Hobbies are for fun, Man Gardens are for production

As i get older i am slowly able to accept the fact that some people like the idea of doing things better than actually doing them, and doing them right is something all together different.

Gardening has a classic case of this... people come out like gangbusters on a weekend in the spring and plant a ton of stuff, call it a garden, and spend the rest of the summer at social events telling people they are trying to impress that they are indeed gardeners. There is a certain person i know of who for the past 4 years has filled their garden with rows of squash plants. The first year i was very concerned because of course squash plants get very big and for a garden of this person's size i would estimate that 2 squash plants will fill the whole garden. So by planting 30x more you do not actually do better but actually far worse... all the plants fight each other for resources and are overcrowded, are more susceptible to disease, and especially in Vancouver where it is often not hot enough and becomes too rainy for the fruit to properly mature before the blight sets in.

So i pointed this out, thinking that this knowledge could be of use to somebody who was thinking of a squash harvest down the line... they would hear none of it and were emotionally attached to all 60 plants... now when fall came, that plot was a blighty mass of underdeveloped rotting squash plants... on the harvest scale it was a total bust.

So the next year the person did the same thing... i was in disbelief. I tried to remind the person of last years folly but it was if last year never registered and even in that person's memory it seemed, was full of fall squash feasts that never happened. Was i bursting a bubble mentioning this failure? I just wanted to help... no help was needed because their game was to plant 40 squash plants and then spend the summer feeling good that yes indeed they were a gardener. In the second year somebody gave them a nice cherry tomato plant that did great and i watched as the wonderful tomatoes ripened and then fell to the ground and rotted. It caused great conflict in my soul... should i just pillage this plant and eat like a king, but that would be garden theft... and garden theft is for immature scoundrels and McGill Math Professors. In reality i should have done it because that person had got all they wanted from the garden, a licence to walk around with the label "Gardener"... i have learned that it is very important for humans to have labels... it gives a sense of comfort and belonging, and that's fine (hell I'm a MAN GARDENER and fully happy with what that means).

It's all about opportunity... for example a person like this presents a Man gardener with a key opportunity to "silently" tend their garden and have the spoils. A cherry tomato plant (sweet 100) is a perfect one for that (not too much work)... just slip it in a good spot where it will get lots of sun... nail it some water and presto lots of excellent food that you can pillage slowly over time without being noticed. Obviously if you can slip a large tomato plant in somebodies garden without them knowing it's not too hard of an operation. And for comedy, the dream situation would be to attend a party with the said person gulping back tomatoes that you grew on their land as they are explaining to somebody of the opposite sex how they are really into gardening and then you chime in with and I'm loving these ____ special tomatoes (the ___ being the initials of the person)... and then a tumbleweed goes blowing by and people carry on. it's hilarious, nutritious, free and nobody gets hurt and everybody gets what they want.

So the other day who do i see planting a few rows of squash? Un fucking believable... i hope that gardening is just an abnormality in this persons way of life. Is there a word to describe making the same mistakes over and over again and learning nothing. actually that is very human come to think about it... perhaps this person is a politician who gets a tax break if they have a garden... that makes sense. So I threw some basil in the plot and i plan to kill off most of the squash slowly as they grow bigger... clearly i can get away with this as fact retention with respect to gardening has a zero reading with this person... Hell maybe i can make their garden roll and get them into it... but that would cut into my yield... best to let them smile and don't burst any bubbles.

Squash tip of the day... bury a mound of organic material (compost) that makes a hill and plant your squash on top of it (called squash mound). You can even start the plants indoors and transfer them to the squash mound later. Also note that squash like heat... one thing you can do is put black material under the squash fruit... the black will absorb the sun's rays and pump up the temperature to help ripen... but the golden rule is to know your climate... grow the damn food that grows best in your climate. It's like the spinach thing i talked about yesterday... know your plants life cycle and put that plant in it's ideal environment. There are no Mango's in Alaska remember... hell I'd have a mango tree in my yard if it could produce, but it ain't going to happen, but that doesn't mean i don't want it to happen. You have to separate fantasy from reality when dealing with a garden because the garden follows the pure science of growing. That's why i don't grow chili peppers... it ain't right for a Vancouver climate... not that i don't fantasize about one day having a geothermal powered MAN greenhouse... but that is next decade.

spring harvest, Mr. Stingie and some other things

I am loathe to admit that we were at a large "big box" type of store today to load up on milk and other items and one of the things we were looking for was chile powder because i was thinking that chile was the thing to have for dinner, but there was no satisfactory chile powder so we re-planned and i got my head around a BBQ.

And then it was mentioned that we had no vegetables and i had to stop, take a breath and remind the youngins that we were in fact the beneficiaries of a MAN GARDEN.

Spinach, lettuce, beet tops, green onions, broccoli and Swiss chard are always a menu option. Truly amazing how people step into a store and forget where they came from, what they want and what they need. Put that one on your wall.

How to harvest:

Always good to look professional when you go to the garden... you need an aggressive look, a look that Say's "don't fuck with my garden you simple son of a bitch".



Takes me back to my Scarborough roots and getting ready for a road hockey match between the Conlins Road Canada Jays vs. the Bobmar Bobcats... if the game was on Bobmar street and our team walked over from our home turf on Conlins road we felt the need to intimidate before the game begins.

Let the kids worry about crazy old man Robertson in his double Mac attack, all barking on about how good it is that it rained today... it can work to take the focus away from the garden... the proverbial gold.



A good healthy spring harvest for sure, somebody is on the ball as a real man should be. But today's harvest didn't come without it's moments. The other day i allowed a woman to harvest from a Man garden and she apparently found a slug in the lettuce... who knows when and where and how, but for sure they are there. (notice the pro redwood tree in our front lawn). I Harvest lettuce and spinach by the leaf for just such a reason... what you are also doing is thinning and plucking mature leaves from the plants where space is becoming harder to come by. the plants will naturally fill space so if you are in tune with your garden you can have this in mind as you harvest. Again this is an example of the "garden needs love" philosophy and love is knowing what is needed... put that on your fridge in those little magnet letter things... unless of course you went all style on the cheap and got an imitation stainless steel fridge which is non fucking magnetic, which undermines the kitchen, which is the centerpiece and activity hub of the whole damn family unit. Don't cheap out on that shit get a magnetic stainless steel fridge or go old school white because a fridge door is a place for high art and quality reminders like "love is knowing what is needed".

The one leaf at a time plan also gives opportunity for proper inspection of quality and presence of invertebrates. Sitting on one of the leafs i was about to pluck was a hornet that looked at me with those eyes that said "sure i know its Sunday but I'm just aching to sting somebody into next week". The lesson of course is focus and being aware of what you are doing when you are doing it, another beautiful gardening/life metaphor. You need that hornet there because that yellow-man is feeding on the things that are feeding on your man plants, the hornet is your alley in the quest to produce produce. Hey man i just did it... i used the same word as a verb and then a noun... not quite as good as my original rage hero's quote "The fucking fridge is fucking fucked", but perhaps more tasteful... did i just work fridges from a different angle again... Whats the score here MULE... has the Man Nanning blueberry wine eroded my judgment?

I never worry about a wasp or a bee out in the garden... they do what they need to do, and i do what i need to do the main thing being not to grab them or trap them in my clothing. It's when a wasp gets inside the house i start to worry... surely all the signs of armageddon are flashing to the wasps reality telling the wasp "you have to sting what you can, while you can" (for smash). That's what glasses and hardcover books are for... or at least i should say that glasses and hardcover books together have a good secondary function of being able to trap (in a sting proof container) wasps so that they can be released back out to the garden.

And now for the Man gardening tip of the day... your spinach is riding high now, but soon the heat of summer will be too much... it's time to plant beans in that space, it will take a while for the beans to take over but then the spinach will be at the end of it's game and it will be bean time. Nothing beats fresh garden beans, and if you are smart you will have frozen some of your spinach for mis-summer lasagna or curries. And then in mid august you can shock in a few more spinach seeds for a fall harvest which will then again overtake the beans.

OK don't thank me just do it for yourself

and the BBQ... they said you can't BBQ in the rain:

fools



this is the Man BBQ central station... taken in early march... the Magnolia tree hasn't even bloomed and now a good beer brewing hops plant is going ape shit to the left of the Man BBQ station... fully weatherproof so that sissery never gets in the way of a proper BBQ. Always do what you need to do... never let the weather dictate your plans.

Etch that one in stone.

it was a beautiful day

yes indeed a nice cloudy cool day with a touch of rain on and off... a perfect day for some mature spinach plants to lay down some serious vegetative growth. The kind of day that can put a man at ease knowing that his spinach won't be forced into going to seed (which happens in the hot weather). As a thinking man i assumed everybody would be thinking the same but then some crazy kook lady at the park started complaining about the weather... you know the kind of thing a lot of lesser humans do... complain about things they can't control all the while looking at the negative side of things. I reached for my smashing brick, but then remembered that a smashing brick should only be used on charging bears or fitness club stereo Nazi's who kill good classic rock to put on auto-tune pop bullshit.

I though OK, the woman has a pack of kids so it could be that she is just not thinking straight... that can happen... you get those yappers yipping and it goes to that part of your brain that just shouldn't be violated. So i gently pointed out the benefits of this kind of weather but she was steadfast in her denial and dug into the idea that this weather gave her the green light to subject a professional neighbourhood man to some insufferable winery. So then i pointed out that the lack of direct sunlight could be good in that it could save her getting a sunburn on that beak of hers, but then i remembered that the harmful rays can still get through cloud cover so i offered her some sunscreen, but for some bizarre reason she was through with me. I tried to remind her of all of the good man ideas i had brought to our discussion (proper spinach growth, seeing positive in negative, skin care reminder) i though them to be new age, "green", and sensitive topics but there was no dice.

so i just went and did a little weeding... if you keep on it, overwhelming is not a feeling you need to battle... although it is good to battle and defeat "overwhelming"... it is all about compartmentalizing the battle... like in a hockey playoff series you just go out and focus on your one shift and then the next one... don't worry about winning the game or the series... good things will come if you do the little things you need to do... I'm sure there is some sissy version of the metaphor out there, but this is a MAN garden blog.

Nothing is better than Man weeding... you focus on your area and you pluck the weeds out making sure to get all of the roots and then shake the roots to keep that good man garden soil in your man garden... you work for a while and it feels like you have accomplished nothing but later when you stand back and you see the region that you just weeded it looks clean and tidy with only you pro man vegetables in the soil and the sunlight... and that's a real good feeling and an excellent metaphor for life.

Man Green onions

So I was putting together a Man sized lunch for the girls and our lunch guests the Hey Rocks.

A little Tuna salad sandwich would go well with the pasta and soup, and what makes a Tuna salad extra delectable... fresh onion greens, or chives.

If you can't grow chives, please go yo your local tattoo shop and get "I am not Man enough" on your forehead. In time you will see the error of your ways and with the help of mirrors and daily man beard grooming, as well as those awkward moments at social events where you keep having to explain why you have a disparaging word tattoo on your forehead... you will find that chive growth is actually very simple.

I send my children out to harvest the chives...its a plant children can't damage and it's good for them to learn. You wouldn't get a child to harvest your sweet peas (for example), because with that overzealous energy and lack of total focus they would probably damage the main vine and put a major dint in the plants ability to further produce fine peas....

our guests are here...

Strawberries

Five things about strawberries...

1) the name actually comes from the fact that they grow well when straw is laid down for the plants to grow amongst. The main theory is that the straw helps keep the ground moist, in that i protects the ground from the drying rays of sunlight. Of course finding straw in the city is a natural fiasco because of course city planners have been brain damaged for most of the century.

2) the plants spread like weeds sending "Runners", or roots away from the main plant to quickly dominate a region. If one was in a rock and roll band and they had ideas about "spreading the music to the world" they might want to take a look at the mighty Strawberry because things that naturally succeed do so for a reason. The difference between a gaggle of hammerheads talking big to themselves about how their next album is going to be so good it's going to go gold, is shockingly different from a plant that grabs energy and puts it into an underground network to drive solid bases in other communities and then springs out and starts kicking ass.

3) Strawberries are very nutritious but yet are also among the 12 foods on which pesticide residues are found in very high quantity. Therefore you should eat organic Strawberries... or grow your own Man Strawberries.


4) Although Man Strawberry farming is the way to go it perhaps might be a bit too much work to haul you neighbours old concrete laundry tubs out to your garden and countersink them to the ground level so that you can contain your strawberry patch withing you garden. Don't get me wrong... definitely a man thing to do, but it's a lot of work. As a thinking man, if i were to do it again i would just make a foundation and pour fresh concrete walls a few feet high. that way you don't have to loose sleep at night worrying about the drainage in your strawberry patch.

5) Strawberry Beer is made in Belgium and in fact is just flavoured with some sweet strawberry action, rather than fermented with strawberries... as we know, any man worth his guitar callouses will make alcohol with his organic strawberries and you can write that one down

ask not what your garden can do for you but what you can do for your garden

On the way to hockey i was talking to one of my buddies about gardening, he has allowed a community group to come in and garden in his backyard in an effort to learn about gardening and in the spirit of sharing with ones community.

One of the things that came up was that he was told that his garden needed more love and that it was important to have people spend time with his garden so some people (who apparently had background criminal checks... who's worried now) were going to come and spend some time hanging out with his garden... and from what he understood they figured that their presence was going to will the garden into a fest of blossoms that the world has yet to see.

Let me set the record straight... man gardening = pro gardening and company= weeding watering and pest monitoring. What one doesn't need is some groovy hippie sitting in a lawn chair in some Zen prayer, not that I'm against hippies in Zen prayers, but if you really want action get your ass out there in the garden at midnight with a quality headlamp and start picking off nocturnal invertebrates that savage plants. Too much for you little sissy... i say if a man can stand in a bar at midnight toasting the fact that his early spinach salads are delectable (which a man should do) then surely that same man can pop out to the garden @ 1:00 AM for a half hour of quality slug plucking. And then in the morning when the average wuss is sipping a coffee and feeling sorry for himself a real man would pack a coffee and get out there and lay a good soaking on the garden. Any man worth his ginch can suck back a man sized coffee and work a garden hose, and what a way to start your morning! You visualize your plants ready to start the day and they have all they need and then you see yourself in your plants and you transfer that positive man energy into making your day the most productive it can be. All day long you know your plants are taking that sunlight, capturing that energy, an creating nutritious and delicious food... what are you doing? Are you Man enough?

next time we will talk about co- planting, soil preparation and other things that i happen to think of and remember as i harvest dinner.