Category Archives: food gardening

October 13, 2025 · 8:44 pm

One Man’s Garden

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

Out on the slim peninsula between Westcott Bay and Mosquito Pass, Barb Fagan and I came calling. An Australian Sheepdog named Joey came running, and a man with a full white beard looking like David Letterman strolled down the drive to open the gate for us. Silver birch line the driveway, trees that he planted years ago. Barb was introducing me to Chet Genther. They are both members of the San Juan Island Garden Club, and it crossed my mind that I may be the only islander not familiar with him.

“I joined the Garden Club to learn to grow flowers,” he said with a smile. For Chet is a food gardener through and through. From the sanctuary for wild roses which it was, to now, every bit of his arable land is tended. “I wanted a farm,” explained Chet, “but one acre is plenty.” Plenty enough for an orchard of apples, plums, Bartlett pear, Asian pear, and crops of cantaloupe, watermelon, sweet potato, red beets, table grapes, 13 varieties of tomatoes, Marionberries, blue berries, raspberries, and strawberries as ground cover.

A Valencia orange tree which began in a solar room in Redmond, Washington has reached maturity on island under a heat lamp in the greenhouse. Orange trees self-pollinate in a breeze, so a fan simulates trade winds. Braeburn apples grow in bunches like grapes, their weight on branches considerable. “I can’t store what I can grow,” notes Chet. Thus crops of whole trees regularly go to The Friday Harbor Food Bank. There’s a generosity to Chet’ s every step. Even his bushy white beard growth is slated for playing a Santa at Nordstrom in Bellevue over the holidays.

Barb and I had the privilege of stepping into one man’s garden. We bade goodbye, our arms laden with produce. Remembering that Chet had joined the San Juan Island Garden Club to learn to grow flowers, I had to ask Barb, did we see any flowers? She laughed. Not the right time of year of course for blooms, but it may also be that it’s fruit trees that keep flowering in this bit of paradise.

Originally published October 8, 2025 in The Journal of the San Juan Islands

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July 19, 2016 · 5:26 pm

Peace Where We Find It

apple picNorth Pole Columnar Apples. Photo by Paul Mayer

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

Not since the 60’s has this country seen so many demonstrations. Now I am in my sixties and standing in a Demonstration Garden. What’s a Demonstration Garden, you ask? Well it’s the Master Gardeners’ way of inviting you into their space to see what grows well in a particular area and to share their gardening practices.

This place, I have decided, is my personal act of resistance. Against all the violence, hatred and bigotry in the world, this is my personal act of resistance because it is a working model. I am planting myself here as much as possible.

The first scent to hit me is fish fertilizer, and I rather like it. I’ve got dirt under my fingernails before I remember to wear my gloves, and I don’t mind that either.

Tomatoes are growing under plastic tarps for heat. In the temperate summers of the Pacific Northwest, tomatoes often need a little help. Patty pan squash, zucchini, peppers, and Bush beans aplenty. Little eggplants, dangling like amethyst earrings.

A new crop of chard is coming along, whereas my first crop is still in the process of coming up at home. Potatoes, garlic, kale. Herbs of all description. Tomatio, looking like pretty little Japanese lanterns. Grape vines gone berserk.

“And peas that are beginning to say goodnight,” as one Master Gardener put it.

Arugula that wintered-over, a skinnier leafed variety than what we are growing at home, with a more pungent peppery taste. Rhubarb, which could be grown outside the fence, as deer don’t care for it.

It’s all about food here—indeed the only blossoms are flowering food plants, artichokes, squash, and such. Despite the small plot, The Master Gardener Demonstration Garden on San Juan Island donates over 1,000 lbs. of produce annually to the Friday Harbor Food Bank, and no wonder. As we stood in the garden, Master Gardeners showed up to work carrying excess produce from their home gardens to contribute as well. Everything is organic, weighed and delivered to the Food Bank, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, just steps away.

I hopped over there to have a look and found a sweet little store, clean as can be, meticulously organized and stocked, where everything is free—all it asks of customers is island residency. Fresh produce, of course. Eggs, meat, milk, canned goods, pasta, dried beans, soups, frozen chickens, frozen sausage, and ice cream treats for kids while shopping. Some signs say take one item per shelf, or two items per shelf. Large families, of course, get extra.

Like so many things on island, the Friday Harbor Food Bank is run by volunteers. But then, this is an island where drivers in cars wave as they pass. Where there are more people walking or running or biking than driving. Where there are no traffic lights. Where the wildlife is harmless and the people are kind. Where the town of Friday Harbor looks like Main Street, Disneyland.

It isn’t fair, I get to live here.

The more I think about it, the island itself may be my personal act of resistance as well.

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