Renee Wilkinson's Blog, page 28

Fall Studio Wrap Up

I finished my LAST design studio of my grad program a couple weeks ago. Woohoo! Only a couple classes and my thesis stand in the way between me and graduation this June.

We had a hypothetical project this past term involving high-speed rail. I worked with a great team of other landscape architecture grad students – Brigitte Huneke and David Fothergill – to plan the best potential sites for a high-speed rail station. We then did some quick schematic designs for what the area around the station could look like.

My station area was along the Oregon Electric line in a somewhat industrial, centrally located neighborhood of Salem, Oregon. I proposed a high-density, mixed use neighborhood, consistent with Salem's Comprehensive Plan. I named the area the "Cherry District" after Salem's historic food processing industry that once thrived here.

The individual blocks had a balance of 50/50 built to open space, not including the wide streetscapes. There are existing alleyways that cut through each block, which I designed into semi-public "backyard" spaces. The residents of that block get to determine what they are used for, so some might turn it into urban ag while others might make space for micro-businesses like food carts.

Main streets accommodate cars, bikes, pedestrians and a proposed rapid-transit system (i.e. light rail or similar) to improve access in and out of the site. The high-speed rail tracks were buried under Front Street, turning the actual street into a pedestrian promenade. Park blocks are located on either side of the train station, connecting to west to the river and east to existing residential neighborhoods.

Riverfront Park from downtown Salem was extended up through the district, providing a recreational trail. Degraded Mill Creek at the southern end of my site was restored to create a recreational trail. These two waterfront trail systems provide north-south and east-west corridors for wildlife and recreation.

It was a fun project that I could spend months doing further design work. I became more comfortable with GIS (producing about 20 diagrams) and I used watercolors to render my final drawings. My reviewers were all really positive and managed to not get too distracted by my growing belly. It was a great way to wrap up my eighth (!) and final design studio.

Winter Morning Garden

There are little treasures of beauty peeking out of our winter garden. It takes some searching between the skeletons of fruit trees and shrubs to find them, but they are out there quietly shivering away. With a warm mug of chai, I bundled up to capture some of those lovely corners.

Artichokes, my favorite vegetable, make pretty winter flowers – little memories of their perennial contribution to the homestead.

We still hear birds chirping here and there in the evergreens, but the bird bath has been abandoned until Spring.

The ever-bearing raspberries have finally stopped producing fruit for the season. They keep encroaching on the pathways and will get a major thinning this winter.

A little tendril from the hardy kiwi vine sneaks down the pergola. The female and male vines cover the whole top of the pergola now.

Everything needs a heavy pruning and some plants need to be moved while they are dormant. Winter will let me delay the outside work so we can get the inside of our homestead back into shape. So sleep away garden! For at least another few weeks.

Portland, I'm Home!

Whose idea was it to move from Eugene to Portland while I am seven months pregnant? Oh, right… it was my idea. As stressful as a move can be, things went smoothly and we had tons of friendly hands helping us lift boxes, chicken coops and duck houses. That little yellow house was good to us, but it was never "ours". (Yikes – look at all that lawn!)

The birds did a great job on the move! They can't see in the dark, so when we closed the lid on their carriers they all just assumed nighttime came early and went to sleep. We're planning to build them a permanent shared run enclosure later this month. For now though, everyone gets to free-range during the day and gets tucked in (i.e. locked up securely) at night. They are having a ball exploring their new digs filled with unsuspecting bugs.

My nesting instinct is taking over and I have a list of improvements now for every room. My friend Ben recommended Yolo Paint as a great non-toxic, no VOC paint option to spruce up our house colors. Safe for me to use while pregnant and their colors are nature-inspired = awesome! (Portlanders, if you need a painter with a sharp eye for color he is your man.)

There is lots of work to be done outside, although our most recent renters took loving care of our home. But trees and vines need pruning, the compost needs turning, and I'm planning hoop houses over the raised beds to get some winter crops growing. It's kind of a frosty looking mess right now.

It feels great to be home despite the all the boxes in our tiny house and the clean up needed in the backyard. Honestly, I can't believe we pulled all that off: Jay finishing his doctorate in NYC, me doing this graduate program in Eugene, both of us making it work. We've come full circle now and look forward to the permanency of life in Portland.

Friendsgiving

There are too many great photos to share from our Thanksgiving spent with friends, or Friendsgiving, this year. So fewer words and more pictures!

First, don't all good things start with friends jammed in a teeny kitchen cooking together? I feel like I'll remember all that giddy energy in the kitchen more than almost anything that night. So great to celebrate with some of my closest buddies.

When you get a bunch of designers together for a holiday meal, this is what the table setting ends up looking like. Amazing! Claudia out did herself with candles, tiny Japanese maple leaves on each napkin, native ferns in the middle and lush, bright tulips. Well done lady.

The spread! Final menu: Herb roasted turkey & shallot gravy, slow roasted root veggies, brussel sprouts w caramelized shallots, green beans w pine nuts & lemon, yam empanadas, garlic smashed potatoes, chanterelle stuffing, cornbread-sausage-apricot stuffing, fall salad, orange-cranberry sauce and angel buns.

Everyone comes from different parts of the country, so we all had different special dishes. The angel buns (above) were made lovingly by a friend from Kentucky. As cute as they are good.

Three words: cornbread, sausage, apricot. Oh momma… This stuffing was non-traditional and amazing. I have to track down Ben's recipe for next year, or at least make sure we spend the holiday together again. The best of savory & sweet in one bite.

The plate. Well, the first plate. There were seconds…

So stuffed, we played cards and games after dinner. Had to let it all settle before dessert. Dominoes and poker were the most popular.

Desserts: pumpkin pie, chocolate layer cake w berry cream filling, chocolate empanadas, apple crisp and pecan cheesecake (above). I had a bit of everything – twice.

At the request of our hostess, the meal started with us all holding hands and sending good energy to the 14th guest at the table – the little baby in my tummy. Thanksgiving was everything is should be – a celebration of the people we love and the good food we are fortunate to have in life. The evening ended late, like midnight-late, and we all went home to warm, happy homes. How fortunate we are this year.

Thanksgiving Prep

Thanksgiving falls at a weird time in my graduate school schedule. It's always the week before our final studio design review, so I'm cranking on drawings when most people are pouring over holiday recipes. The picture below is the world I live in right now: sketches, trace paper, tea and pomegranates (a little treat to keep me in my seat working).

The last few years we have hosted a small gathering with friends at our place. This year a friend is hosting, as things are too crazy right now between school, moving in a couple weeks, and being nearly seven months pregnant. (whoa momma!) We're all bringing a couple dishes to share and the menu sounds amazing so far, in part because we're all from different parts of the country with different specialties. Here's the line up:

Herbed turkey with cornbread-sausage-apricot stuffing & gravy
Sides: crispy brussel sprouts, green beans with lemon & pine nuts, cranberry-orange sauce, yam empanadas and angel buns
Desserts: nut torte, apple cobbler, chocolate empanadas, pumpkin pie

Our hostess suggested we all wear sweatpants (amazing), try to stuff as much food in the preggo lady as possible (also amazing), and stay late by the fire playing guitar and singing (awesome). This is how Thanksgiving should be, right? People you love, delicious homemade food, and comfort.

I'm always curious how everyone else decides to spend the holidays. So, some questions for you:

Who do you celebrate with?
What old/new dishes are you making this year?
Should sweatpants really be allowed at Thanksgiving?

Problem Solver: Strawberry Tree

In late fall and winter, you may start to notice a lack of anything looking alive in your landscape. The trees lose their leaves and there's nothing left behind but a skeleton of plantings. That is when you know you need more "evergreen structure" – something to give life to your garden year round.

Here is a plant that may just solve multiple problems for you in your landscape: Strawberry Tree. In short, it's evergreen, produces edible fruits, fruits off-season when not much else is producing and is drought-tolerant.

Strawberry Tree, Arbutus unedo, is native to the Mediterranean, but becoming more common as an ornamental in the US. Look a little closer and you will see odd-looking red, edible fruits hanging off the branches. I see this unusual edible all over town and have been enjoying it as a snack to and from class.  The better tasting fruit has a hint of strawberry-like flavor.

It is a broad-leafed evergreen, meaning it has wider leaves and not needles, with red bark. Use it to cover up an unsightly view, like a utility box, plant it as an evergreen hedge to make a divided, or plant it a place where you can enjoy the greenery year round. The one on our homestead is planted outside the bathroom, giving us a little more privacy.

Strawberry Tree typically produces small, white, urn-shaped flowers in mid-fall (Sept-Oct) and fruits around late-fall (Nov-Dec). As shown above, often it will fruit and flower at the same time over several months. The plant will grow to about 8-10 feet over the course of ten years or so. It is relatively slow-growing, so it could grow up to 15-20 but that would take about 20+ years. It is a drought-tolerant plant once established, another great feature of this shrub. It can also tolerate a range of soil types and will do best in zones 7-9.

My advice is to buy Strawberry Tree from a nursery that specializes in edibles. They are most likely selecting for better tasting fruit. I have snacked on some that taste like nothing and others that have that great strawberry-like flavor. Our shrub at home is growing in relatively poor soil, in full sun, and has been doing great. I'm planning to get more this winter actually to tuck into bare spots along the fence where we need more evergreen structure.

Missing Gramps

It has been three years since my grandpa passed away and it always seems harder at this time of year. He passed in December, but those late fall months were the hardest for us all.

We always talked about our gardens during our visits. In those last few months, it was almost exclusively what we talked about. It was easier to talk about the purple carrots I was growing than to talk about how much we loved and would miss each other in a few short months. Neither of us made any reference to the increased pills on his nightstand, his loss of weight or the hospice nurse who moved in.

He passed away just a few months before I was accepted to grad school and here I am, almost finished now. This picture above is probably from 1980 – I'm the one in the diapers – and it's been on my studio desk all through grad school, giving me inspiration.

I think it's hitting me harder this year because we'll be back home again in Portland and he won't be there. And he'll be missing another milestone when Bug comes along into the world this Spring.

I don't really think there will be a fall when I don't think about him and I don't think there will be a carpentry project I'll do that doesn't remind me of him (although he was a far more gifted craftsman than I am). I just want to pause before the chaos of moving, finals, and the mayhem of the holidays to remember him. I still miss you Gramps.

Raking Is Not Homework

"I can resist anything but temptation." -Oscar Wilde

This became the theme of my weekend, for better or worse. I tried hard to sit at my desk focusing on homework while Jay worked on tidying up the backyard. Have you ever seen those old psychology experiments that tested the ability of little kids to resist eating a mashmallow? It was kind of like that.

Of course I gave up, ran outside, threw my boots on and helped out. Ohhh… the garden beds are so tidy now and all set for winter! I pulled out all those scraggly, dead warm-weather plants like tomatoes, peppers and beans.

I collected the fallen leaves and mounded them over the beds. The runner ducks were huge fans of this process, foraging for bugs in the leaf piles. It's safe to say we were all having a blast.

The leaves will break down over the winter and add some nice, airy texture when they get turned into the soil with compost in the spring (assuming whoever moves into this rental house wants a garden).

The winter crops are still growing strong – Bull's Blood beets, Rainbow swiss chard, and Lacinato kale. They looked "tucked in" under a winter blanket. It will keep them a little warmer to have that extra mulch and the slugs attracted by the leaves shouldn't bother these crops.

I'm too far along in grad school at this point to feel guilty for giving myself a little freedom time. It was a gorgeous day working outside and far better to work in the sun prepping for winter than the cold, rain of most fall days. Even though we're moving back into our Portland homestead in a month, I still feel good leaving the yard in the best shape and giving the future tenants everything they need to make a sweet garden next spring.

Fruit Crisp for Two

What a weekend! It was equal parts active and hibernating with a double scoop of food lovin'. This big baby in my belly, who we're calling Bug, went with me to yoga. Of course you have to follow up exercise with a huge brunch – hey, I don't make the rules. I ate my entire plate of biscuits and gravy, plus half of Jay's stack of pancakes.

Later that night I pulled out my copy of the Art of Simple Cooking from the shelf and had Alice Waters tell me how to make beef stew. I mostly listened to her, but cut some corners to make it in an hour instead of 3+. I again stuffed myself with a huge bowl and some fantastic crust bread.

There was a big break through for me this weekend: I can make a fruit crisp dessert for just two people? Whoa momma, get ready – here's my basic recipe:

In a small bowl, mix together 3 T. oatmeal, 3 T. brown sugar, 2 T. flour
Add spices to your taste. For apple, I mixed about 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 1/4 tsp. clove and a heavy dash of nutmeg. For pear, I use 1/2 tsp. ginger, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon and about 1/4 tsp cardamom.
Using your fingers, mixed in about 1 T. butter
Cut up 1-2 large pieces of fruit into a small baking dish, or layer fresh berries about 3/4 of the way up the baking dish. For a two person serving, I use my little 7″ x 5″ Le Creuset baking dish.
Sprinkle on crumble mixture and top with 2 T. chopped nuts
Bake at 350 degrees for about 25-30 minutes, less if you're cooking berries. You want the top to be brown and the fruit to be cut through.
Throw a big scoop of vanilla ice cream on your dish with half the crisp. Inhale and lick the plate.

I don't have a picture of the finished product because, hey, I'm pregnant. You think a pregnant lady can wait to eat her crisp? Not this one anyway. The first night we used two big baking apples and the next two hard, but ripe, fall pears. I think this may add five more pounds to my ever growing belly, but Bug can thank me later.

Portland, I'm Coming Home!

Let's be honest: my heart is planted in my Portland garden. It has been tough to be away for the last couple years temporarily living in Eugene while I work on my masters of landscape architecture degree. I have found a few places to make me feel at home-ish here in Eugene, but I have never stopped pining for my "real" home.

I have been trying to figure out how I can still graduate this June, but be back in our Portland homestead sooner. We've managed to work out a deal where I can finish the program while being based in Portland – woohoo! I've intentionally kept the garden, chickens and ducks portable, so everything is getting moved up north in about a month.

I will still be taking classes, some at the White Stag building downtown, and working on my thesis. Being home will really make me feel grounded and let me focus on these last few months of school, to push through and finish on time. I can't wait!

My spare time lately has been spent nesting – big time. I have (somewhat embarrassingly) put together digital material boards for every room in our house. I have also been carefully updating our planting plan for our food forest, filling in those little holes with a new batch of edibles.

I'm excited to share the new garden plan with you when it's ready, which should be soon. It will be a crazy month finishing this school term, packing and moving (or rather watching people move my stuff since I'm going to be like 7 months pregnant…). But I can't wait to be back in the city I love, snuggled into our cozy house and watching the garden wake up this spring.