second planting... or manning up again

I am a man who gardens by region, which is a good method for a man who gardens and parents at the same time. Good for the short blasts of focused effort... so today i laid down some more peas, popped in some more beets and nailed down a new scattering of beans.

There is still a lot of time left in the coastal growing season... in a good year one can get a lot of solar power to those little chlorophyll factories we know and love as chloroplasts in August, September and the early October.

Chloroplasts are organelles found in plant cells and eukaryotic algae that conduct photosynthesis. Chloroplasts capture light energy from the sun to produce the free energy stored in ATP and NADPH through a process called photosynthesis.

Basically if you can get the damn plant some sunlight and keep it hydrated the plant can take care of the rest and you can amaze people with your "green fist"... sissies have green thumbs, Man gardeners have green fists... and the reason you have a green fist is for "garden security"... i believe we have been over this, so lets move on.

With the weeding and culling last week i had a chance to see my garden as a larger organism which helped to identify areas of need. Well it happened that we were loving the beets i harvested last week so we need more (beets will have no problem growing into the fall)... we had been feasting heavily on an area of chard and lettuce in an effort to clear out some space and with the weeding i realized that the space was there... so in go the beets... one seed per hole and give then room to grow. Make fun designs with them.... i planted mine in a kind of rainbow pattern, and then filled in under the rainbow with more beets.

I laid down the peas in among the older peas... that will help them climb up to the lattice to spawn the second wave of Robertson Pea devouring... I did damaged a few of the pea plants with my insane "savage weed attack", but it's what you have to write of as collateral damage.

I dumped a few more corn plants off on the new guy who took over from the people who inspired the song "rage hero episode #37". He was late into the garden... late like mid-summer and needs plants to learn about gardening. We had a good little chat... i had this idea of just gardening plots that were abandoned for various reasons but this guy took over the plot after i had taken it over, but he actually legitimately took it over by waiting on a list for a couple of years. Anyway i introduced myself told him how to care for his broccoli plant, and i enlightened him on my philosophy on the history if his plot and made various initial suggestions based mostly on soil preparation. He appreciated that but by then i was on a roll... i had a garden student in front of me... somebody who was listening to me talk... he was standing there nodding his head with a trowel and a corn plant in one hand and a piece of broccoli in the other. Well i had to cut him off from listening to me and we had to get that corn in the ground... so we did and then i gave him another.. it was a corn plant in the entrance to my garden that takes a beating when people try to take a shortcut into the garden if you know what i mean. I laid some beans down there... funny corns and beans... apparently if you are a vegetarian you should eat corns and beans because together the two vegetables have all of the essential amino acids your body needs.

I actually have some corn cobs growing... it will be interesting to see if they got fertilized properly... that is if a local squirrel doesn't make off with the bounty before Robertson teeth get a chance to do some sinking.

That said the Man vs Squirrel comedy is one of the finest ones out there. As a young child the hours of amusement i got from my father who was trying to keep the squirrels out of the bird feeder, was pure genius. And then the chipmunks in the attic at the cottage rolling acorns around at night... brilliance. To my fathers credit he did come out on top... eventually after he systematically deleted their options one at a time.

Plant observe experiment.

You are not growing the plants.. they can do that themselves... you are their guardian and for your efforts you are rewarded with the finest reward... fresh produce.

vacationing and Gardening have their problems

I put everybody and his brother in charge of my garden while i was away... i was going to write a blog about how to prepare for a departure but then i realized that my thousands of followers would be aware of my whereabouts and some of them might be hardened hard core criminals and come and rob be while i was away. So knowing these as clear facts i decided against it and now i have garden confusion... garden confusion can happen very easily... holey shit my wife just walked into the room and i passed the idea that a chair next to me should be reupholstered with a plaid tartan and she agreed... Ok

where was i

Garden Confusion, also know as OGD Overwhelming Growth Disorder

you lose the space between good and bad, right and wrong just a blur of green.

You need a good hour block of "Savage attack weeding", which can have it's problems, the main one being that you get into a rhythm of pulling out weeds and you end up bagging the odd bean plant... and wouldn't you know it the first bean plant i yanked from the ground was the one with the Popsicle stick with my daughters name on it... son of a gun... she knows where it is... it still had some root on it so i stuck it back in the ground and then flooded the area.

One thing i have found with heavy weeding or lettuce harvesting is that it really brings in the stinging insect carnivores. i think it has to do with the fact that when you take away foliage you expose things that were not exposed before... the wasps must be aware of this and in actual fact i saw a wasp on the ground trying to fly away with a large grub but it couldn't so it just bit off a piece that it could fly off with and took off... and then the ants came in to feast in the bountiful man garden.

The other fear you have is weeding around peas... i think sometimes it is better not to pull out the roots of plants that share root territory with you pea roots because you can do a lot of damage to root systems... better to just shut down the green matter on those plants to give the peas the advantage in the game for life. I always loose my mind in times like these... it is because i am an impatient person... sometimes inpatients can be a good thing, like when it's a flowering plant (yuk yuk). Impatience can force the game but is often not the best mix for a long term plan like growing things

I had to weed because my new neighbour, the 70 year old Vietnamese lady put the fear of lazy shame into me

While i was away apparently she stopped certain friends of mine that i had assigned to harvest and eat. She was like a crow on a great horned owl when old clubfoot Sam (local blues player) came to water and pick some peas. This is something i can get behind... that is a gatekeeper for a man garden if i ever saw one! In a more negative side affect she was all over me... she is like a "no weed in the garden" kind of person while i tend to be a more garden by region kind of guy. True that i was away for a few weeks and then last weekend was the folk music festival so i tend to resemble a sun stroked exhausted alcoholic rather than a eager garden master with a keen eye for what is actually happening on the gardenbed level.

But when your garden neighbour reminds you of a few areas of your garden neglect (like weeds and over-ripe produce) you must play it like a hockey game... you had a bad shift so you get scolded and then you fly back out on the ice and come up huge with a big effort that says you know you were wrong and it will never happen again... and if it does than the next time you will place the large dandelion like weed that has insane spikes on it in your underwear for the day to serve as a lesson. The other lesson of course is to let people pick things that are ripe and loosen the ownership curve a bit on bountiful fresh produce that you foster.