Kathleen Alcalá

While some gardeners are putting their beds to sleep for the season, mine is just warming up! Yellow beets gave way to snow peas. Snow peas gave way to red cabbage. I’ve got a second, sweeter crop of carrots, new crops of broccoli and chard, and every other day I harvest a few potatoes. I tried to grow blue ones, but I must have picked up the wrong starts at Bainbridge Gardens! I made soup with them the other night along with a cup of dried nettles picked earlier this year at Suquamish.

We had a hot, dry summer in the Northwest, punctuated by bad air from fires to the north, east, and south. Some days were apocalyptically bad, with the worst air I have tried to breathe since leaving smog-filled San Bernardino in the 1970s. But the plants loved the days of endless sunlight, rare up here.

Fall means  Read More 

Another winter, and those of us in the Northwest have turned inward, that pause when we clean our homes after a hectic season, and plan for the coming year.

It is very dark here in January, and I struggle to get out of bed even when the clock says it is time. Our vegetable gardens are sleeping, deep in dreams under a cover crop of clover or alfalfa, or like mine, under a layer of fresh soil I optimistically added in early November, hoping for a late fall crop. Instead, it froze early, taking out the last of my kale and some promising squash.

This year, social justice is  Read More 

We were about fifteen feet above the water, too high to see what canoe people see. A group of Bainbridge Islanders circumnavigated the island last summer in the Virginia V, an old ferry that has been restored and now serves as a tour boat. Our guide was Dennis Lewarch, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer  Read More 

Winter has settled upon us, and we are into the long rains of the northwest. Mornings tend to be the driest times, with moisture piling up to break loose in the afternoon.

I sloshed out to Cooper Creek one day to look for returning salmon, to no avail. Bainbridge has just a few streams,  Read More