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.
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.
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