Well well, the Man collective has spoken... on tomatoes

So i got a nice email from a fellow MAN gardener and he had this to say:

"trim the bottom leaves off you tomatoes, they get no sunlight, then wrap the stalk with a bit of bare copper wire. no more slugs. originally I was going to put a loop of cu, and a loop of al. poor mr slug would be a battery. ouch. but apparently mr slug won't cross the copper."

Clearly the man is insane, but who isn't around here... when the going gets fucked the fucked get going...

What i do like is the attitude... the man attitude... as the bible kind of insinuated "do unto others before they get a chance to unto to your tomatoes".

the other great thing about this is that he solved the problem... the slugs won't cross the copper wire, but he never would have thought of that... it came out of a need to damage the culprits. Now as a natural scientist i was wondering about things you discover trying to solve other problems. Our Man Andrew discovered that copper wire will keep the slugs at bay... (until they become really hungry perhaps.. time is the hunter on that dog)... but what if you did set up a current? What affect would that have on the tomato plant in terms of raw yield? We defiantly know that currents from electromagnet forces do have an impact on living beings.

I remember in university taking a course in vertebrates and we did an experiment where we stressed fish with currents... that was until "Seed Corn" a guy who's father was a chicken farmer... he was a king hell riot of a guy and a very dangerous person to be around in terms of freak accidents and other tomfoolery... anhyoo Seed Corn ate our fish on a bet and so when the lab instructor came over to our tank to check out our experiment, we had a bit of a "missing fish" dilemma that never really got properly explained.

What I'm getting at is that the right current could be beneficial to the plant's tomato yield by creating an unnatural tomato growth spurt inspired by the effects of the electrical current... i would guess that unnatural= bad, as things usually work that way, but remember bad can be good if it makes money... a uniquely human trait.

But Man gardening is about producing for yourself... about not going to the grocery store but rather to the garden. And our man Andrew is correct in the management of tomato leave plucking... a few of my friends are Italian and there are many stories of people spending a lot of time pinching off tomato leaves to keep the right balance in the plant.

Plants need space to thrive and sometimes they compete with themselves for that space and your job as a Man Gardner is to help the plant make those decisions. Food producing plants have been "selected" over the years of human cultivation ... actually a form of genetic modification, for traits other than learning to grow properly. it's all about the yield, or in Monsanto's case it's about the yield and the elimination of anything that stands in the way of total market domination... but their plants have a team of corporate lawyers happy to bankrupt any opposition who's position is completely logical and necessary in terms of the propagation of life...

getting a bit off topic... nothing quite like a Monsanto rage... Monsanto is a seed corporation that is one of the clearest representation of the devil on this planet.

I myself don't have a problem with slugs on my tomatoes, perhaps that is because i have much tasty lettuce nearby for the slugs to feast on and they leave my tomatoes alone. Our Man Andrew also mentioned that he is actually a balcony gardener so I'm thinking it might be a good idea next year to go with all new soil... or bake the soil he has in his oven to kill off any vagrant slugs... of course he is going to have to recommend that his neighbours who have garden balconies bake all of their soil as well and sometimes if these people are not MAN gardeners they might foolishly thing that baking their soil in small increments is a waste of time... i guess if copper wire works.

kind of fun to imagine the strata meeting where they tell everybody with a balcony that they need to bake their potting soil because the building is about to be wrapped in copper wire and the slugs will be no longer.

I remember running a garden, or a few of them in our last place and when i suggested a rain barrel to collect water for a portion of the garden that had no water access there was a pack of lunatics that were worried that the rain barrel would encourage mosquitoes to live... and that was around the time there was a malaria panic in the news... so that meeting came to an unfortunate conclusion... i was glad i wore my pyjamas to that meeting... sometimes a strata council president needs to make his point... don't worry they were a nice plaid pyjamas.