harvest

Simply put... recall spring time when you meant to plant but you put it off for a week and then another week and then you were furious with yourself for loosing 2 weeks of prime growing time and thus hindering your yield significantly.

Now we are in rain and cold and mold season and by checking out of the garden scene at this time you stand to have all kinds of good things start to rot. This is the time when the pioneers were going ape shit trying to store the food for the long winter. Of course they didn't have the options we have... our sissy society dictates that we make a call on the cell phone about how we are a little ache today so we need to go to a coffee shop and spend nine bones on some fancy coffee and a date square... and we then feel like we have accomplished something. I feel hate just thinking about it... how do you think the local newspapers would like a story about a pro side burned "maniac" going around and laying random beats on coffee shop consumers, all the while calming he is doing a service to society... probably wouldn't fly i say. And it would be wrong of course too, because a man gardener should spend his time bringing in crops.

Remember the spring spinach i froze? made a pizza the other day and sprinkled some of that on and felt rather regal come to think of it. Store food for use now... use refrigeration technology.

Did i ever tell you about my Hops plant? Of course Man hops make man beer and if you are against beer then you are against me, conprendo? So of course as an natural farmer and brew master i was all over getting some hops plants, but they are hard to buy, but with a little research and once you know what the plant looks like you can find it in back alleys all over town. I happened to be coming back from the gym on day, on a bike, down a back alley and i noticed a hops plant so i came back and dug up a tuber (a root portion that will grow a plant) and put it in my yard by the compost and the back fence... it took a while to get rolling but once it got over the fence where it could get full sunlight all day it took off like gangbusters, and i probably have enough hops for a 23 liter brew. Then i got to thinking what about the mother plant? How did it do? so i went back and the plant has climbed the hydro poll and is running along the hydro lines and there must be a few garbage bags full of hops on the plant. I will have to go take a picture because it is actually ridiculous how well that plant is doing... which of course means we need a cherry picker or a couple of good men with a 32 foot Vulcan ladder to reap that harvest. It's odd that my wife was just recently going off on how she doesn't think i should clear the leaves from the eves this year (we do have a very tall house) as it is too dangerous, and apparently she works with some doctor who was talking about how men come in with head injuries due to ladder related falls and there is a total cor-relation to the season and what the men were doing. I guess harvesting hops from a hydro line in a back alley is a bit off the charts, but could go in there with a disastrous apple harvest fiasco. I mean hops aren't that expensive, but again it is the principle... those hops are about to rot... wonder if i could just yank the damn vine down... there is that hydro issue? I'm thinking a fire truck could come in handy... how to get a fire truck there? think think think... we need those hops.

Those hops are now a symbol of everything i stand for... free good useful plant growth about to waste away in front of the eyes of a thousand hammerheads who throw Styrofoam and plastic from their farmed salmon purchase into the landfill thinking all the time that they have it harder than anybody in the history of civilization.

I'm a getting those hops, and I'm a brewing, and then I'm a swilling... that's the way we roll around here.

stay tuned