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.