garden filching

In criminal law, theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent. Someone who carries out an act of or makes a career of theft is known as a thief, and the act of theft is known as stealing, thieving, or sometimes filching.

-Wikipedia

Remember i was barking on about my corn a little while back and i was worried about when to harvest it as to pick it when it was ready, and i was also wondering how the fertilization of the kernels would turn out... well it looks like i don't have to worry about that any more because some thief put a solid flinching on my corn. Not only did the bastards flinch the corn they fractured the stock of the corn plants so that the other cobs would be left to grow on a wounded plant... and it looks like they stood on my new lettuce, spinach, beet and chard plantings to do so.

This all happened shortly after i ran into a corn farmer who i pressed for tips about how to know when your corn is ready... the answer is when the sheath leaves around the cob start to part and bend away from the cob the corn is ready to be harvested... i had 2 cobs ready before the first wave of flinching occurred... it started as an email alert about some sucker in the garden who lost all their peppers and i was kind of like "Phew, good thing i wasn't fool enough to grow peppers... better go water my garden"... which soon turned into "holey shit my fucking corn is gone, son of a bitch, and they fucking broke the plant... AND STOMPED MY FUCKING LETTUCE... OK this is clearly a declaration of war".

After a hard days researching places to purchase razor wire, leg hold traps, poison spikes, mace bomb and lumber to build a tree fort/ hunting blind in the popular trees behind the garden i recalled how i got that massive scar on my shin:



You can't change the world and when you set a trap you are just liable to catch yourself adding insult to injury. I ended up meeting one thief a few days ago... i say one because i believe we are dealing with multiple people due to a significant body of evidence i have accumulated through the course of my investigation. As a Man gardener born and raised in Scarborough i should have by rites laid a beating on this person, but from what i saw was that life was already doing that... so i just tried a lesson. I tried to train that person to harvest food without damaging the plant, but all i could get was a consistent denial that the person even took any food and was just looking at the garden even though i was standing 4 feet away from this person as they ate my tomatoes and walked over my beet seedlings. For a moment i felt like those suckers in Alaska who were ruined by the exxon valdez oil spill, or anybody who tried to take Monsanto to court... basically you lose and the guilty deny any wrongdoing... the good news is that i just lost some vegetables because i was dealing with a poor sociopath, where as a remorseless corporation is a rich sociopath with the court of law bought an paid for. Ok this is getting ugly... i feel hate welling.

I think i said earlier you can't change the world, as a collection of people we are just to stupid to see the light... too distracted by the carrot that is really just a mirage. So what? You have to find a way to live in it... and that is why at this time i would like to declare Corn a "negative crop" (for a community garden). What does that mean? It means that when you plant corn not only do you not get to eat the corn but the plants around the corn are susceptible to a mean clumsy foot stomping and so your yield on the corn is a gross negative. And that is the game of Man gardening... to reap rewards, not suffer troubling setbacks. My beans and broccoli are going strong but my cherry tomatoes are there saying "come over here for a feed and a stomping".

Next year there will be no corn, and the tomatoes will be planted on the edge of the garden so as not to encourage flinchers to go for a little feed and stomp. For the record we have eaten a lot of tomatoes so i can't classify it as a completely negative crop... you just have to keep on it to remove the tempting fruit as it comes ripe. i might actually experiment with a perimeter of stinging nettle around the garden but i fear for my children on that one... however i believe that learning to overcome hazards is a good parenting technique.

The garden is now 3 years old and i am afraid that it has identified itself as a food source for people who may need food more than the rest of us... perhaps we need a decoy garden beside our garden but something tells me that wouldn't fly given the fact that the city workers that care for the park have killed all of the trees by "weed eating" the bark around the base of the trees and they mowed down all of the blueberry bushes around the garden because it was the easiest thing to do (video coming).

One of those "nobody loves you" moments, but you can't let it get you down... i can buy corn, and gardening is about the thrill of being part of your food creation... being robbed is an uninspiring feeling, so you have to know your game and play it properly.

On a better note i harvested some of my celery today as we were making chili for lunch and needed some aromatic vegetables to fry in oil to set the stage for proper seasoning... bingo celery is a winner, even though it has a few known carcinogens in it's makeup... that's life in 2010. Do you know that laws have been passed that give retroactive immunity to oil companies for the carcinogens put in gasoline additives... suck it up suckers.