Holiday gifts for the gardener

Jeanne Crisp and Julie Kelly

If you have a gardener on your list, you're lucky! Gardeners, from aspiring to the experienced, are an easy bunch to buy for.

Here are gift ideas contributed by members of the Mukilteo Community Garden, a local P-Patch, which features renters' beds and a collective effort by all renters to grow produce for local food banks.

Gardening books are a good start. Tom suggested a beautiful picture book of gardening and cooking to encourage even an experienced gardener. Jan and Marina, who are each on a quest to grow tasty, healthy, high-yield tomatoes, love the book #Epic Tomatoes#. Marina also likes #The Kitchen Garden# and #Food Grown Right in Your Backyard#. Julie suggested reference books that are specific to our region. Her favorite is #Vegetable Gardening in the Pacific Northwest#.

Tools, from basic to specialized, are always on a gardener's list. Here are a few used by MCG gardeners. Ann, a very experienced gardener, thinks it's better to have a few tools of high quality than a whole raft of lesser quality tools – so go ahead and splurge a little. She particularly likes Japanese tools – they do know their blades. Ann also thinks tools that would be useful are a hori-hori (like a heavy-duty knife with one serrated edge and a sturdy wooden handle) and a good trowel, as well as the commonly used long-handled tools. But her "don't-be-without-it tool" is a bypass secateur (a hand pruner with blades like scissors) Along with that, a good quality folding blade sharpener you can take along in your pocket.

If the gardener on your shopping list is into doing their own seed starting or working with seedlings, Ann says a stainless steel widger is a nice stocking stuffer. You can use it to plant seeds, gingerly separate delicate seedlings from each other, or dig a little hole to transplant the seedling.

Tracy, an experienced gardener who lives in a condo, suggests a "fancy-schmancy" worm bin (to turn food scraps into compost), especially for that gardener on your list who doesn't have a lot of space. And for a beginner gardener, Tracy thinks a gift card to a local nursery PLUS a shopping trip with an experienced gardener would be fun. Tracy's friend received a wonderful large plastic hod, (like a hand-held basket in the grocery store). She loves it! She can wash her veggies off right in her P-Patch, which waters her garden as well.

And to keep the gardener on your list organized, Tom and Margaret suggested a

bucket to hold their growing collection of gardening tools, preferably with a liner of pockets that goes on the outside of the bucket to hold small tools.

Micha suggested a ground thermometer (useful to gauge when soil is warm enough to plant in the spring, as well as to monitor the heat being generated in a compost pile), and Julie thinks that every gardener needs rubber garden shoes and gloves. Jeanne says kneepads are a must. They enable you to "drop and weed" without worrying where you left your foam pad.

Sharon, a transplant from Iowa, found that for gardeners new to Washington, Sluggo is a must!

And last but not least, here's an idea that's brand new this month – a Mukilteo Community Garden shirt! The Garden is offering T-shirts and sweatshirts as a fundraiser. A quarter of the cost of each product goes to the garden and will be used to rebuild the original garden beds, now 13 years old and starting to rot apart. Order online at www.bonfire.com/mcg and support your Mukilteo Community Garden.