Situated on the edge of the Pacific with a mild climate, Seattle has access to plants from all parts of the world.  With our strong family and historical connection across the Pacific, come a great range of good eating, and a range of vegetables that one may or may not be familiar with.  Here from Asia is a check list of plants you may know but also some you may want to try!

Many can be found in Farmers markets, or Asian Markets such as Uwajimaya or the  markets in the ID or try HT (Oaktree) Market on Aurora in North Seattle.  Of course we can also grow our own and given the price of baby bok choy that may be a good idea!

Thanks  to the UW Extension for the research on this list.

Bottle Gourd

This is a vegetable favorite of many Lao gardeners. The fruit should be harvested while still young and tender. It is peeled, cut into pieces, and then steamed or stir-fried. The shoots (vine ends) are also used as a green vegetable.  Area Lao gardeners wash them, steam them (to blanch) and then freeze them for winter eating. Like many squashes, they take time to get going, so transplants are recommended.

Cucumbers

Oriental-type cucumbers are long, slender, and have small seeds. If they are kept mulched and well watered, they seldom get bitter. Trellising will help you produce nice, straight fruit.

Snow or Chinese Peas

These are the flat pods, not the newer snap peas. They are easy to grow and amazingly productive. ‘Oregon Sugar Pod II’ is an excellent, virus-resistant variety for our area.

Chinese Parsley (Cilantro)

This herb can be sown from spring through fall. Late-seeded crops will over-winter and produce an exceptionally early crop next year.  Quick to bolt so keep an eye on it.

Chinese Chives

This perennial is another that can be sown just about any time. The flat leaves and the flowers are both used for a mild, slightly garlicky flavor in many dishes. They are easy to grow and very ornamental.

Amaranth

This leafy vegetable was cultivated by ancient American peoples as well as people on other continents. With such a long history, it’s no wonder there are many kinds. The names tampala and Chinese spinach are also used for leaf amaranth. There are also grain amaranths (produce edible seed), ornamental amaranths (such as ‘Joseph’s Coat’) and weed amaranths (such as pigweed). All of these are edible, though not as tasty. Very young leaves and stems can be used in salads. Older plants are slightly stronger flavored and not as tender and are used like spinach or in soups.

Malabar or Climbing Spinach or Basella

This green leafy vegetable is very popular in many Asian countries but requires more summer heat than we get in Seattle. We do well with so many other greens that it would seem a waste to devote your hottest spot to this crop. It is a versatile vegetable with a sticky quality similar to okra.

Garland Chrysanthemum or Chop Suey Greens

This yellow daisy is tasty, nutritious, easy-to-grow, and very pretty if allowed to flower. Tender young leaves are used in a wide variety of ways but are usually steamed or stir-fried or used raw in salads. As the plants get older, the flavor gets stronger and more bitter. At this  point, the flower petals can be eaten.

Pak Choy (also spelled “Bok” and “Choi”)

This non-heading, mild mustard can have smooth or crinkled leaves on broad, white or green stems. The most common kind looks a little like Swiss chard. It can be planted by seeds or transplants. In Seattle, we can get two crops of pak choy per year. Plant the early crop in March and the late one in August.

Yiu Choy

Again, this is a perfect crop for our Northwest climate, since it is difficult to grow in hot weather. Plants are ready for harvest when the flower stalk is present but still green (no yellow flowers open). Use stems, leaves, and flowers. All are sweet and delicious.

Chinese or Napa Cabbage

These are head-forming, succulent, mild cabbage-like vegetables. ‘Spring A-l’ is the variety we recommended for spring planting, and ‘China King’ is good for fall (sow mid-July to mid-August). ‘Michilli’ and ‘Wong Bok’ don’t seem to work as well here. Generally, fall crops are the most successful.

Chinese Mustard Greens or Gai Choy

This is a must-have crop for most Asian gardeners. They love the fact that it can be grown all year ‘round in Seattle. Our summers seldom get too hot or our winters too cold for mustard greens. It is a fast crop and one of the most nutritious you can grow. It has a stronger taste than the greens named above.

Chinese Broccoli or Kalian

This is another plant-it-early-or plant-it-late crop. Here, however, we recommend you do it as a spring crop. Early plantings develop a big, healthy root system that allows you to harvest the plant repeatedly through the summer. At each cutting, you take the broccoli-like stalks and adjoining leaves. Let it regrow and keep picking until the plant’s energy runs out.

Radishes

We’ve all tried the little, round, red ones, but the Asian cultivars come in a variety of shapes and colors. Many, including daikon, are meant to be planted in August for fall and winter eating. All parts of the radishes are edible (including the pointy seedpods) and may be eaten raw, cooked or pickled.

Try these but they really need lots of heat…

Yard-long Beans or Asparagus Beans

These can be grown in our area, but we really don’t get enough heat to do a very good job. They resent our cool night temperatures. Try your sunniest spot, make a raised bed, and plant the seed when the soil has warmed (transplantsgo into shock). Cover the bed for the first several weeks with a clear plastic row cover and pray for a warm summer. With luck, you will get a nice crop of tasty beans, pencil-thin but about 14-18″ long. These “beans” are closely related to black-eyed peas and only distantly related to regular green beans.

Thai Hot Pepper

These are among the hottest peppers we can grow here. They need to be started indoors in about February and then transplanted out in early June. Clear plastic covers to build up heat are important to get them really growing.

Asian Eggplant

These are long, skinny or small, egg-shaped versions of the familiar vegetable. They are heatlovers, too, and good companions for peppers under a plastic row cover. They can be added to stir-fries without peeling or seeding and cook up very fast.

To help you with recipes try this book, Hot Sour Salty Sweet: my current favorite for recipes.  It has it all,  great pics and stories of South East Asian eating and cooking…and it’s a real book!

baxter

Recent summer and winter visits to Seabrook WA have inspired me to investigate the New Urbanism community planning movement. New Urbanism is an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually continued to reform many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies. New Urbanism is strongly influenced by urban design standards that were prominent until the rise of the automobile in the mid-20th century; it encompasses principles such as traditional neighborhood design and transit-oriented development. It is also closely related to regionalism, environmentalism and the broader concept of smart growth. The movement also includes a more pedestrian-oriented variant known as New Pedestrianism, which has its origins in a 1929 planned community in Radburn, New Jersey.

Defining elements of New Urbanism (all exemplified in Seabrook, WA):

• The neighborhood has a discernible center. This is often a square or a green and sometimes a busy or memorable street corner.
• Most of the dwellings are within a five-minute walk of the center.
• There are a variety of dwelling types – usually houses, rowhouses, and apartments – so that younger and older people, singles and families, the poor and the wealthy may find places to live.
• At the edge of the neighborhood, there are shops and offices of sufficiently varied types to supply the weekly needs of a household.
• A small ancillary building or garage apartment is permitted within the backyard of each house. It may be used as a rental unit or place to work.

• There are small playgrounds accessible to every dwelling – not more than a tenth of a mile away.
• Streets within the neighborhood form a connected network, which disperses traffic by providing a variety of pedestrian and vehicular routes to any destination.
• The streets are relatively narrow and shaded by rows of trees. This slows traffic, creating an environment suitable for pedestrians and bicycles.
• Buildings in the neighborhood center are placed close to the street, creating a well-defined outdoor room.
• 
• Parking spaces and garage doors rarely front the street. Parking is relegated to the rear of buildings, usually accessed by alleys.

More about New Urbanism can be found at http://www.newurbanism.org/

These native plants thrive in the Seabrook landscape:

Dwarf Western red cedar. Thuja plicata ‘Excelsa’ is a narrow cultivar used at Seabrook as hedging or specimens.

Pacific wax myrtle. Myrica californica is the most-used plant at Seabrook, as evergreen shrubs or clipped hedging.

Red-twig dogwood. Cornus stolonifera is used as screening or trimmed hedging; it can take sun or shade, wet or dry conditions.

Baldhip rose. Rosa gymnocarpa is a hardy, small rose with a delicate flower and bright red fruit.

Douglas spirea. S. douglasii is a casual, airy, small shrub.

Coast strawberry. Fragaria chiloensis is a glossy-leafed spreading groundcover with small flowers.

Streambank lupine. L. rivularis is a prolific flowerer that grows quickly from seed.

Western sword fern. Polystichum munitum is an evergreen, textural classic fern used as a filler or accent plant.

New Urbanism offers a sense of community when you want it and privacy when you don’t. Quick and easy access to shared features like parks, playgrounds and commercial areas forgoes reliance on the car. Seabrook is an enjoyable example of this movement where shared public spaces and a sense of community have developed in a sustainable environment.

Michal

Although we often complain in Seattle about the amount of rain we get, water shortages are something we can, and do, experience. Our last drought was as recent as 2003. In response, citizens of the Puget Sound water shed have reduced our per capita water usage from 152 gallons per day (gpd) to 97 gpd from 1990 to 2007. Most of our precipitation occurs in winter, and highest usage is in summer. We are reliant on snow-pack in the mountains to act as our water storage system for summer use. Global warning is expected to cause more of our precipitation to fall as rain, rather than snow, and run immediately down to the lakes and Puget Sound. We need to continue to conserve water. To this end the City of Seattle has a water goal: To sustain water quality and quantity in support of human activity and the ecosystem by using our water sources efficiently and with care.

Rain barrels, rain gardens, drought tolerant plants, pervious surfaces, snow pack retention, salmon recovery, these are all terms we often hear in Seattle. More people are moving into our environment and development continues. One result of this “progress” is reduced infiltration rates — more water is being diverted into drains and piped away, and less water is absorbed into the ground to replenish groundwater supplies. Increasing infiltration rates would provide several advantages: providing bio filtration, slowing runoff and hence diminishing erosion, and lessening the need to upgrade storm sewer systems and water treatment plants. Here are some steps we can all take:

Slowing the flow of rainwater:

• Install a green roof. This may be too big for some to undertake but, installing a green roof on a storage shed could be a good start. The purpose of the green roof is to absorb the rainfall and slow its movement, lessening its speed and lessening its erosion of hillsides or streams.

• Install a rain garden. A rain garden gives the water from the gutters and downspouts a place to be detained. It slows down the flow and the water infiltrates into the ground rather than rushing down the street and into the storm drains.

Collect water for use later:

• Install rain barrels, cisterns, or underground catchments. All of these deliver the benefits of a rain garden or green roof and also allow the water to be used in the landscape at a later time.

Use gray water:

• Install an underground catchment and pump. This is water from (for instance your washing machine) which is filtered and then held in the catchment for later use. This water could be used to water your plants.

Choose the right plant for the right place:

• Proper plant selection will save water. It can be valuable to have a professional design your landscape in order to save in the long run. The selections will include plants that thrive in the PNW, the right plants for the conditions at the site where it will be planted, and plants that are more resistant to pests.

Drink tap water not bottled water:

• Seattle residents use the equivalent of about 354,127 pint bottles of water each day. Production of this volume of bottled water requires use of some 40,719 barrels of oil each year, creating about 5,439 tons of greenhouse gases.

• Nationally, nine out of every 10 plastic water bottles end up in landfills — not in recycling bins. In Seattle, the recycling rate is closer to 49 percent, but those bottles still require huge amounts of energy to produce and transport.

How Good Design Can Change Your Lifestyle…

Small changes can often make a big impact. The typical backyard patio is often a small concrete slab surrounded by lawn. Generally people don’t go past the edge of the patio so it ends up as annoying useless space. In this example, the Homeowners’ were frustrated by the lack of space for cooking and didn’t even have room for a outdoor seating. By removing the lawn, a much larger more functional patio was created. Now the Homeowners and their family and friends can enjoy the fun of having people over for a barbeque or evening conversations around the fire pit. Not only is this more beautiful space but less maintenance as well.