turned out as an experiment in growing winter squash on a trellis.

For details see this page: Trellises.

One of the joys of this property is the selection of volunteer native plants, especially elderberries.

I like the elderberries, as much as the deer and elk, so I planned to transplant locl volunteers to a central area.

Reasons? berries for birds and animals, potential medicinal uses for the berries, ….

Other native favorites of birds and ???? are hawthorne, indian plum, and crabapple, all of which I have discovered on our parcel.

The six fruit trees added in 2025 grew well except for the plum and the cherry:

Some bugs took over many of the leaves, setting up colonies and spreading, consuming leaves as they went.

We treated the tree with a mild solution of neem oil, which eventually dispersed the colonies.

Its leaves were affected with unknown assailants. As with the cherry, the mild neem oil solutions cleared this eventually.

View a gallery of 2026 photos: