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.