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.
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.
