A little Christmas gardening

One of the reasons I moved to Vancouver a long time ago can be summed up with the word "climate". I love pond hockey and you will never get that in Vancouver but what you lose in pond hockey you make up for in winter gardening. Mind you we did take quite the chill in November that put a serious skid on my celery operation, which in turn has affected my soup production. If I were a wise Robertson I would have had that tarped and protected... meaning winter greenhouse.

My fall garden took a hit from the stooge city workers that look after the park (the greatest threat to the parks welfare for sure). The aggressive hammerhead with the itchy trigger finger on the weed eater took down all of my peas in a simple act of mind-boggling incompetence... perhaps he just didn't want to work that day and he felt that his job sucked and he was so hard done by that he may as well do a really shitty job as an act of protest. After about 5 calls to the city I finally got them to put some plastic protectors around the base of all of the expensive new trees that were put in the park because those fucking idiots kept ringing all of the bark off of the young trees with lazy and indifferent weed eating... they did kill a few trees BTW.

Anyway lets get back to the garden and away from the apathetic city parks crew.

I still hadn't planted that "Bold point garlic" so i needed to get it in the ground and I was more than ready to call the Robertson strawberry patch a complete failure. Recognizing a failure is a success of course when it comes to gardening... climates and plants and soil and concentrations of pests are all variables with every crop so your role as a gardener is to take stock of the particulars of your plot of land and act accordingly with respect to maximum yield to your desired crops. Perhaps i mentioned before that last spring i lugged my neighbours old cement laundry sinks over to the garden and counter sunk them into the plot of land at incredible effort to myself in the bizarre hope that they would serve as a proper strawberry planter. I don't even understand me some days... like when i was a kid in the principals office and Mr. Gough the principal looked at me enraged... his lower lip quivering and the question was usually "what were you thinking" and the answer was usually something along the lines "it seemed like a good idea at the time but in retrospect i can't make any sense of my actions either". Dumbfounded would be the word i would use to describe his facial expression after that... the good news is now that I'm older usually when i do something bizarre I just harm myself (some people do suffer collateral damage i guess it might be fair to mention).

So Laundry tubs as strawberry planters in a garden in Vancouver... Well it didn't work... my take:

Bad genetic variety of strawberries, slugs, poor drainage, strawberries spread over the planter immediately anyway... very low yield of odd shaped half eaten berries.

Things i did wrong:

Saw the extremely heavy laundry tubs out by the curb and thought "hey i have a good idea", lost my mind an put too much mushroom manure in the tubs, was overconfident about the tubs ability to drain itself.

So on Christmas i dug all the soil (or manure for that matter) out of the tubs, got rid of the strawberry plants, took a 16lb sledge hammer and smashed out the bottom of the damn tubs (or at least broke it up), put some more natural sandy soil in the tubs and planted the "Bold Point Garlic" in the boundary that was defined by the laundry tub. Then I nailed some other garlic in the ground around the tub that was not of the bold point variety so i can keep them separate.

For the record, in a perfect world one should plant garlic in the fall, but lats face it the world is far from prefect and word from the Garlic guru down the street is that you can pretty much do anything to garlic and it will carry on.

I also did a little clean up. A little garbage pick up around the park is good for the soul. remove all the dead pea stocks from the fence and remove my removable fence extensions for taller pea growth. looks cleaner, neater sharper and more ready for the coming season.

Things to do:

Order quality seeds, go dig up some of those hops roots and get some in the new "roundabout" on our street and in the back alleys. Keep an ear to the ground and a thumb on the pulse of the neighbourhood. Engage various people about gardening to 1) put the itch in others, and 2) pick up some hot tips.

Also i finally finished the studio recording of that song i wrote about that time i ripped my leg open on a rusty metal bar that i put in the garden to base a fence off of because my garden neighbours at the time would just walk all over my plants and i foolishly thought a fence or boarder would offer protection but of course it backfired and i nearly killed myself. Greet the world with love no matter what face it shows you is the lesson.


I call the song Rage hero episode #37 because i figured it was about the 37th time in my life that i have seriously injured myself at the hands of some inane scheme i devised to "make life easier"... Genny Trigo sang it and killed it.

happy new year gardeners.