Volume 3, Issue 10
Volunteering at UW Farm? Recommended reading:
The wildlife-friendly vegetable gardener by Tammi Hartung
reviewed by Rebecca Alexander

Here's a book on growing edible crops with a unique perspective, that our vegetable gardens can be planned and designed to encourage or at least coexist peacefully with wildlife. For example, you may not want to share your lettuce with slugs and snails, but you can make the garden hospitable to predators that consume mollusks (such as birds, toads, lizards, foxes, and skunks). ...

Design elements in a wildlife-friendly edible landscape include a "perennial backbone" of fruiting trees and shrubs (fruiting ornamentals that will attract birds and other animals and dissuade them from eating the fruit you’ve planted for your own consumption), a water source, and "decoy plants" planted as a border around plants you intend to harvest for yourself. Some of the ideas here require a fair amount of space: not every urban food gardener has room for a hedgerow, or can afford to plant extra (sacrificial!) rows of crops for hungry critters. Still, you may have room for a few ornamental plants that attract pollinators or a few aromatic shrubs and herbs (like curry plant, Helichrysum italicum, or santolina, or lavender) that may discourage browsing by deer and rabbits. ...

The book concludes with design plans for edible gardens that are aesthetically pleasing, functional, and inviting for humans as well as other living beings.

This is an excerpt. Read the full review in our online Gardening Answers Knowledgebase.

New Students:  Welcome to the Miller Library!

Welcome back, students and faculty – and a special welcome to new students.  Leaflet for Scholars is a monthly electronic publication just for you, highlighting the resources and services at the Elisabeth C. Miller Library particularly for academic study and research. Anyone can subscribe on our website.

The Miller Library collection focuses on plants and gardens, complementing without duplicating the collections at Suzzallo-Allen, Odegaard, and the Built Environments Libraries. Our staff has decades of cumulative experience serving faculty and students. Visit us in Merrill Hall at the Center for Urban Horticulture. The library is open Monday 9-8; Tuesday-Friday 9-5* and Saturday 9-3 throughout autumn quarter, except for Thanksgiving weekend.

*Note: the Miller Library will close at 1pm on Thursday, October 13, so staff can attend the Celebration of Life for UW Botanic Gardens director Sarah Reichard.

New Edition of The Nature and Property of Soils
recommended by Brian Thompson

“If you are a student…you have chosen a truly auspicious time to take up the study of soil science.” This encouragement is found in the preface of the new fifteenth edition and is explained by emphasizing the growing need across many fields for scientists and managers with this expertise.

New to the Library