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.