Monsoon season is upon us

A wise man once said "you gotta get what you can, while you can",  right now the pacific Northwest Garden is screaming that at it's caretakers.  I have 3 buckets of green tomatoes in my kitchen... gone are the good old days of  a fresh tomato off the vine in the morning on a bagel with cream cheese and seasoning.   You have to play the game you are in... one of the key things missed by the average chuckle head consumer sheeping around this wonderful planet.   Not everything that comes out of a garden has the look of the kind you might come to  expect from a lifetime of seeing vegetables on a supermarket shelf only... remember everything has a purpose. I reduced a collection of rogue tomatoes in a pot with garlic and onion for future sauce,  it was kind of random and a half distracted on my part... I wasn't really into it but it was that or provide King Hell habitat for the population of fruit flies i seem to have swarming ever so close to the beer brewing carboys.  The green tomatoes will turn red in time...  make sure you monitor them for trouble areas.  Sometimes spots will go bad and you will have to make some executive decisions. I left some of the plants should they manage to keep producing... I've always been kind of a Hail Mary kind of person.. sunny today so perhaps i was on to something.

My melons are in, all 5 of them, and i have a fair collection of peppers, many of them dragon hot... you see i made a salad tonight and cut into what i though might be a small red bell pepper, but that was not the case... as they say in yoga: i was doing a serious round of "lion's breath".  I picked all of the beans, but of course you leave the bean roots in the soil, as they will put nitrogen back into the soil, and perhaps squeak out another round of beans.  I also picked a bunch of heirloom purple beans from a local neglected garden, which was a good call.  I should mention the beans were all dried on the stock from general neglect... they will provide fine seeds next season.

The carrots, beets, chard and spinach can hang for now, in an "eat as you need" type of relationship, and the kale is going steady.  I believe i have red Russian kale, and it makes a fine kale chip.  I do eat kale chips now... perhaps i mentioned my kale chip experience... i went to learn about Cob house building and the damn hippies were just sitting around making kale chips.  Clearly it angered me, but i have changed my tune... or flip flopped as they say in political jargon.  Apparently you can't change your position in politics... it's a sign of weakness... gathering facts and re-assessing changing landscapes is for silly fuckers and not strong leaders.  Strong leaders have a position and no amount of enlightenment can change that... enlightenment is for the weak, apparently.  By the same token oil and salt and secret Robertson spicing methods on baked to a crisp Kale leaves, is also for the weak... i wolfed back a bushel of kale in a day... shit happens.  I never would have bet on me eating a bushel of kale in a day, in fact i often associated the word "kale" as synonymous with the word "unpalatable"... live and learn.  I was also part of an online community of people who hate cilantro at one time, but that was before i learned ho to properly use it.  The lesson... well there are a few...  1) never let some dip shit hippie try to tell you that cilantro, garbanzo beans, brown rice and vinegar is a delectable treat, and 2) Learn from people with strong cultural culinary backgrounds on how to use cooking ingredients.  A little bone wisdom for you out there... rather than hate people who come from different cultures, because they are different, embrace them and milk them for culinary and life wisdom.  Other gardening note would be that slugs love cilantro.. do unto them before they undo to to, as  the bible hints at... it's really a translation issue, my leaders tell me this is the way and i pay them handsomely for the guidance.

Soon i can dig up those potatoes... you see i didn't want to dig around the roots of the other plants to harvest potatoes given that the God damn squirrels were so busy digging up all of the  the plants I fell into random planting disorder.  Kind of modeled after the sea turtle life cycle survival pattern... the sea turtle lays a shitload of eggs and only a few will mature as they will be picked off by scavengers hungry for an easy meal...  so basically i just ended up planting everywhere and hoped something would survive, as my loon neighbour's plan of "hopefully the family of squirrels that i have had living in my porch for 3 generations won't dig the endless supply of peanuts i put out for them and the rats into your garden" didn't really work out... hope is for suckers.

It's fall now people!

What good is a garden if you are not feasting from it come harvest season?  We are, and have been in harvest season  for some time people.  I kind of got involved in a major project the last few weeks so the garden was a bit neglected, of course it got watered... this is not the kind of criminal neglect that some of the amateur gardeners out there are use to laying on their rookie plots.. I'm talking about the general maintenance... the gentle eye monitoring progress, the constant harvesting and finger tinting that comes with supper preparation.  Me, i was high up on a ladder fighting hurricane winds protecting an investment so to say.

A garden is an investment, but more of a lifestyle investment.  Many people put more money in a garden than food they get out of it if you look at the raw economics of it, given your time and all.  But time spent in a garden is good time, a kind of Zen peace, a footprint model on how to live the good life.  Less trips to the produce store means less passes through the salty snack food isle.

Tonight i made chili and when i got to the part where it asked for a can of tomatoes, and i had none, for a moment  i thought i was in trouble... and then i realized i had many dozen ripe tomatoes all over the place.  My problem was solved before i even knew i had it... i solved that problem i would have in the fall last spring... pretty smart I'd have to say.

This weekend i see a bean and chard feast, a Greek salad and another round of kale chips.  Kale chips are pretty good even thought i thought i hated them before... it was the people making them i hated only because i wanted to learn how to make a cob house and when i got there hippies were making kale chips and very happy about that i might add.  I saw it as a blow to progress, and i also saw kale as an inedible shade creating menace.  i have met many people who claim to love kale, only to later dig out mounds of brown juiced soggy kale from the crisper.  Oil and salt and spice that kale and bake it to a fine crisp (don't fucking burn it) and it's like that tasty seaweed you can get in your fine asian markets, minus the radiation.  It was only a nuclear reactor spilling into the ocean... what could possibly go wrong.  That's why i am against Nuclear energy... as a human that naturally fucks things up i like to look ahead at my losses.  When this goes pear shaped what do i lose? But remember we live in a world where the economy, or some shallow views of it, rule the day.  Maybe if people could go to space and look at the earth as an entity a light might go one and they might think "holy shit, let's not fuck this up".

Did i just go off on another one of those tangents?  When shit get's you down and you start felling the hate walk away, find your love in your hear let it stay.  Ahh lyrics, my bible.

And we've got to get back to the garden...

I think this is a melon... after those bastard slugs murdered my first round of squash/ melon's, because of course i let them... i wasn't out there @ 3am in a killing frenzy, i was stupidly trying to live my life... that won't happen again.  Anyhoo it's getting late in the season so i did this:

I pinched off all of the extra flowers from the plant... the idea being, let's try and bring a few of these melons home.  Never mind trying to produce 30 melons just let me sink my fangs into a few.  For example, as i spoke of before, i believe i spent $3.99 on this plant from the local Portland nursery.  I knew it was late and the garlic was coming to an end in this part of the garden so it was kind of a hail mary pass.  The question is: Will i get a melon from this plant? Cause i could get a melon at the store, one that i chose for less than that.  A minor economic question that deserves consideration, but for me plants are my pets, just as squirrels are my nemesis... the time i spend gardening is as good for my soul as a $15 yoga class or a $25 hockey game.. they are just all different.

I take it personally when things in the garden don't pan out... as Rodney once said "i go down with my ships".. like a true captain.  What is life without passion?  Remember blind rage is just misdirected passion, or perhaps passion that is politically incorrect to flow with.  Speaking of that, isn't politically correct one of those things that makes no sense?  Everything is incorrect about politics, so to be politically correct would be wrong... right?

Little hot Thai chili peppers have a king hell fire to them... i guess i should figure out a way to dry some of these little reds.  My kids have a thing about hot peppers... my bad.. they love broccoli however because no fucking hammerhead has ever told them kids shouldn't like broccoli.

Speaking of broccoli i am getting some in now, after that bastard squirrel ate my whole plants i had to start fresh again with a Portland Nursery special.  I have definitely not got my money's worth yet but then again broccoli can go long into the season... we shall find out what this Oregon fall brings us.

Soon the maple tree will shed it's leaves and i will mulch them into the clay and triple mix soil that i have in an effort to make it better.  It takes a long time to get your garden soil just right, that's why it's best to not move every 5 years, but every negative has it's positives.  In the end it's all just memories and the memories are of the great yields one has from season to season.

Tacos, turnip and sanity

This is a Kohlrabi, or German turnip for the record, a solid anti-carcinogen as Dad would say... a crisp fresh peppery turnip that was thrown on my plate as a child while the health virtues were toted.

I shave it and lay it on a taco with Mexican cheese, and the man meat of choice... for the record that is how you do tacos.  The hybrid Canadian taco way is to season some ground beef in a bastard "taco" mix and pile with lettuce cheese ET AL.  The pro way to make tacos is to cook something properly, a meat or veggie option, and cover with Mexican cheese and a shaved Cabbage option, and don't forget to hit with fresh lime juice.  You can make different kinds of tacos but the trick is to stick with a simple flavour... we never learned that before... cook something properly and let it be the flavour of the taco... you can make different kinds of tacos, just don't start a competition within the taco. Competitions are good for games, eating should be a win win type of scenario.  It's OK to spell flavour as flavour, but just don't make a taco like some hybrid Canadian might, it's an insult to the culinary art.  For the record, shaved fresh garden carrots will be a good addition to your grilled and cheesed option... don't forget the fresh squeezed lime... and if you are man enough hit it with some hot peppers.

This is the kind of hot pepper a Man can take on his taco... you can do your best dragon imitation and the hydration that comes as a bonus will come in handy later should you fall into an accidental drinking session. By the way that is celery to the left of the pepper plant... good for man made soups.

Speaking of drinking, i have been noticing a sever lack of watering on some of the neighbourhood gardens.  Growing plants is easy... sun and plant genetics take care of most of the battle, all you have to do is make sure your plants are watered... I have heard many bogus watering rituals.. i have a simple one... if it's a hot sunny day you plant is probably thirsty, mind you later in the season like this the garden is lush, or should be, which provides shade for the soil which helps keep the moisture in the soil.

Again, don't wet your tomato leaves... wet the soil... actually soak the soil... we are coming into the blight season and the thing that spreads blight is moisture on the leaves... if you do water them make sure it is in the morning.  Dad's rule was to not water tomatoes after 4:00pm so they would not be wet throughout the night... There will be natural dew that will eventually take down the plant, but there is no point helping this disease.

Again, don't water beets @ peak sun, their leaves don't like that and will turn brown due to some physics magnifying affect... i guess if you believe in physics that is... if you don't believe in physics because science is against your religion then i would suggest praying after watering your beets in peak sun.. that way GOD will know to intervene and fix the human error.

Again, If you stay on task and keep picking your beans then they will flower again and produce more beans.

Also, if your squash, mellon or zuccuni are showing powdery mildew (a fine white coating on the primary leaves), then you want to keep an eye on what's happening.  You need to think in terms of cutting your losses.. will this fruit or will it be a source of disease?

As we close in on the season, we need to remove sources of disease and encourage sources of food. I know i have to kill a few squash plants that just aren't in the right place and big enough to star in the fall.  I of course blame the slugs and the squirrels for setting back my first batch of squash and melons.  Clearly next year i will have to defend better.  How will i do that?  Bigger seedlings, more barriers, set traps and be more vigilant on night killings.  I guess it would be ideal if i could win the lottery and then buy my neighbours house and then bring in the new rodent order over there...  but alas, lotteries are for suckers.  You don't throw random seeds in a garden, fuck off, and then come back to a bounty... it just doesn't happen.  You need to be smart, put in the work, observe, defend and do what is needed.  That's why gardening is a perfect metaphor for life... shit doesn't happen accidentialy, it happens becauese you worked for it.  Happiness is the state of knowing what you are doing is right and it will work out in the end... put that in a tweet and post it.

The best garden is the garden that feeds you

I realize there are a bunch of chuckle heads out there that like to plant a garden and think that they are all "green", whatever the hell that means.  Many of these simpletons forget to harvest the food... perhaps the tumbleweed that is rattling around in their head still makes the sound "I am a gardener".  Who knows, everybody is busy... too busy to get their food... only enough time to slog through traffic to go buy food from a food serving establishment.

If you are a chuckle head  i implore you to find the power within to change your ways, you can do it.  Or get in touch with myself and i will come and harvest your food... we are in that time of year where the weird line between stealing and salvaging start to blur.  Walking around the neighbourhood there are a few roadside gardens with produce starting to rot in them... like they say you can always tell a human but you can't tell them anything.  I'd even be happy to harvest the food for these people and get it to them like it would be in a store, but you know, start messing with somebodies garden, you are messing with their space, and taking their freedom... a real no no.  There needs to be more emphasis on food harvesting... because the stores sell vegetable starts they are promoted and there is a buzz among consumers to buy them and get with the program, but yet there is no consumer triggered response to harvest the food.  We need more harvest festivals... more harvest alerts... community "things we can make with tomatoes" contests.  Yes Yes, frame it in the idea of a contest... we like contests, everybody wants to be a winner!

Don't get me wrong, if planting a garden gets you outdoors in the spring touching the soil, then that's a good thing, i just hate to see waste.  Apparently North Americans throw away 40% of the food they buy... not to mention the idea that we shit in drinking water... but hey we share facebook links promoting environmental stewardship. Sure sure, it's easy to be a critic of a politician who is a puppet for polluting industry, because their line of crap just doesn't jive with reality.  What is reality?  Slippery slope for a gardening blog.  Reality is, if the food you grew is ready to eat you should harvest it.  Cut your broccoli before it is a mess of pretty yellow flowers, grab your tomatoes before they ooze back into the earth... and if your cilantro went to seed, then harvest the seeds... it's coriander, a fine spice.

Heirloom Tomatoes-

I planted a few this year... i will never go back.  Silver fir is a neat one.  They are a bit more susceptible to earwig infestations, but if i were an earwig, that's where i would want to be... inside of a delicious tomato.  The flavour and structure of the fruit is unparalleled and you can cut away the bits that have earwig infestation.  Some people get real squirrley when it comes to bugs in the food, but the alternative is chemicals on the food, or a tasteless tomato bred to look good on a shelf in a store.  I'll put it to you this way... a slug or a bug has probably been on your food  if it's worth eating.. that's why god created running clean water for the chosen folks like us... maybe it was science and technology that created running clean water... it's so hard to tell in these election years what the facts are.

Roma Tomatoes-

These are the tomatoes you cook with, they reduce down to a fine sauce.

Cherry Tomatoes-

Are for snacking on, or throw them into a salad.  Or you can get fancy and cut in half add basil, feta cheese, balsamic vinegar and a touch of spice to make a king hell salad.

We have been eating beans and Swiss chard at will, and a second round of hood strawberries is coming to fruit.  i have eaten a few carrots that my daughters washed up for me, and the beets are looking large.  I did waste the Vancouver Canucks victory salad... i put it back into the earth to fertilize for next season, if you know what i mean.  Will there be a next season? Or will some bizarre global weather phenomenon that nobody could have predicted shut things down.  Ahh the unfortunate side effects of of the human love of money... if i can have more money then screw the masses.

Living with less money should be the foundation of gardening, but it often doesn't work that way.  A poor man with a rich life grows his own vegetables and poaches his own meat, which reminds me to buy a fly fishing rig.  I need trout like i need omega oil. 

It's true... a vegetarian diet will cure what ails the man and the society he lives in, but for tomorrow i might have a BLT, to really use those heirloom slicing tomatoes.

Summertime will end when it's over

My tomato plants are stomping balls... trying to focus on the positive and not mention the "S" word... Let me tell you a fine heartwarming story.  Lets say there was this guy Mr. Schnrub... and say Mr. Schnrub went to Home Depo to pick up some bamboo stakes for garden support, because Mr. Schnrubs'  wife Mrs. Screetch likes to think tomato cages and hockey sticks are ugly... anyhoo we are getting off topic.  Schnrub goes into the store with a pack of maniac children to grab the bamboo, and notices one stack seems a bit fatter, so he just grabs that one, out of natural habit and checks out.

It's not until he is in the backyard later that he realises he bought 9 packages of bamboo for the low low price of one... they were all just taped together... Schnrub went looking for the receipt to rectify the system but ran into a beer, and then another, and next thing you know he was giving lectures to the local wives on "neat ways to stake your peas"... he gave away a lot of bamboo that day.

Mr. Schnrub had no bamboo left when i was poking around looking for some. Being a man who discovered that his tomato plants are killing it, i was in need of stakes.  Enter happy Sam... one of the guys on the other side of the street.  Actually back up to the other day when i was tying the grape vine up the telephone pole with my dwindling twine collection, and i lost the tail end of my twine collection... gone somewhere into the soul of a healthy vine.  Happy Sam is always happy to help out... Hell i still have his tree saw and he is loving my presence.. I ask him for bamboo stakes and twine... he comes up huge with the biggest smile on his face... he had twine in the trunk of his car and the motherload secret.  Earl has bamboo.. he gave me a few stakes from Earls plants.  Earl had planted the bamboo as a bit of a privacy wall but now the forest was descending... so when i went to ask Earl if he had any surplus Bamboo his face lit up and asked me if i wanted to prune for him... pretty much the answer i was hoping for.  Harvest your own Tomato stakes.  Bamboo is amazing stuff... I've never gardened it, but i was a bit intrigued.  Considering how expensive bamboo stakes are, i had visions of going to the Farmers market selling "artesian tomato stakes" at a grossly inflate price.  The selling point would be that these artesian tomato stakes have a series of 1/2 inch leave stock stems which will help to maintain twine line verdical from installation to harvest.  It's funny when you start dealing with sticks... you get a full plant specimen and you cut it down to what you need, and then for the first time, when presented with options you realize the possibilities... the kind of thought pattern that can really throw you into one of those "why are humans so fucking stupid mind tirades"... and then you snap out of it and remember to BE the change you would like to see.

But really a fine moment in community.  I was faced with driving a car out to a store to buy something when i realized i could harvest a better version of what i needed from my neighbours backyard doing him a service as well.  One of my aliases by the name of Ziep Poberson has an album cover titled "everything you ever need you already have", he never made the music, but the music is right there... the answer is learn how to find it, or recognize when it is there.

So i guess I spent the day sorting the tomatoes with a sidebar into custom stake building.  It's true i did break out my high powered radial arm saw to make the cuts... i was using the clippers but we were getting stress fractures on the bamboo walls...and the saw kicks ass.  Tomatoes like to collpase on themseoves... well they probably don't actually like to but they do as a result of gravity.  Stake out the branches finding a balance between space and light and the future. The plants in the pots are so thick i had to find new places for some of them, which i had having eyeballed the sunspace on this new land i farm.

Speaking of tomatoes, my old Man Garden took 10 or so new runt tomato plants that the good people at Home Hardware on Commercial drive gave to Gardener Pete.  They charged him for stakes but figured that the tomatoes are kind of late so better to get them out of the store and into the ground somewhere and hope for the best. I think if they get regular regimented watering they will produce some fruit... you never know... one may receive a nice Indian summer (hot september-Mid October).  Once those tomatoes get moving... they like to move it move it!

And i had some of Brian and Ann's tomatoes in a diner today... you see I am on water duty and there were a few ripe tomatoes, so of course i took them.  Was i being greedy taking them?  NO NO NO! This is important... you need to harvest ripe fruit to sent the signal to the plant that it's original mission to reproduce has failed and it needs to make more fruit...  you need to exploit this biological trigger for greater gain in the long haul.  You plant food to eat food... don't be one of those hammerheads who plants food to say they plant food and then have that food go to waste because you just didn't pick it in time.

Harvests sneak up on you... have you bagged your garlic yet?... you better cause it's about to go bad in the ground... get it up and get it drying in the sun, this can garlic your kitchen an provide you for starts for next years crop.

I hum in B... which makes sense now that i see it, and the mouse clicks in F.  I know this because i happen to have a tuner hooked up to the mic on my desk.  Just more facts, take them or leave them.

a tale of 2 gardens

Should we go with some slug killing tips first?  After all, knowledge is power and power corrupts and that's good... right?  Sorry quoting Knockin' Dog songs again... and the song never even got recorded, so it's even more obscure.

So i broke out the slug scissors... you see i inherited about 9 pair of scissors, so i dedicated one of them "slug scissors".  You can just snip the bastards, although some mend and the head half tries to make a getaway.  It works well... you get an effective easy kill, but I'm kind of partial to crushing them on a rock.  You see i like my slug carcasses in one spot because slugs like to carnivore the dead slugs, so if i have all my kills on a rock in a known place then the slugs will then come there to feed on the dead slugs and then whamo! A second round of crushing or snipping.  I'm not crazy about just snipping a slug, say that's on a bean plant, and having it's carcass fall to the base of the bean plant.  The reason for this is because the carcass will just encourage other slugs to come and feed at the base of the bean plant and then of course when that food is done maybe the slug just move on up to the bean plant.  It appears that slugs are creatures of habit... if you see a plant with lots of slug damage in the day then there is a good chance that the slug will be back on that plant in the night.  Come back at night and, as Dad would say "bump them off".

I had a neighbour over who has enlisted me to help with a garden at her aunt's house down the street about 50 blocks... a good bike ride and an excellent destination.  Big yard, shady play area for the kids... all the right things we need for a good time.  She was in my yard the other day to drop off a map shortly after a squirrel ate my whole broccoli plant... i showed her the holes where the peanuts go and what was left of the broccoli.  Her words... "holy shit, i would be seriously pissed" and then "SHE FEEDS THEM!"... and then "you have to get more traps up".  Perhaps my insanity is justified after all... if a loving mother can feel that, then a man gardener is not a savage for thinking the same.

The grey bastard squirrel ate the whole broccoli plant... Hopefully we win our hockey game in Sherwood tomorrow... maybe i will stop at the pond on the way out there to smell the beautiful flowers, hear the birds, feel the sun and take care of other minor business.  You want to be dead sure that your pests don't come back.

So we were at this garden out by 52nd and Woodstock in the fine city of Portland. I of course forgot my camera, but fortunately somebody had a cell phone with a camera so i could take a photo and email it to my desk for the report.  The only problem is that i can't email a photo from a phone... i got into all kinds of strange menus after i tried to change "2" into "@".  I'm a natural Luddite... do people actually have small enough fingers to type on those slide out keyboards?  I'd rather become proficient on the mandolin.

OK back to the garden... Apparently this garden has been a garden for like 60 years... there was a grandfather working the land years ago who wasn't shy about dousing the soil with chemical herbicides and insecticides...  Old school like.  I remember my father actually had DDT for his garden, but he didn't really use it being a man of cautionary paranoia, and a fan of peregrine falcons as well.   I remember he did say "it works really well".  Here's to hoping the soil has returned to a more "organic" nature... apparently they have been working the land for a decade (chemical free), so it's probable that they have eaten all the toxins through the garden vegetables.  Have no fear... there will be no shortage of toxins in the future... shall we say all elements (air, earth, water and tire fires) will be ripe with toxins.  It's is a guarantee, make no mistake, in fact the economy dictates that it must be so.  There is nothing you can do, but you should still grow food... it's a good think to know... things might collapse... it might come in handy.

The soil in this garden is a dream for sure... beautiful stuff.   Old Clay Robertson's cement garden has a long way to go, but fortunately Robertson has the will to change the land. They have added a lot over the years, and I'm sure the tilling and growing of roots for the past 60 years has been excellent.  I did a fair bit of weeding in this beautiful soft soil and then started to tend an old neglected lilac tree by the garden, and then i threw in some beans and did some solid pruning on the tomato plants (cutting away the lower and browning tomato leaves to help keep disease at bay).  This garden is up and running pretty good... tomatoes booming, beans a blasting, grapes and raspberries beets, lettuce.  I think its a matter they they are busy so more people tending can help assure the garden will get the best care.

It was really nice to see a garden not so fucking savaged by squirrels.  No holes beside all the plants, no chews, no peanut shells, no unearthed seedlings dying in the hot sun.  It was like a dream garden, big and open and full of sun, just remove the little weeds around the big plants and let them roll.  We put a few bags of compost soil around the plants for nutrients and further soil amendment and it was all good. Grow plants rather than the fighting pests to keep plants alive.  I looked into some pepper spray to put on the plants so the ass hole squirrels won't eat them, it was pretty pricey stuff at the high end nursery, so i will try a SR jones special pepper concoction.

Make a pepper spray by mixing 1 tsp. of mild liquid detergent, 1 gal. of water and 1 small bottle of hot pepper sauce. Mix these ingredients in a gallon jug, then transfer to a spray bottle. Spray this mixture on plants.

A watched garden seems to not grow

Kind of like that watched pot will never boil thing.  Of course it's all rubbish...  a pot on the heat will boil at the same rate whether it is watched or not... being watched has no affect on the equation.  The watching is not stealing heat energy away from the aqueous dihydrogen oxide.  It is the perspective... the impatience of the observer... the person who wants so much for something to happen and happen quickly that they perceive that it is not happening and never will.

I was away from the garden for a week and upon my return i noted how everything has grown so much.  You often don't notice these things day to day but week to week is another matter.  I also noticed that the weeds got a foothold and began competing, and that new slug damage is clear and evident, and clearly the squirrels have been having a free and easy good time in my absence.

I spent a good day weeding... good for the soul, i believe i have explained that before.  Labour that goes on and seems to be going nowhere, but then when you step back an see the big picture you realize you have accomplished a lot.  We need to see that in our lives.

It's 12:35 am, and i will shortly go out for a slug murdering session... word has it that there is a guy in the neighbourhood who talks and laughs to himself in the middle of the night with a head lamp on... i wonder if it's me?  Kind of fits my description, but kind of appears more "crazy" than the "forward thinking" angle i see through my lens.

I slashed a squirrel off the fence with a hockey stick after the bastard bit off a cluster of blueberries from one of my duke blueberry plants.  Some new squirrels have moved in since the last ones seemed to have (sing it with me...) Disappeared!

On the good news front it seems like 2 of the broccoli have made it out of critical condition, and the peas are producing wonderfully... carrots and beets are strong and the berries are coming in.  Things to worry about are...  some of the beans by the back fence are under savage slug attack as is the chard. The melon is now an ex melon and the squash and zucchini aren't really thriving, but that could be an arctic weather phenomenon.

The tomatoes really took off and i had to do a fair bit of tying them up. There are flowers and small tomatoes, the only real problem is the usual... ass hole squirrel burying peanuts (put out by the idiot neighbour) in the planters the tomatoes are in thus causing root damage and hindering growth.  I missed a hockey game in Sherwood on Sunday and a chance to increase the Sherwood squirrel population by one... crimminy.   Perhaps this is getting out of control even my kids are having a blast at the idea of buying me a carved wooden squirrel to haunt me at night... they think it's funny... wait a minute... perhaps i could get the brain damaged neighbour a wooden squirrel carving and perhaps that might fill some void, where perhaps she might come around and agree to go and live in a heavily supervised group home... worth a shot i say.

Just back from a slug run and i caught a massive snail devouring a bean leaf... smashey smashey... i bagged a few slugs as well.

Probably time for a second planting of beans... did i mention i threw in another rhubarb, and it is doing well... slugs snails and squirrels don't seem to have a taste for rhubarb.

Late night gardening

Late night gardening is a great time for gardening, no scorching sun, peaceful and you see what's going on.  Sure there is the odd accidental stomp to a good plant that became randomly placed in the wrong spot as a result of a whole series of errors with their accompanying salvage techniques... but you can't win them all.

The good news is that i couldn't find any slugs in the garden... and of course that is the bad news as well.  i know there are a significant amount of juvenile slugs in the runt, bolting and insanely planted lettuce.  I mean, what kind of a moron draws a hockey team's logo in the dirt with random lettuce seeds and tries to call it a victory salad?  Let's call a spade a spade, it is a failure salad!  It is a fertile slug colonization ground... a safe haven which they can use to attack the rest of the garden.  And there is dumb ass in the kitchen sink thumbing through each little lettuce leaf to make sure it is slug free for 45 minutes to make a salad nobody really had any interest in eating.  It's amazing, i know these things but yet i walk into failure time and time again... isn't that the definition of insanity?  To repeat the same failure year after year?

OK so I'm insane... i mean we all are, I just happen to be one of the few who can admit it and break it down in a blog or 3.  Failure is a great ally of course, and not the toxic mind freeze that our fickle society makes it out to be.  i have a song out called "failure" or "I am a failure" as it appeared on the album "The ocean is life", that has caused me some problem in  discussions with people over the idea of "negativity".  I don't find it negative to point out failures and go over why losses happen, rather, i find that positive.  As well i find assessing a failure as a success because you tried, but yet failed to see the big picture, but you are a good person, and you are feeling a little achy and tired now, and perhaps given time able to shift the pieces of the puzzle another way so that the story reads YOU DID NOTHING WRONG...  I find that annoying.

So after not finding any slugs in the back vegetable garden, i went to the front yard where i did a significant amount of weeding today... berry gardens, tomatoes, poppies, grapes and a stack of rogue roses always ready to stick me and hogging up some good blueberry growing turf.  Out there i killed a few massive slugs, and half a dozen snails.  It was pretty good... always good to bump off garden pests that start with the letter "S".  This no killing thing is a bit flawed... a perfect example of how absolutism is bad for anything.  Extremists i like,  absolutists have too many barriers in their mind.  Killing is bad... but what if you are killing an invasive species... if you could kill all the pine Beatles that are destroying forests, would you do it?  Would you kill zebra muscles if you could stop them from wreaking havoc in the great lakes?

A crazy person sent me a note about living with squirrels... it was cut out from a newspaper, how gibberish like this gets published i don't know... It starts out by saying squirrels will not be thwarted... I disagree!  If you mean to say that if you thwart a squirrel,  another squirrel will move in to it's territory to start doing it's thing, and then you will have to thwart it... and so on and so on... that i could see as accurate... but i like the sport of a good thwart.  So the article goes on to say that you can have a squirrel feeder away from the area where you don't want them... WTF?  And then it goes on to list things a squirrel likes to eat...  A pine cone filled with my organic peanut butter? and then the person who got paid to write this pap finishes with "Make it as easy as possible for the squirrel to access their feeder"...  "THEIR FEEDER" ! What's next i have to sleep on the hardwood floor cause a hard done by rat could use a good sleep in my bed! These are solutions to my problem?  Silly me, i thought my problem was that the neighbour who should be living in a heavily supervised group home but rather is living with a family of squirrels and feeding them peanuts which they are burying and digging up killing all kinds of plants... Oh but wait, we have a new solution!  Hold the fucking presses, I'll just put a new squirrel feeder out there... then i can start paying for the things the squirrels bury in my garden... what a great solution!

When i was a kid, dad put up a bluebird nest box in the yard at the cottage and we got a tree swallow pair nesting.  It was great to watch the birds being raised, and then one day a red squirrel climbed up the pole chewed through the entrance and ate the young birds... let's knock this squirrel sympathy bullshit off.

My plants are coming back since the dedicated slug murder started earlier this week... there are plenty of slugs in the pacific northwest, they will just be an endangered species in my garden.

One reader wrote in and mentioned a dedicated pair of slug scissors... excellent idea, a precise quick snip... saves you having to grab them before crushing them with a spade, cause you get that slime that is hard to get off your hand, and it is toxic, and it might have salmonella.  I have also been hunting out slug hiding spots during peak sun... under rocks, under planters.

I think i might have messed with a bee unfortunately.  By my chard i saw a few slug holes (always look for the plants that are being decimated).  I couldn't find a slug but there was a burrow at the base of the plant so i kind of fucked with the hole and then i heard a bee zoom by me.  One of the things recommended to do is to get rid of your "lawn" and plant plants that will give bee's natural habitat.  Most bees are solitary creatures that live in holes in the ground... i will be more careful next time.  But since we are on lawns, the idea of a lawn started as signal of British upper class wealth. Having land meant that you controlled power, and could waste perfectly useful crop fields for a useless product that had nothing to recommend it other than it looked good. Lawns also take an inordinate amount of water... to waste that much water is another signal of wealth. I would say, he who has the most bees to pollinate the crops is the wealthy one.

What to do what to do...There is a bean poking up... I'll buy my lettuce from the farmers market and focus on beans, peas and tomatoes...  Cary, who had the slug scissor idea has also offered to give me tips on what to grow in Oregon... perhaps we should take this show on the road and check out her garden... can't hurt.

Back to the garden

We do need to get "back to the garden"  and off of our various rage tangents... not to underestimate the power of a good rage tangent, but it occurred to me the other day as i was frothing on about the squirrels, it was in fact the slugs that were hammering away on the melon, zucchini, peppers, chard, strawberries and other lesser vegetables and fruits.  It's the problem with rage gardening, you become too focused on one thing, which creates opportunities for others.

I have been on a fairly aggressive slug killing frenzy for the last few nights.  There are two tuna tins countersunk into the garden full of beer, there are 2 melon rinds sitting as bait and i go out every couple of hours into the night to squash and kill.  As a bonus when you crush a slug on a rock it then becomes food for other slugs, or a decoy so you can easily go out and crush it turning 1 carcase into two.

I also ripped down a lot of the vegetation at the back of the garden as it made for a nice shady area for the slugs to hide out in the day and use as a base to attack the garden.  I will need to put a barrier up to the overgrown and unattended yard that is kitty corner to the garden... in time.

A classic case of failure being good, or at least the threat of failure being good.  It all came down to the broccoli... you see as a pacific north west gardener, broccoli had always been one of my most productive crops... in fact i only threw 3 in the garden because i didn't want to overdue it... as of now one is dead and the other 2 are on life support, so then i thought well perhaps i will try squash and melon (farther south)... might work.  But the slugs went to town and woke me up... yes this is war... the melon might not survive, i think the zucchini might.  Now that I'm an active participant killing 3-4 slugs an hour into the night for the past 5 nights, i am seeing a rebound of the plants.  With decoys and traps, a headlamp and a jovial spirit of trash talking slugs as you terminate their existence, a Man gardener can have a good time rounding the corner on a problem he has.

Too much work? Nonsense!  All of life's reoccurring problems are that way, and they take regimented discipline to overcome.  Probably why religion works for some.. stay focused, do what needs to be done.  I trust myself to do the right thing, and in the event i do the wrong thing i trust myself to find my way out of it.  I almost used the word "weasel" instead of "find"... it was a little joke given that weasels are farmer pests, but the weasel comes across as dishonest, or "snake like", when in reality if you fuck up you need to make amends... you need to right the wrongs and you don't accomplish that on sly actions.

Peas are doing well, and it might be a tomato kind of town... in bad news category we have this... spinach is bolting... little runt spinach plants bolting.  Is it the clay, or are they two densely planted? I think it's hard to get water in clay soil so whatever the signal is (stress of some sort), the plant thinks it's a goner so it tries to make seed with it's dwindling time on earth.

It always pays to be a patient man planting... space the dam seeds out.  Give each plant some real estate to live thrive and survive.  If i'm the man i say i am, i will have to thin tomorrow... meaning i must pull out plants so that each plant has space to thrive... if i fail to do that then i am a sissy.

Red onions have taken a fair hit... squirrel issue i believe. Garlic might need better drainage but seems to be doing well... no garlic has yet to try to flower.

I filed in a whole pile of random beans... a package of seeds to be exact the other day.  I just went random... i avoided the random squirrel holes.  In reality, I'm trying to find out what will work in this garden.  Beans, i would think will do well, but i have been wrong before.  At the same time i have been putting in some pretty big efforts on the night defending lately.  It was about 45 minutes ago i was in the garden... i shall go out there now and lets do a tally.

OK these are the facts.. 1 am: It's rained since last time i was out there, and i found one massive slug on the melon rind and rather than crush it i tossed it into the beer filled tuna dish.  i then did the rounds and when i came back the slug has escaped and was heading towards my melon plant that is on life support.  So i crushed that slug on a rock and i am now dead sure it won't be a problem anymore.

it's a strange life but somebody has to live it.

Is it gardening blog night?

Who knows what night is is around here with respect to blog updates... The super Robertson entity is like a random glob moving in various directions.  Be able to laugh at yourself: that's my advise... if you want another hot tip I can give you "don't spend money you don't have".  I got that one from a 3 minute commercial from a radio in a bar, but i distilled it for you... the add was kind of strange... some dude with an annoying clear voice going over various ways in which you can go into obvious financial ruin.  It was strange for sure, you see i set out to try to see the third period of game 2 of the Stanley cup finals... not an easy thing to do in this town... there was a playoff basketball game that some people seemed pretty concerned with... but i did end up finding a TV that was in a room with  blasting rock music and full of dirty tables, but the god damn hockey game was on. No sound just loud radio...  At one point, i believe a Nickleback song was blasting... something about "everybody wants to be a rock star", and Pierre McGuire was talking, and for the first time in my life i found myself longing to hear what he had to say.  Write that one down.

Earlier, our family did eat a full hearty Victory salad... the one i planted in the garden back when i was trying to put spirit omen energy into the biosphere for the Canucks to come up big, but clearly my calibrations were off a bit and the energy went to Vancouver's formidable opponent the LA Kings, who just went up 2-0 in the finals.  I tell you one thing, watching hockey in Portland is almost harder than keeping a peanut fed squirrel out of a peaceful garden.

OK let's talk garden, since this is a gardening blog, or a Man Gardening blog for that matter... remember good living philosophies and Hockey and omens for that matter are all part of Man living well.

What do we have in this photo:  It is a stake i made from a stick to hold a plant line for a row of beets... and it is sprouting!

You see a tree branch had fallen in the front and i needed stakes for plant lines so i snapped off that and stuck it in the ground.  Now it is sprouting... what can we learn from that? 1) SR is very consistent with the water hose. It is really the single most factor that determines how well a garden will grow... if you can sprout a stick that you stuck in the ground to hold twine, then , well you are not bucking for the bronze in the watering competition.  And the other thing... 2) I would say the power of life is strong...  life finds a way to live, cause that's what it does.  In some ways it's good news with respect to the massive, ill fated, short sighted, money grubbing manor in which the human population lives.  Life will go on... it will just be lacking genetic diversity, and clean water, filled with pollution and random mutations.

This next photo is a good one... it's of a little girl in her pyjamas  waving a hockey stick in the air shouting threats to the local squirrel population.  A most excellent way to start the morning.  I always make sure to tell the kids not to grab the squirrels, because they are swine bastards and will turn tail and bite you... much better to try to hit them  with something firm.

At one time there were 2 Kohlrabi plants here now there are one.  I believe what happens is that the brain damaged neighbour puts out the peanuts and the squirrels grab them and look for a plant to  bury them by (as a marker) and then later when the squirrel wants a peanut and it's too fucking stupid to walk back to the never ending supply then it just digs up the plant and has a peanut.  It can bury the peanut by the plant and keep the plant alive cause it knows it needs a marker, but yet it's such an ass hole when it wants to dig it up... perhaps that's it... may as well kill the plant so we don't think there is a peanut there.  At least a crow looks and knows it is evil... these squirrels try to pretend they are all cute wining over the hearts of the mentally challenged.

It's important to remember that if we did go back to the garden, as Joni Mitchell sang about in the song Woodstock, vermin are really the big threat.  sure sure, easy to forget in our new world order of oil spills and insane companies spraying the earth with toxins... that's just a money thing, when it's a food thing one has to remember everybody likes to eat.  talk to a chicken farmer about a fox and see how much sympathy he has toward the cute fox.

What about snails and slugs?

Hot damn it's 1:13 am, time for our fearless leader to get out there with a head lamp and murder some invertebrates.  It actually looks pretty clear out there... nothing eating the broccoli, but then that large snail i found loitering in the rocks is no longer... aloha sucker!  I could probably have done a more thorough search but since we have suffered such a high concentration of squirrel plant murder from the terrorist squirrel population i have things oddly planted and since i saw no slugs or pests on any plants before i stepped on a cherry tomato plant, i figured I'd cut my losses.

This is garden with Garlic, peas, greens, roses, tomatoes, strawberries and plum tree (left to right), in the pots are more tomatoes to replace terrorist squirrel murdered plants.

We like our garden, the girls picked a salad tonight and peas will start in a few days... all i need is a red tailed hawk.

Now let's try to focus on the negative...

Never underestimate focusing on the negative.  It's true that good thoughts breed good thoughts and good actions... but it also breeds wordy hammerheads trying to sell you self help manuals.  Sorry, just calling it like i see it... there is always some fuck up who can't get their head out of their own ass chirping off about how to live right, and you find yourself thinking if you would just shut up i would live better instantly.

So the negative, and focusing on it as a positive.  True story:  I was at a tree planting camp (justifiable for a gardening blog) and i was about to quit a shitty company called Wilderness Reforestation because they had willfully screwed me in many different ways, but part of me wasn't a quitter and that part of me was winning the moral battle that was going on inside my tormented soul.  It was odd because there were 4 of us that were going to quit and my earlier anger with respect to the negative helped the other 3 decide we needed to move on.  Keep in mind we were in Northern Ontario, far the fuck away from anything, in a block of forest, or a block of land that once was a forest and is now, as we say in Portland, stump town. So at the 11th hour i begin waffling with the reason quitting is not an honourable thing to do, when Jason Potts comes over to me (one of the 4) and looks very seriously at me and says "you have to focus on the negative"... so i did and then i quit and then 2 days later i was in another tree planting camp a few hundred miles away in a company called Outland, that was filled with some of the greatest people i had ever met, we had a blast, made great money and made some connections that ended up landing me out west which basically set the stage for everything that has happened in my life for the last 20 years... my wife, my kids, my bands, my gardens.. here i am.

And so are the fucking squirrels.  Lets put it this way.. i have a hockey game in Beaverton next week and a few squirrels will look to find their new home out there at that time.  It won't be the easy life they are use to, but they are cunning little bastards, maybe they can survive out there.  It's not really the squirrels fault, it's the idiot neighbour's fault...  she feeds them non stop peanuts, lets them nest in her house... they are just like "shit man I'm so stuffed, well we better bury some of these peanuts in the crazy guys garden just for safe keeping... think we can waddle over there?"

As a result I have been over planting... it seems like 40% of the plants get dug up as a result of "collateral damage" due to peanut burying.  Why you should never feed animals, birds a possible exception (habitat loss), as they say in the wild a fed bear is a dead bear.  the reality being that if you feed a bear it will grow accustom to the easy food and become a menace and then rangers will come in and shoot the bear because it is mingling  in human territory and has become "dangerous" to precious stupid humans.  And it ends up dead, which is not ideal at all.

If the people who write for the show portlandia ever need a concept for a show look no further than some of the fucking loons around here that feed and harbour squirrels.  It's vintage shit... crazy too, i mean sure squirrels are cute, to some, but if you look in the city records of house fires you will notice that many a fires have been started by squirrels chewing wires causing houses to burn down... and perhaps a neighbours house too.

As expected, the marigold experiment didn't maintain the success it had in the first few days and we need to now focus on the negative.

The positive is that i replanted the bald spots with some of the many random "starts" i planted in the little plastic planters i have accumulated over the years.  I laid down a line of leeks, I collected a cash of Kohlrabi, i banged in a future bushel of beets, i tucked in three tomatoes. 

It's time for beans, but I'm running out of room... i think that means pole beans... I have always been a bush bean kind of guy, my father was a bush bean man, and as the song that never got finished goes "sooner or later we all turn into our fathers".  In fact the classic Dad vs Squirrel or Chipmunk epic battles are still to this day some of the greatest childhood memories... Dad would shut down the rodent and be just a glowing, and then the rodent would get around Dad's system, and Dad would be fuming, and then dad would adjust the system, watch the rodent fail and be in a state of glee until the rodent found a new way around the problem, which would then stimulate Dad to spring back into action.  Lets put it this way: 3:00 AM Dad is awakened by a chipmunk rolling acorns in the ceiling above his head at the family cottage... his son is then awoken by some serious pacing and the words "that bloody S.O.B!"... one of the rare times in my life where i actually liked to be woken in the middle of the night.  In the end there was sheet metal all around the area where the outer wall meets the roof of the cottage.

By the way, saw a neat potato planting idea a few streets over.  It looks like the dug a tough and planted the potatoes in there which will make for easier "mounding" in the future.  if you are going to "build up" why not start low.

Tomatoes: i hear through a "friend of a friend of a friend" (name the song lyric and win a 5 cd Canada Lynx records CD pack) that you should pinch off flowers of a small tomato plant so it gets bigger.  What the hell, i did it to my cherry tomato and my Roma tomato.. they say to do that with the blueberries too for the first few years but i just never had the heart.

lets replace negatives with positives and see how we grow

Not to claim victory at all... not even close, but since i put some marigolds in the garden i haven't seen a squirrel in there.  Mind you it's only been a few days, but definitely better to not be hating little rodents.  You see i got involved in a facebook thread where i was calling for squirrel death, and that caused various opinions to be shared and one of them was killing is bad.  Killing is bad, like fair is fair, and don't let any rich religious based political war profiteering pack of ninnies tell you otherwise... killing is bad.

Once you accept your thirst for revenge has boiled over into a justification to doing something that is wrong, you can begin to look at the problem from another way.  How do we make the garden undesirable for squirrels so we can all live in harmony?  The two things i  have come across, or have been pointed out to me are;  planting marigolds and spraying Cayenne pepper.

Luckily there is a lot of squirrel friendly territory around here and an unlimited supply of peanuts, so the hope is we can define my vegetable garden as a net negative, and everybody can carry on.  If i were to trap these guys and relocate them far far away, i believe i would be giving them a death sentence.  If i were to put a family of life long fed free peanut and free house lodging squirrels out in the wild nature would make quick work of them.  I wouldn't actually kill them but the proper relocation would... i guess i could swallow my science background and throw up a short term economic face and justify it, as we do so often as humans, but i like the mantra "see the wrong and then and change and they will see the change in you and learn".

What else have i learned lately:  Lots of clay in the Portland soil.  I bet you i could i could file a yard of sand into my garden in the fall, till it all in and that would help with the water seeping into the soil for better irrigation.

The last 2 days around here have reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which is apparently 32 degrees Celsius.  So obviously i have been worried about my spinach... when it gets too hot the spinach wants to "bolt" meaning it senses sure death and tried to make seed as quickly as possible...  So far so good.

The mason bees have 6 tubes plugged up but we had a bit of a setback today.  A few prized mason bees got into the basement today, because the door was open by a blueberry bush.  Clearly we can't have 2 quality bees out of commission on such a bright pollinating day so it took me a while to get them safely out which cut into my time to prepare for my mother-in law's arrival today.  I had big plans for how the house was going to be a just shining, but then 2 of my star pollinators fell into the trap.  For the record what you do is hold a towel up and use it as a barrier to guide the bee back towards the door that leads to the great outdoors.  An old Robertson trick... dad and i would help bats find their way outside by holding up a sheet and cornering them towards a door (at the old Robertson cottage).  Simple fools will say you can hit them with a tennis racket, and you can, but that's not really helping if you know what i mean.

Is it time to thin your carrots and beets?  Perhaps you got lazy and planted too many seeds in the rows cause it seemed like too much work at the time.   If you did then now is the time to think about thinning the next time you are weeding.  Try to envision the plant and see the space it might need to grow into a fine edible specimen...  In fact my garden needs a good weeding... starting to see some grasses and other undesirable plants to take hold.  I'll draw the line on killing weeds... It's OK to kill weeds, just don't be a dumb ass and use herbicides (chemical weed killers), know for sure that the world needs no more chemicals poured on it's soil.

Fire in tomatoes, you started from seed a while ago, get you damn beans in the ground, and water water water.  He who waters their garden gets plump vegetables, he who forgets learns a lesson in plant drought development.

Still haven't seen many honeybees... what have we done?

Spring garden progress report

We shall try to stay on topic this time and not focus on any various non gardening rage issues.  Although gardening does rely on the growth of life which often forays into segments that ideologically oppose our foolish little consumer impulses... but hey who's counting, besides me, and other various loons. Click on the pictures to enlarge if you feel like it.

The good news is that the mason bees have taken quite nicely to their new home... you see i thought i heard one of them hatching so i set up the camera for a little time lapse filming and it turns out what i heard was bees in the little holes doing their mason bee thing.  Multiple bees using multiple cylinders getting down to business.  Even at night tonight i went out and there were multiple bees in their tubes settling in for the night.  Most pleasing for sure!

Of course things are flowering, and pollination needs to happen, strawberries, blueberries and plums are flowering now but it won't be long before we see some pea flowers.

(for the record all the white things are hail stones) I went and put up a vine and veggie trellis net for the peas to climb up using some bamboo stakes and some twine guy lines... i was fairly pleased with the outcome, and then i just did a replant in the spots where there were no peas because squirrels had dug up the damn place.  it should be noted that squirrel families are booming in both of my neighbours houses, and there hasn't been an incredible amount of digging lately.  Perhaps my flying out of the back door slashing a hockey stick has had an effect, but i think it's more the fact that the delinquent rodents are now nursing young and hence don't have time to bugger old man Robertson's set up.

Better them than me, but i have a hard time understanding how people can live in a house infested with squirrels... i actually did once it was in 2001... i remember one of my drunken Quebecois roommates was referring to the squirrel as "Squirrel Laden" because it was hard to catch much like Bin Laden at the time... uh oh teetering on a political rage here... in the end the house smelt like death and one of the guys ended up getting lice...  rent was cheap and i wasn't home much.. i went to work, played in the band ROADBED and hiked mountains on the weekends.. but soon after the squirrel CT and i bought a loft and started living the good life.  If there was a squirrel living in my house now there would be no other focus than evicting the squirrel... period.  In fact squirrel death would be automatic, and then the problem fixed so that new squirrels live without the knowlege that a great place for them exists.

Potatoes are up and rolling... i was talking to a neighbour and he mentioned a system of growing potatoes in a barrel like item and continuing to put more soil in throughout the season and in the end you get a barrel full of potatoes.  My father would "mound' his potatoes pushing dirt up over them which worked on the same principle...  i think i shall experiment with something along those lines... perhaps put a bucket with the bottom cut out of it over the potato plant and fill it in as the plant grows, and see what happens at the end of the season...  probably more potatoes.

The reseeding of tomatoes from the greenhouse baking fiasco is inching along, but that said i went to the local nursery and grabbed a sweet 100 cherry tomato and a Roma tomato... both are large and healthy.  I also split a tray of broccoli with another neighbour so i have 3 plants in the back garden now.    I waffled on where to put them... they do become very large plants with big leaves that produce very well in the pacific northwest, so i threw one in with the row of spinach with the idea being that when the summer heat comes and the spinach is over the broccoli can have that space, and then i threw a few others in spots near the garlic, as Garlic and broccoli are apparently companion plants according to a few websites.  Remember a companion plant is a plant that grows well with it's companion.  That's why i threw in a hops plant... Zeus to be precise... well there was another reason, but a good one is that ladybugs love hops plants, and lady bugs love eating aphids and other garden pests so by having a hops plant one gets the added benefit of a healthy ladybug population for pest control.  Remember i wasn't going to plant a hops, because it is an invasive species, but hell something needs to do battle with the ivy, and seeing that the hood is full of squirrel feeders i hardly see an issue.

Rhubarb-  we bought a good strain from a nursery and put it in the back and i think it was getting too much hot sun cause it didn't look good so i put it in the front yard where it should get some nice shade and we shall see what happens.  Seemed like a pretty easy crop... hopefully i didn't kill it, time will tell.  i have a weird energy with rhubarb... simple thing, always causing me problems.. kind of like a cell phone... which i don't have... just kind of misses me.

Beets, Spinach and carrots- because i was a lazy ass i planted them too heavily randomly sprinkling seeds into the ground and now i am soon due for a little thinning.  One of your key things in growing vegetables is to give each plant the proper space to grow, thrive and survive.

I also picked up a Thia Chili Pepper plant just for laughs to see if these supposed hot Oregon summers can produce.  I have been using a lot of hot peppers lately trying to make various curries and Mexican dinners, so why not try and grow something.  i was thinking of a small greenhouse like structure but remembering the last bright greenhouse idea i had that set me back a few valuable weeks on the basis of a mind boggling gap out I'm not sure... perhaps a fall issue to bring the peppers home.

Oddly enough i planted a ton of cilantro, a plant i have publicly loathed for many years... but for Indian and Mexican food cilantro is a must.  My problem was that i met too many knuckleheads who's idea of a fancy new age salad was too cook up some Bulgar throw in some chick peas and douse the shit out of it with cilantro and think that they were doing something radically "organic" and perhaps "gourmet".  And then you are the in the park trying to toss it into the bushes while some pea-head  raves on asking for a recipe for this nonsense.  The problem is cilantro is not a great primary flavour, I'm sure some might disagree, and i would encourage ridiculing them!  Cilantro is an excellent secondary flavour bringing body to the sensation of hot food... it works well in Mexican salsa, and i have a date with some Mexican people who are going to teach me how to make Mexican food... I will report back.  For my purposes cilantro is an essential ingredient in chicken curry and dahl, which i can dial in now and my family likes to eat, so it makes sense to have a fresh supply.  that is the other key thing... fresh... spices need to be fresh for food to be scintillating.

Of course there is a secondary man garden now as well... you see swell friends  Fire-Man  and Sharon came down for a visit...  i might add that Sharon brought me a hat she wove from my Vancouver B.C. hops vine. It might actually be a fruit bowl which is what it is being used for now although i have worn it around as a hat... what happens is some fool sees me wearing one King hell vine woven hat and tries to be a smart ass by saying something and then the said person gets a pretty thorough lesson on Humulus Lupulus... which is of course Latin for hops... if you hit the bastard with that you can stall them and get ready for a good hops lecture.  So this the initial construction of the secondary garden:

Anytime you get to smash concrete with a 16 lb sledge hammer it's good. Smashing is one of the finest tonics around, but then to have that said smashing turn concrete into full sun garden is the kind of transition that I'm all about.  it is by the sidewalk so it will have it's dog piss issues, but really that is just an honest source of fixed nitrogen.  In reality, my testicles probably have more radioactive nuclear waste in them than they should.. but hey accidents happen... so really worrying about a little dog piss seems a little silly.  For the record no root vegetables... so far 2 blueberry, 3 poppies (cool flowers), a cherry tomato (the sweet 100 i mentioned earlier), a grape vine and some rosemary.... i might fire in a hybrid raspberry from another neighbour this weekend.   I think most of those can have piss protected elevated plant regions, so one at least has an alibi for some paranoia that might jump on his brain from time to time.

Mason Bee... did i mention i was susceptible to rage issues due to the lack of pollinating insects

So this is my mason bee sanctuary on the east wall of our house... the bees like morning sun... that is my kitchen window that looks out over my new Man Garden:

  The little box is the cocoons, approximately a dozen, some are big and some are small... the small ones are the males and they will only be around for a short while to fertilize the females of course, and then the females will go about the business of filling the cylindrical tubes with larvae and packing mud in between the larvae and then on the ends of the tube.  That is why they are called mason bees by the way... for their mason skills.

  Pretty sure this one is a male by the size guesstimates of a professional eye-baller, he was the first one out and then did some sunning and then he was off... it worked out well as I have some plums and some blueberries that need a good pollinating.

 

Later in the day I was on the front porch blasting out some S Robertson style banjo for the neighbours to digest and I saw a very similar bee trying to crawl under the cedar shingles... I tried to alter my song and tell the good bee that the sanctuary was at the back of the house, not this decoy east facing pillar that you seem to be so obsessed with... it got to the point where I was about to put the grab on him, but then I remembered the obvious... he is a free spirit, he will do what he needs... he doesn't owe me anything for the 24 bones I spent on this exercise... and most importantly. Don’t put the grab on things that can sting.  Actually male mason bees cannot sting but years of mental bee sting phobia still play hard on the mind.  What the hell you start going around grabbing male mason bees cause you can and then all the sudden you make an identification mistake and put the grab on a killer bee that whiffs out one of them swarm scents and next thing you know you are writhing around in a ditch being stung 400 times per minute while neighbours try to soak you with underpowered garden hoses. No thanks!

I'll try and do a time lapse of a cocoon hatching tomorrow, I guess they will come when they come.

Oddly enough I was in charge of the mason bees last year at our community garden... I got some smart-ass answers from some Vancouver mason bee suppliers. It is quite possible that I missed the deadline, although it appears that the bee cocoons are kept in a refrigerator and then when you bring them out the heat activates the bee... as which is normal for invertebrates that don't regulate their own body heat internally.  Perhaps it was too late in the season, so what I did in that case was just wash and prepare the mason bee nesting plastic, and put it out as an environment for natural mason bees to find and use.  I guess there is no real guarantee that my bees, or the cocoons I bought will use the house I have for them... I believe our location is optimal (morning sun), so we shall see.  The lady at the bee store... it wasn't actually a bee store, but I kind of like that idea... very human... well she was very nice and walked me through the whole process.  You don't actually have to stuff the cocoons into the holes... just create an exit hole in the box by opening one side and let nature take it's course.

For the record I also replanted a bunch of tomato seeds... my neighbour and I collected a bunch of heirloom varieties... Burbank slicing, Silvery Fur tree and Manitoba... why not try again now.  Buying tomatoes from a greenhouse is always an option, but a wise man takes as many paths as possible, when reasonable of course... reasonable being a word that has great flexibility... reminds me I should some yoga rather than streaming hockey games and cursing events.

That's why the bees make it a good day... I have to say I was pretty stoked to see the first bee.  I like bees, I like the bee mantra... ultimate teamwork... do this! Well I don't feel like it... OK everybody, let's waste no time and sting this fucker to death and keep this machine moving.  You never see an old fat bee trying to tell the other bees they need to do this thing to help make the old fat bee fatter and more comfortable... no no no the others would have dropped his youth full carcass off the edge of the hive the moment the said bee bastard started coasting.

Why are bee colonies collapsing?

They say it's debatable, but those who are "they" happen to make a lot of money making things called insecticides.

Insecticides- icide, meaning kill... death, and of course insect, meaning insect.  Hmmm i think we need more research... perhaps it's this climate change thing we have been denying but also saying it occurs naturally i guess to cover the bases...

Meanwhile the idiot Prime Minister of my home country is fishing for investors of other countries to extract more natural resources from the said country... but that's another story... mother of mercy how did we get to the point where we mentioned that stugot?  Oh yea it was the plight of the bees, and so naturally our hate would be directed at corporate lackeys always interested in selling out human and national long term interest to corporate bidders.

Killer Bees are from south America... perhaps we could all prey that a swarm of killer bees will descend and bring some "sting therapy" to this nonsense... we will probably find out that prayers for impossible things don't happen... which is good to know by the way.

That's why you should dig up your lawn and get a proper habitat in there... to provide bee habitat think natural... they like leaves to shelter ground burrows, different plants that will flower at different times... perhaps we should make new shirts "he who has the greenest lawn is the biggest fool"... I doubt you could sell that, but I have been wrong before

The season is in gear!

There have been some successes and many failures… the greatest failure being the greenhouse fiasco... you see I built this greenhouse:

My problem was that I wasn't in a "greenhouse state of mind"...  I am a greenhouse rookie so to say.  What went wrong?  Two words: Blast furnace!  Put it to you this way... since we went with failure before success lets look at the positive in the failure...  So,  say some moron forgets to open up the greenhouse on some suddenly hot day with peak sun and the temperature rises inside... well we now know that beets are the species most likely to survive this insane indiscretion, followed distantly by kohlrabi, and a lone cherry tomato plant.  Clearly ventilation and temperature regulation are key elements of greenhouse mastery... call it a learning failure... making it a good failure!  Once again I will buy big tomato plants from the nursery paying for the head start (or wait until they start blowing them out… most likely). This growing plants inside in suspect conditions with little children bombing around is perhaps a net negative.   Comparing a small tomato seedling and a large tomato plant from a greenhouse you will see that the greenhouse plant has probably more than a thousand times the chlorophyll filled energy producing green matter.  And that is your head start, and it is a race, make no doubt about it. That plant has to get big, flower and produce tomatoes before the fall monsoon comes in.  On a financial issue it is a failure because seeds are much cheaper but at this level it is about the joy of growing your own food. With that logic we are here to get in touch and to be comfortable with growing food... I would even  go so far to say that it would be negligent to deprive our children from growing up and not seeing food grown by the people that sit at the dinner table.  Too busy my ass... that's the thing, the plant does all the work... you just set the parameters.  Gardening is very spiritual on that level.  I haven't yet abandoned the idea of a shelter for the tomato plants...  my reason being to keep the rain off them and discourage the growth of blight.  Did I mention I might have done the same greenhouse “blast furnace” bit on my neighbours plants... the ones I stood in front of and stated my word as a man gardener that “these plants will not die”... I guess I still have a few weeks to work some magic... I'm thinking of an illusion where I replace the heat baked crumpled sprouts with some king hell plants and just eyeball the bastard when he gets back and say... "Yea that's the way I roll, what can I say, I have a green thumb"... or I could admit failure... but I think if he had some real nice plants he would be happy and I, for some short period, could avoid the tagline "absent minded savage maniac".

Blueberries- I have a Patriot and a Duke by the plum tree... I have 3 Chandler (red stalk), another 3 Duke, 3 Early Blue and a Ruble (keeps leaves)...  these notes are for my use.  That is a lot of blueberry bushes for our hero, but you see I got a deal...  At the local Nursery, which is a very good Nursery the Blueberry plants were going for 20 greenbacks.  I located a guy and his brother that sell bigger plants from a farm down near Salem Oregon for 6 dollars so I went down there before a hockey game I had in Sherwood.  Holey mackerel it is a long way, and I almost missed the game cause some jackass in a sports car tried to turn around on a narrow farm road rather than back up a half a kilometer and got stuck... I was figuring I am not coming back here (due to distance issues... excellent plants I might add) so I bought as many plants as I could fit in the car and for a while, a short while, I became the neighbourhood blueberry broker.  Alarming lack of bees of course, which reminds me to get a mason bee colony... a nice buzzing honey hive would really do the trick... we shall see.

Random planting notes starting with planting a blueberry. Notice the soil prep,.. Potato- every eye will produce a plant cut 21 hours before planting to develop a scab to help prevent mold growth... Plant red onion starts in rows with room to grow... imagine large red onions and plant accordingly.  Strawberries... It was recommended I buy "hood" so I did, CT also bought some ever bearing variety and there are some others that were in the garden before... should give us a good variety, even though as you may remember, I swore off growing strawberries given the Vancouver fiasco.  Basically I have strawberries at the base of the fruit garden (plums and blueberries), and in the rocks that support the garden, so I am not really losing space, I am just using space that is not ideal for vegetables:

Garlic- coming along quite nicely... a few suffered collateral damage from the squirrel insanity, and that whole plot has taken on a new level of mind crushing.  I hate to get off topic again, but we really do need a neighbouhood wide cull of the squirrels… but murder is such a harsh word to the local squirrel sympathizers.  It's really my time for a BB gun; I never had one as a kid... too dangerous, so now as a parent I am moved to the line of justifying bringing one into the home.  Oddly enough my father had a BB gun... he just failed to mention to me that he had one... probably saved him having to replace windows at the cottage... and outdoor light bulbs.  My "community together" project that starts with a major coordinated squirrel eradication, has received divided support, so in pulling a page from the great community activists I have welcomed the dissenting voices to the conversation... "Very interesting you feel that way... perhaps we could get a taxidermist to set a squirrel stuffed pelt on you balcony that you could enjoy until the new squirrels move in for the next scheduled slaughter".

Yes the garlic is growing well.

Beets& Spinach- are up and off to the races... bare patches where fucking squirrels, dug fucking peanuts supplied by fucking neighbour

Peas- are up... similar squirrel issues.

Did I mention I planted again?  The greenhouse fiasco lay hard on my heart... what to do, what to do,… and then we came up with (we... me and silent Internet partner) the idea that a Stanley Cup victory salad garden was in order... plant the salad and by the time the Cup has been won the salad will be ready... excellent idea for sure as it has now begat a salad eating frenzy, and how can that be bad?

Being more experienced this time I used the greenhouse material and some chicken wire to create a seed protected zone (A barrier where squirrels cant get at to dig in peanuts).  I sewed the chicken wire together with the PVC piping... we cannot tolerate this nonsense:

Who knows what new failure is around the corner?  We are better off this month than we were last month.

 I guess I should mention... a man took a poke on the index finger from some chicken wire that he had on his garden plot of land.... he did it too himself.

No pain no gain.