The October garden, triumphs and failures

It was thanksgiving in Canada last weekend, and i ended up in some Canuck's house down here in Portland and as we sat around the table talking about things we gave thanks to, i went with the old hat... Failure.  Yes i am thankful for failure, it gives wise lessons.

It was of course my potato box experiment that was a grand failure... I blame myself of course.  I got fewer potatoes out of a big box i constructed, at cost to myself, not to mention the shade tower effect, than i got out of the potatoes right in the ground beside it.  Of course i didn't lose my mind and kill the potatoes in the ground trying to get too aggressive with the straw all over the box, in effect killing the potatoes.  My man Murray down the street does it, and kills it with boxes and soil.  Soil or straw?  I believe my experiment was flawed by putting too much straw on the plants and just plain choking them out.  I got greedy trying to get more and i crossed the line and snapped the trap on my own paw.  It is especially poignant in my case because i spent many summer nights at parties crowing off about the beauty of the potato box.  It is a failure i can live with... if it happens next year i punch myself in the face.  But it won't happen next year because i go down with my ships, and when you go down with your ships it leaves a stronger impression on you.   You see i'm not one of those "Oh i'm not sure what happened, i think i had the wrong seeds" kind of person.   It was my fault, i thought killing potatoes was kind of impossible... they just keep coming back i thought... they will but you need to let a good portion of the green matter stay in the light for photosynthesis to happen.   I'm not sure i am sold on the straw over dirt argument, but i will monitor the various other potato boxes people i know have and get to the bottom of this.  Failure means you tried, it also sings to the fact that you had a goal in mind when you tried... the failure means you didn't reach your goal, you can still learn.

After a month of monsoon rains, i pulled my tomato plants to cull the blight population, and then we got a week of hot sun... perhaps i could have squeezed a few more tomatoes, but i did clear a good patch of the garden to work the soil and get some garlic in.  I find some of the late tomatoes don't quite have the flavor that the mid summer one have.  And there is only so many hours in the week these days to garden, so sometimes you have to do what you can when you can.

I got some massive bean harvests, i think i need to do what our friend down the street does and just shell the beans and dry them otherwise i will have soggy beans in the crisper.  We  have all the carrots and beats we can eat for a while, i leave them in the ground until eating time... same problem in that i picked a massive pile of beets and some are going soft in the fridge.

My kids collected a pile of basil seeds from a derelict garden, and i myself have a bunch of purple heirloom carrot seeds ready to harvest.  The seed harvesting is a new passion for myself... it really speaks to the old hunter gatherer spirit I have. Why not?  For the record hybrid seeds will often be sterile or won't produce the same plants.  That's why you want to save the seeds of heirloom varieties if you are looking to get identical plants next season.

Back at home the maple tree out front is shedding its leaves, as Dad would say "that's free compost".  Here in America you can opt out of the leaf collection tax if you clean up your own leaves, hey what's more American than getting out of a tax?   But seriously, now that the tomatoes are down i can dig some trenches in the garden and fill them with leaves.  This is how you work the soil, break up the clay and  make a garden.  Next year will be my 3rd season in this garden and i can really start to see the soil conditioning paying dividends.  Turning your soil is a fantastic exercise to get you back to the roots of what is important in life... i pity the people who think they don't have the time or don't have a place to work some soil.  In some ways it is a bit of a garlic dilemma... i have a great line of garlic i need to keep going but if i plant it now then i cant work the soil in that region of the garden anymore this winter.  So you have to pick your spots... come to think of it now i could probably plant the garlic in  pots and transplant it later, which would give a chance to work the soil some more... gewt the sand and the clay and the organic material all mixed up real good like.

When i was stomping the leaves into the trenches before i buried them i thought of Dad, and i remember how he wasn't the biggest fan of kids jumping in leaves.  Most likely because they were raked into piles ready to be transferred into the garden, so the jumping would be a setback to the effort.  I then thought that had i tried to sell it as an effort to break up the leaves, much like chewing breaks up the food for digestion i would have had a better chance of selling it to him... he probably would have gone for that, but a few years later what we did was hit the leaves with the lawnmower for just that purpose and then raked up the mulch and put that in the garden.  I don't expect too much of a freeze this winter in Portland so I'm sure we can get these leaves composted down by the spring for planting season.

I shall look into cover crops... i think crimson clover might be the ticket.

The September garden

OK folks, we are into blight, powdery mildew and aphid attacks.

Cut that blight out of those tomatoes and get the cuttings away from the garden and into the city compost bins.  Clearly you should be harvesting the tomatoes too and dealing with them.  Nothing disease likes better than a pile of overgrown neglected plants... it will spread like a wildfire.  You can cut back a lot of the tomato plant to give it some room to produce.  Now don't be shy... think about it, if you have a bunch of tomatoes rotting on an overgrown plant, then you have more than you can deal with... let the strongest most promising part of the plant shine powered by the large root network you have developed all summer.

If you have a squash type of vine and it is covered with powdery mildew you might be well advised to get rid of it.  The last thing you need is a concentration of powdery mildew in your garden coming into the fall. If it looks like you might get a lot more fruit that you will use and the mildew doesn't seem too bad you could perhaps leave it, but we are in that territory where you have to start thinking about getting what you can while you can.  Don't be a promoter of mildew in a community garden.  One thing you can do if you have a powdery mildew problem is ask yourself why?  Often times your plants are in too tight and are thus less healthy, or perhaps they were weakened by drought when you didn't get a chance to water, or they were shaded.  I did a walk around the garden and some had it bad and others not so bad.  Big healthy plants in good soil in prime sun spots with room to grow that received adequate water to the roots and not the leaves throughout the growing season often do much better.  So you missed it this year, it happens, but by leaving the mildew in your plot you will maintain a concentration of the mildew in your soil... something you don't want.

I had a couple of Romanesco broccoli plants in my plot that were illegally creeping out onto the paths... they were massive with large leaves that shaded my beans and some tomatoes... i wasn't getting a lot of broccoli actually none to be exact, but my regular broccoli plants have been stomping balls. I did a closer inspection tonight and noticed a good aphid colony growing where the fruit was coming, so i manned up and ended their reign in the garden.  For sure they sucked a lot of good nutrients out of the soil to get so big, so i was at a loss... do i try to hold out in hope of something?  It is the gardeners dilemma... you hate to kill plants, but then there is reality... you need to think in terms of absolute yield and if some silly plant is is putting a hole in your boat then clear sailing is not in your future.   You would be much better off with some lettuce seeds in the spot dominated by aphid ridden cabbage family plants.   Now i realize that there are many armchair wizard gardeners out there that will go on about miracle herbal cures for aphids and yes with massive effort you can reduce an aphid infestation... i would liken it to taking out a loan to buy a lottery ticket to get yourself out of debt.   Not a smart money bet... if you are infested with aphids then you are on the wrong track to begin with... now it might not be your fault but it has happened, it is your responsibility as caretaker of the plants to make these executive decisions.  Another gardening as an analogy to a good life scenario... sometimes if an aspect of your life is not working it is because it wasn't meant to be and perhaps putting more energy into this aspect is not the right thing to do.

My father had lists of plants that did well in his garden and others that did not... as time went by he grew the things that worked in the garden he had.  Gardens are weird beasts you have to let them communicate to you by listening to what they are telling you.  For the record the garden doesn't actually speak to you in words, although i sure you could find a few humans that would argue that... you need to look for the signs... a good sign is a plant doing really well, a bad sign is a plant doing really poorly... sorry for the tutorial on the obvious, but...  You know why ointment says on the package "do not ingest, for topical use ONLY"?  It is because some moron ate ointment to try to cure their skin disease and then tried to sue the doctor because the doctor never told them.

So now... if your garden is now fast becoming a cesspool  of disease there is another option... mow it down and try a winter planting. That's right it's not failure, it's opportunity... the time is always right for something... the wall street genius is always ahead of the pack... so should the granola street gardener.  There is nothing wrong with what happened unless you fail to learn from it.

harvest season is upon us... time to preserve

A light picking of tomatoes tonight shall give the fruit flies a good time tonight... not really i put them in the fridge.  I wasn't up for stewing them down to add to my can collection tonight.

For canning i used this resource for reference.  The key thing i learned was to add lemon juice, a tablespoon per pint, as the acid is important for preservation.  That's why the first batch is in the fridge cause i did some "Man Canning"... Man Canning is like Man gardening... you just do it using your wits, passed down knowledge and a little bar stool wisdom.  Apparently botulism is a painful experience, but that's how you learn right.  I was never really a textbook guy rather more of a make it and then re make it kind of person.  For sure it is a long road learning life through a series of mistakes, but i have always been a fan of long roads... i like the scenery.  There is always the remote chance of stumbling on something unique, a weird kind of lottery prize.

I was actually on a beach the other day with a good man, it was a naked beach and we were a few of the only people there.  Now not a lot of men would sit naked beside each other on a beach but we did, as natural nudists would... we talked about many things, like making arrow heads out of glass melted in bonfires, and we got on to canning... and i heard the Parker theory on canning.  If the stuff in the can changes colour or shows activity over time, then this is a bad thing.  Indeed you can rely on observation skills, and you should of course when you are canning.  As a trained scientist my sterile senses are well honed, and of course liable centers on food preservation will error on the side of caution.  However i will not give away any of my canned tomatoes this year since it is my first time... i will give away my pickled beets, and my pickled kohlrabi as there is enough salt in sugar and vinegar (the acid) that I'm not too worried about poisoning people.  If i poison myself then it is a lesson to me, if i poison somebody else, then yes it still is a lesson to me, clearly a less painful lesson to me, but it just wouldn't be fair.

I still like my chances, i believe the thing to do is eat the batch i did without following the instructions early in the fall out of the fridge rather than let it hang around on a shelf for a few years.

It's weird how we have an innate mistrust of our abilities to preserve food... clearly an conspiracy to help convince consumers that the best and safest food is the one canned in a mega factory by people working minimum wage and sold in a reputable store that is trying to bust unions.

My point is we can do it, pioneers did it without running water, we can do it... have faith in yourself and continue, even though their not with you.  I have been making beer for a few years now and never had a bad batch... well there was that vanilla beer that was horrible, but it wasn't bad like make you sick bad.  Now my sister who is a classic consumer told me you can't make good beer at home... she said the same thing about pizza... i beg to differ.  Actually i differ and i am right.  You can't do anything if you believe you can't do it before you start... that is of course why gardening is the perfect introductory sport to self sufficiency.  Plant needs water, soil and light, it takes care of the rest.

Now why all this talk in a gardening blog?  I see it like this... the only thing more annoying than somebody who doesn't grow food is the person that grows it and then wastes it.  Think of it as preparation for the apocalypse... you know it's coming, of course the earth will be a toxic wasteland, but just in case it isn't you need to know how to survive.  You could also argue that if we all did this perhaps we could feed each other and be done with this insane consumer society, which of course isn't going to happen either given that our species is polluted with self serving hair trigger responding half wits.

OK, so we have to find a happy place as our planet goes swirling down the toilet, and it feels good to grow and preserve food.  Trust me on that one... make food not war, share food not hate, build food connections not walls, grow food not indifference, can tomatoes not shitty pop songs fronted by gyrating salespeople.

Go show up to a party with a big vegetable dish that you grew and people will say  "Oh my God that is amazing"... but really it is simple stuff, but next  to the consumer that brought high fructose cupcakes in a plastic container you can hold your head high.

Lets get back on point here...  how to attack your tomato preservation.  Some are just frozen in bags, some are reduced and canned and you will season it into what you want it to be when the time comes... will it be chile, will it be a minestrone soup, will it end up in a lasagna, on a pizza, on pasta.  My wife tells me you can salt and bake them and then freeze them to add flavour to a dish down the road.  Clearly you will want options down the road.  Sometimes it seems kind of silly because canned tomato products are pretty cheap, and given the labor and costs you might actually be losing money, but remember never let money be your barometer to happiness.  This is all just education for when you live on a farm in isolation and you don't have the options of buying what you want when you want, it's about the pride of being a maker, a doer, somebody who is not afraid to take their destiny in their own hands and pound something out.  Every year you do something you get better at it, it becomes less of a confusion and more of a fine art.  Always experiment... go down with your ships, it is the only way you really learn.

You see i set out this year to have a king hell tomato harvest, and this i accomplished... i have been giving lots away, but to me it would be the failure of failures to not see how far i can stretch this harvest to feed the family.  I often think how much farmland do  i need to feed us for the year... clearly i like the processed snack treats... i am a natural glutton.  But in my mind i see myself as an organic sustenance farmer... all i need is a forest, a wood stove a 10 acre farm and a 1000 acre barley field, and a 14 acre hops plantation.  I was joking a 100 acre barley filed should be sufficient.

How do you eat chard? Do you steam it and hit it with butter and parmesan cheese, or do you hit it with soy sauce?  I have chard by the truckload... perhaps i should pickle it.  Can you do that?  Of course you can do anything.

My purple heirloom beans are coming in now... i grabbed the seeds from a neglected garden last year... some silly fool just never picked them... i witnessed most of them just rot into the ground but i grabbed a few pods and that is what we are eating now.  I was late on the beans because i filled the garden with peas early in the season... i like the combo. I planted the beans when the peas died down and now is their time.  You have to love this long Oregon growing season, being able to space your crops out like that.

Also i noticed that my blueberries are really growing now that my house is not littered with squirrels who have the bad habit of chewing off the fresh growth.   It has made a huge difference... so remember if you have a neighbour who feeds squirrels you can stop that nonsense by trapping the bastards... just make sure the neighbour sees the squirrel in the trap... this will horrify the said neighbour and they will call the authorities and the authorities will tell the neighbour to make sure that the trapper kills the pest on their own property, which will in turn motivate the neighbour to make a plea deal to free the rodent on the condition that the stop feeding the rodents and your problems will be solved. 

Also never give up on killing slugs... if you were to call somebody a slug that would be an insult right? I rest my case.

Dirt under the old fingernails

When you are back from a few weeks "vacation" in the middle of the summer... lets just say the gardens need some attention.   Harvesting, eating and storing food. Weeding, decommissioning and making room for plants... and then filling in the holes.   There was a beet bigger than a softball... i do have a photo of it, but that would open the door to a photo downloading session that could cause all kinds  of setbacks in a night that has had many already.  For the record i was watching some NOFX videos on the Internet before i started this blogaroo.  A pretty tight hardcore punk band... you see i took a bamboo pole in the eye earlier today when i was in "savage attack weeding" mode and it reminded me of the song " Stickin' In My Eye".   Wonder how many garden blogs have plugs for NOFX in them, but i have no problem here.

I hereby classify strawberries as an invasive species... i guess i could google it but there is a band called the strawberries and it could lead me down a path. Like the one where you could go on about how the Strawberry Guava plant that is one of the most aggressively invasive species in Hawaii.

Never mind Hawaii let's think of the paradise called my back yard..There are probably about 100 hood strawberry plants in my yard that were yanked from the earth to give the beans some space to call their own.   Some of the beans of course took a hit but that is part of the score... farming never goes perfectly and sometimes you miss it and it just becomes some grand Darwinian experiment.

But that's when you step in... you see jungles don't necessarily make a good garden... every plant just rushing to go to seed, long an scraggly, trying to be the one that wins the battle for light... or at least stay even.  That's when it is time for some executive decisions... for example i sacrificed a broccoli plant to give room to some beans... they showed more promise... i chopped down the Kohl rabi that had grown massive, again to give room for beans, and i was worried about what to do with it but after some discussion with another local chef, i have decided i will pickle it.

Did i mention tomatoes... Holy Bleep, do i have tomatoes... all heirloom, all delicious... can you say the word sauce?  I did sauteed red onion, and then just reduce the tomatoes... let your conscience nip at you throughout the day as you randomly taste the bugger and fret, and ponder... and then realize... well well didn't Mark, the stay home dad across the street say he was making tomato based preserves today?  I wonder what he is doing?... he was of course in his kitchen working on his tomato preserves.  Hot damn, there was a food processor and a strainer and a few pots... i was instantly confused, the kind of soft feeling i might try to describe as screaming doubt, where the scream function is disabled  leaving only a quiet terror.  Poor old terror, a word that hit the big time and has grown afraid of it's own shadow. What the hell am i talking about? Actually I'm typing.

I think 6 Hood strawberry plants cost 4 bones in the nursery... meaning i have a bit over $50 in plants on my lawn about to get baked in the sun tomorrow morning.  I mention this more as a matter of reality than trying to be a money grubbing fucker.  It just is what it is... we pay for things that we don't need to, it's the thing about plant life... plants make seed or just expand, if the world was run right there would be no need for this buy plants nonsense.  This is one of the clear evils of the Monsanto enterprise, using a legal net to pollute and destroy the natural growing community.

I collected a bunch of pea seeds from the tail end of my peas... unfortunately for me my daughter was at a farm "potion" camp this week and came home and ground up the bulk of them to make a potion.  My cilantro went to seed and now i have a large jar of coriander.  The purple carrots i planted, perhaps a bit too tight in with the beets and peas, well some of them went to seed so we will collect that and try again next year under better circumstances.  

If you missed the food, go for the seeds.  In fact i have a big bag of purple spinach i harvested the other day, and i got the seeds from the community garden seed bank where somebody obviously let their plant go to seed last year.  You see the seeds were on a plant... just grab some and do it.   I should probably blanch and freeze the bag for later as i have more food than i can eat at the moment.

Mowing weeds and finishing plants gives rise to spaces in your garden... today i filled in the space with beet and carrot seeds... i should probably get some hot peppers from the nursery (listen to me) and file them in as well.  It is after all hot pepper season all hot an all outside... after all you can never go wrong with some hot peppers... if i had some hot peppers now i could pickle them with the kohl rabi and we would be having some king hell spicy cocktails come November.  Not that I'm much of a cocktail drinker myself, i stick with the beer. Speaking of that our Hops are coming to a fine conclusion.  The Zeus hops plant i put in last year shall have a fine yield but the others i put in this year will have to wait until next year to give a man the yield he desires for a fine brewing experience.

I think i fucked up the potatoes, put too much rouge straw on the plants and killed them... i planted more in the box and they are coming, but part of me wonders if this experiment should be just wiped out until next year.  Part of gardening is to live with nagging doubts, like any good life exercise, it just means you are thinking.  I've always been a fan a paranoia... too mean for some to stomach, but it makes for good comedy, and it helps embed your mistakes into your subconscious.  That's why we ride the big roller coasters right? To scare the crap out of yourself and get the adrenalin pumping... if there was only a free productive way to achieve this bliss...  of course there is but you have to move the scale... rather than whimpering 306 feet in the sky about to take a dive straight down into the earth, why not calibrate the success of your garden to that level.  Make a deal with yourself, if you don't grow enough potatoes for the fall then you will snap your hand in a rat trap... an very painful experience, it keeps a nice element of terror to motivate the gardener through these days of plentiful tomatoes.  Cause it would be easy to bask in the glow of many tomatoes, and just shove your potato failure to the back, but that would be wrong and unbalanced. Like in a game of hockey where you lose 7-6 and somebody tries to say well we scored 6 goals hurray for us... but you gave up 7.

I pickled 18 jars of beets, and 9 jars of kohl rabi and garlic and hot peppers, (store bought) and i have made enough kale chips that my shit's are now green and there is still more.  I was talking to people who say they don't have time to garden, and it's odd cause i don't have time to do anything but garden.  That's fine by me, my plants are my friends, i am their guardian.  Call me a tree hugger, i don't mind, plants make good friends, plants aren't emotional bastards, give them what they need and they will give you what you need, none of this barbed tongue bull shit, just pure science.  Don't get me wrong, i don't talk to my plants like some fools advise, because of course, plants don't have ears.  I imagine if you go and talk to your plants and hang out with them, one would hope you would have a hose in your hand and be actively watering the plants, or perhaps weeding around them and they would like that benefit, and perhaps the fool might think that talking to the plants made a difference.  For the record i have no scientific data to prove  that the specific act of talking to your plants helps... lets call it an educated guess.  Perhaps i have told this story before... neighbour in Vancouver lets people garden his yard and the plants aren't doing well (clearly due to shade issues), but they tell him that the plants need somebody to hang out with them, so if it would be OK with him, they could send a volunteer to sit in his yard a few times a week in a lawn chair to socialise with the garden.  Of course this put him off the whole program and on to a more paranoid version of this gardening scheme.  I imagine the people running the program probably believed this to be helpful because they left orbit a few years prior... if you know what i mean.

If you are talking to a plant  what do you say... i guess the plant isn't going to interrupt you with a more interesting story, so that could be good for the terminally boring.  The plant is not going to say "this story sucks, and you are a moron"... perhaps it might try to will you into watering it, but then a person who talks to plants might not notice the signs of drought as they are deep into a story about themselves and so happy that a chard plant is finally listening to their drivel...  the world has all kinds, and man gardeners don't talk to plants... perhaps they trash talk slugs at midnight before they murder them, but hey who's keeping score, besides me of course.

Harvests, second plantings, things done right and things done wrong

We ate a beet the size of a softball the other night, 2 beets feed the family... clearly there is meat involved, and spinach and salad and broccoli soup of course.   Just so you know I'm not like "OK family sit down and have your plate of beets".   That would be silly of course, and silly is not the Portland way... it happens to be weird.  Silly is like the dumb version of weird.  I see silly as ridiculous and weird more like abnormal, but considering what is normal in this world I'll take weird every time.   It's actually fun being weird around an old fashioned knuckle head's because the old fashioned knuckle head has a small mind wrapped around an outdated world view and they think they are right because that's they way they were raised many moons ago no mater what proper logic dictates.

Anyhoo, this is the Man Robertson gardening blog and not the Man Robertson philosophy blog so lets get to the vegetables.

I believe one of my goals was to have a king hell beet harvest, so we can tick that one off the list... probably time for a second planting of beets, I'm sure there is time.  On the negative side i might have planted the beets, spinach and carrots too close together, which is kind of a big failure given plant spacing was another goal this year.  You see i noticed the carrots trying to go to seed... meaning they were trying to sprout flowers by shooting a long "plant thing" up high and flowering.  It was probably their best chance to survive given the garden was going bananas all around them.  I picked one of them and it had a very small carrot so i gave it to the kids who washed it and put it in an ice bath, an invention they called a "carrot cooler".  After gnawing off the carrot they found what they called the "carrot's bone".  I guess the inner core goes hard as the plant shifts to flowering mode... who knew?  The good part is that we know now... that is Man Gardening in a nutshell... fuck the research, just slam plants in the ground and see what happens.   That's when keen observations skills come in handy.  Not all of the carrots went to seed and i harvested all of the spinach and cooked it down in butter and garlic and we wolfed it back.   Perhaps now the carrots can shine and turn that deep purple i was promised back in spring when i had a heart full of hope, and perhaps tried to squeeze too much out of the limited real estate.

A pumpkin came up from last years compost from Halloween' and i let it go for a bit but it was like a god damn attack octopus on speed clawing up all of the tomatoes and spiking me left right and center.  I tried to train it to the back to climb up that loathsome rose bush but it kept trying to force itself into the prime tomato grounds so i had to end it's reign.   When i get the cob house built in the backyard I'll plant a pumpkin next to it next year and it can climb all over that and compete with the Zeus hops, I'm sure the kids would like pumpkins come October, but for now it would cut into me having tomatoes in July, August and September.   Basically it just came up in the wrong spot, sometimes you win sometimes you lose, the key is to make the decision beforehand on where you want to win and where you want to lose, and run with it.

We are getting real close to tomatoes... I am getting a few that are starting to show colour thanks to my February indoor starts.  Peas are coming to a close  and i have many freezer bags full, along with the fact that we have had our fill of peas every day for weeks now.  Today i planted rows of blue pole beans amongst the roots of the peas, so that they can grow and climb on the trellis i had build for the peas.  Of course they will have to compete with the pickling cucumbers i put there too... that's Man gardening... fire the plants in there and see who rules!  Apparently the pea roots are great for fixing nitrogen in the soil so don't pull them out.  There will probably be some delicate trimming involved later, but think of that as as way to better get acquainted with what is happening on that level, cause you know when you are in there there will be some weeding you will realize you need to do.

 Between broccoli and chard harvests we have our steamed vegetables solved for the summer... potato boxes are waist high and the strawberries are pretty much over.  My kids who i nickname "the harvesters" are all over the blueberries but the lone plum will be mine... it's a first year tree... perhaps i should give Kaiya a bite since she helped me pollinate the tree with cue tips.  I could probably buy her off with an ice cream, but then if the twins got wind of that there would be hell to pay.

I love this time of year, as i love all times of year, because i am a lover of course, but this time of year just before dinner the kids and I go out to the gardens and decide what we will be having for dinner... they really get into it, and although it's not really free it kind of feels that way.  I believe the great life decisions are ones made by seeing what is ready, and not particularly by what you think you want, so we have the perfect vehicle to the life lesson.

With regards to the community garden, i did a lap around the garden tonight and conversed with various gardeners, and there was a slight undertone of a perceived "competition" among garden plots.  As i have always said "Gardening is not a competition, but if it can be turned into one to create greater yield then do it".  As a strategist i believe that whatever it takes to motivate you to succeed then use it.  That said i have to say that the biggest problem i see with plots that are under performing has to do with lack of watering.  You need to soak that soil every day, and soak it good... irrigation is really the key to gardening... not that i mind having examples to show my children of plants suffering from drought, but that is what it is.  Obviously you can have better soil that will hold moisture better but if you have no moisture you have no game.   If i were to be serious i would say to some people "water your garden with 100x more water than you have been and see what happens"... of course not everybody's life is structured around their garden for some reason, which seems weird to me, but that's the way it goes.

The potato box is in front of me and has a few more layers on it now, to the right is the tomato patch and i am currently soaking the peas, soon to be beans and cucumbers.

Potatoes in boxes and flowers and peas by the truckload

Part of me is happy that the other gardeners have pea envy, the other part of me can go find a hole to hide in.  Stockpile the victories my man because one day dame fortune will plant a rake in your pathway and you are going to step on that rake and take a whack on the beak and those bastard slugs will look up and laugh. 

But for now there are billions of chloroplasts in the leaves of your plants capturing the hot sun's rays and producing food for you.  This is where the little tweaks pay big dividends.

The potato boxes are really kicking into high gear... i don't have a photo of mine but you get the picture.  My potatoes however have some beautiful blue flowers on them... or i should say had on them.  Yes the smart wisdom is to nip off the flowers as you don't want, at this time, for the potatoes to make seed... you want more potatoes, you are a bloody starch monster and you need yield.  My oldest daughter just loves mashed potatoes and she was over looking at the setup just tinting her fingers.  There also seems to be a common wisdom to fill the potato boxes with straw... apparently this will give more room for potatoes to grow...  this i didn't know until today.  Luckily a gardening neighbour offered me some straw... i wasn't sure what to do with it but now i think i do.  As a side note it's funny how useless some of these "gardening forms" are.. somebody asks a good question and then every idiot and his brain dead brother makes comments but nobody answers the question correctly.  You see i was in the garden chatting with a good man... lets call him Reichel just in case this story turns incriminating...  we were talking about potato flowers.  No we both smartly agreed that as a general rule any plant making food, that doesn't directly come from the result of a flower, should not be allowed to go to flower if one wants continued food production.  So i pinched the flowers off and i agreed to look it up.  Then comes the problem with the internet, where every moron gets his form to clog up avenues to good information and point out the useless things that they think that have no bearing on anything. 

So what i think is right is that when potatoes flower you can grab some young potatoes for a quick dinner if you like tasty young potatoes, but if you nip off the flowers and pack more straw and build the box up higher you will get more potatoes.  So far i have used planter box soil, but i will try the straw next. 

Back at home the strawberries are coming in like gangbusters:

 

I have been getting a bowl like this a day for over a week and I'd say we are at about the mid point mark.  Remember you need to be on slug patrol ever night to keep the population at bay.  If it wasn't a war then you might not enjoy the spoils of victory as much.  My main problem with strawberries is that i live with 3 little strawberry monsters... they will gather around a plate like that and devour it in a few minutes.  They get good position on the bowl and keep their elbows up high to fend off and fathers trying to get in there.  That is of course why GOD made the decoy bowl of strawberries, and while the kids hoard over the decoy bowl of strawberries the father locks himself in the washroom with a bowl of the prime berries and goes to town at his own pace without the intrusion of little hands.

Also i am going to have to start freezing peas for those November stir fries, and i am reminded of the work in harvesting.  To me harvesting is one of the more satisfying things in life... perhaps beaten only by finishing a song in a recording studio where the bed track was nailed.  But it is work, make no mistake about it, a farmers job is never done, but if you like the work it is about as satisfying as it comes.    So many people go to work and their job is to jackal somebody into doing something that is no good for that person, or the community or the planet in general, but they won't get paid if they don't do it, so they do it and on some level must be injured by it.  There was a time i was a stereo salesman, it was a very brief period and i was reamed by management one day when i refused to up-sell a more expensive VCR to a pot breathed kid who needed a VCR to watch movies with his roommates.  They told me i was a failure and if i wanted to succeed i needed to follow the plan... i quit.  I think that's why gardening is my kind of religion... do the right thing and let it happen, it's work but it's honest, and heck even good for all.

Were going on a slug hunt...

I was pretty happy picking up the kids from school today... I got to spend some time at the garden snacking on peas while onlookers gawked at my garden.  I noticed a mistake i made.  I randomly threw in some red spinach that some kind gardener had left some seeds in the seed bank.  It was clearly a plant that went to seed.   Incredible idea... let a plant go to seed and then collect the seeds and then share with a community.  Not really the Monsanto model... but anyway the other day when i was filling my potato boxes with soil i was just grabbing random scoops from the garden, and i kind of forgot about the red spinach.  It happens... we now have some red spinach in the garden and some in the potato box.  Nothing a little transplanting and replanting can't fix.

Then at school i was talking garden with my buddy... lets change his name to Ramsey... yes we will go with that... you see this story may take a few unfortunate turns and we don't want to incriminate anybody.  Well Ramsey was concerned about holes in his plant leaves thinking there might be some kind of moth attacking... i assured him it was slugs and we could go and catch the bastards tonight at the stroke of midnight... and he was Game.

It was going to be Ramsey's first late night slug killing frenzy, and i wanted to make sure it left an impression on him so i spent the afternoon and evening collecting slugs and snails to plant in his garden just before our arrival.  I figured that since we were going there anyway the best thing i could do as a mentor was make it a big eye popping event.

The good news is that a quick trip into a pacific Northwest forest can yield a large supply of really large slugs in short order... the bad news is that those slugs can do a lot of damage in no time.  Obviously i had to ring his garden in baking soda so that the slugs didn't escape into other plots and run amok savaging other gardens... like mine.  As a result Ramsey's garden did have the distinct look of a crime scene, and he reacted accordingly going bananas right off the bat... he was darting around like a squirrel fresh out of a cage mumbling and shrieking.  I figured this was good, i was doing him a favor pointing out, in a exaggerated manor, the dangers of late night gardening neglect... then i remembered that cigar i found on the sidewalk...  it was large and perhaps locally rolled, so i suggested that Ramsey light it and get some good hauls and he could use the cherry to singe those slugs into remission... a bit of a crazy idea of course but since he was in a bit of a state it seemed rational to him.

He was hauling and hacking and stomping, so i went over to my garden and found numerous small slugs and bumped them off accordingly.   It was kind of peaceful  with a half orange moon on the horizon... i was snacking on peas, doing a little weeding and finding the odd slug.  It wasn't as peaceful in Ramsey's plot... i think i heard vomiting and disorientated gibberish and some of the local porch lights were coming on.  I went back to see our friend and things had definitely gone pear shaped... i figured, well a good strong first impression had been made so lets bump those slugs off and enjoy the moon.  From the look on Ramsey's face i began to wonder if that was a blunt and not a cigar as he was looking a little sloppy and he had noticed the thick baking soda boarder around his garden and come to the conclusion that his garden was in fact a giant slug nest and that perhaps if he dug down below he might find the mother cave.  As a pure scientist i was pretty sure there was no slug nest under his garden, but then again as a pure scientist one does need to prove or disprove each hypothesis so i got him a shovel.    His excavation was going well, and me being a good friend, made sure all of the slugs were disposed of... and i found a snail.  I thought it might be kind of funny to kind of slip it on his sweaty neck and then point at him in horror and yell "one is attacking you"... unfortunately he fainted into the pit he had dug which worked out well as a police car pulled up.

i had to kind of bury him a bit and come up with a story about these rabble rousing teenagers who were causing trouble but then darted into the woods of Mt. Tabor ... good thinking on my behalf i thought, and i had to get Ramsey out of there.  Luckily there was a wheelbarrow that i could use to get our good friend home... but i couldn't take the main roads... it would look awkward  me rolling a grown man home through the common pedestrian streets... the only way was up the mountain and down the south side.  Clearly a Herculean effort on my part, but what are good friends for.  We had to elude the law and get things right.   Halfway up the mountain we cut through a little used path far away from the road... this would do quite well i thought, and then i heard an owl... sounded like a barred owl... i hadn't  seen one of those in a while so obviously it was worth a quick check... i couldn't find the owl and silly Ramsey decided to go for a little joy ride down the hill.  Fortunately for him, he ran into a blackberry bush which arrested his decent into the reservoir. I get it, you get a sense of invincibility after a slug domination so you try something crazy... it happens to the best of us.


The truth is there was only one slug in the whole garden, and i felt defeated so i made up this story to give it a little juice.  The last thing we want to do is bore our readers right?  But there is a clinical score here.  This is a new garden and the slug population has yet to really build up... but now that there is food it will.  I think the site of this community garden has long been a city tree farm, not king hell territory for slugs, but with all the new lettuce and such there a single slug can lay 500 eggs per season. So if there are even 20 slugs in the garden it could be ten thousand slugs next year... there was once a band from Vancouver called "the Son's of Freedom" and they had an album called "Never Retreat, Never Apologize".  I think we have to keep this in mind with our slug diligence.

The real comedy occurred when we got back to Ramsey's house and there were like 30 slugs in his personal garden.  It was like that book the alchemist where a man goes on a hunt for the truth and it was right under the tree he started from.

Nobody was harmed in this story.

I might have picked up another garden

Well you see, i was at a gathering today and the people in the house, who just moved there casually mentioned that they won't be doing much with their garden box this year, due to the fact that the gardener of the house will be in another state for work related reasons.  Hot Damn!  They seemed amenable to the idea of me putting on a clinic in that box, that has good sun and all... I am a bit worried about the neighbours... they have a large American flag and a sign to the effect of removing Obama so that America can get back to the way it should be.  I mean people can believe whatever they want, i guess... my concern stems more in the fact that an honest person in a backyard at 1am killing slugs with glee, might get shot at, should some confusion arise. 

Oh the costs of gardening... those swat team bullet proof suits cost a pretty penny, and people can get a little testy when they see happy men in riot gear in the middle of the night poking around in backyards that aren't theirs.  Could you just plant some things and let them be, and take your chances?  Not too likely... that would be the easy road, and the easy road has no upsets.  Do you go into a big game without a plan?  Not unless you are that reckless child President starting and amoral and illegal war... and how did that end?

Curses... these terrible diversions... but gardening is a war, and don't forget it.  Alien troops of weeds and pests, and don't forget the unusual weather patterns, that apparently have nothing to do with human impact on the planet.

It was a rainy day today, which was good i found out... a good day for the slugs to be out attacking my strawberries in plain light.  I was out there crushing like a bad man, and i did a harvest.  This is my first ever strawberry harvest... i threw a bunch of "hood" strawberries in the rocks holding up my garden last year and they went bananas... there are hundreds of strawberries out there and some are coming ripe... i probably picked about 30 today and i picked some that were under ripe to test an idea.  Will they ripen after being picked... is that the key?  Clearly a delicious aromatic ripe strawberry is too much temptation for the various varmints out there.  I saw the spot where mice are entering my neighbours attic, and i bet you a mouse would like those berries.  Clearly i am in an obsessive game... how do i get the strawberries before others do?  Farming for slugs is suckers work, and as a general rule i don't put industrial products into my gardens... i don't trust them... something that kills slugs might kill earthworms and other beneficial organisms... i believe in natural selection... naturally i select my targets.  Or as my friend Mr. Rummy once said at a party "I never start a fight, but i always finish it". 

You start using these products, and it could put you on the path to the dark side, a path in which you will never recover from... next thing you know you will be sitting on your ass hole chair looking at your manicured lawn that you just doused with roundup™ thinking that you are "Keeping up with the Joneses"... the good news is that there won't be any attack bees coming out to sting  you... you will have done your part.  This is of course ridiculous, but it happens... and in the end it's all just memories... memory is cheap right!

sorry Mule, the devil made me do it!

Those bloody Goldfinches and other points

Did you know that goldfinches eat beet and chard leaves?  It's true, i saw it with my own honest eyes... my first instinct was to freeze and make the identification.  Did i mention that in my youth i was and avid birdwatcher?  I believe i saw 143 different species of birds one day during spring migration at Point Pelee... it was part of the Jim Baillie Bird-a-thon, around 1980.  You would be hard pressed to do that well today given the massive bird habitat destruction that has happened on this planet in the name of money and progress for the good of humankind... apparently.  Let's not step into that dark storm cloud now, the story is far to ugly, stupid and treacherous to kick into on a Friday night that may still have a sliver chance of being productive.

So yea, i like birds, and they haven't actually killed the beets, and at least they are eating them, which is giving them some nutrition, which i can live with.  But they were goldfinch and they were eating the plants... google it if you think I'm spinning you one.

My general rule is that if you are a vertebrate and you are actually eating the food you are attacking then your life will be considered on a case by case basis.  If i feel the need to net the plants i will net them, the way i see int now is that the beets are still thriving... I'll probably pass on eating the beet greens with all of the holes and the bird shit on them... i can live with that.  We can call it fertilizer for the next generation of crops and carry on and tell ourselves that we are doing good.

Glad i started the beets indoors back in February to give them that head start although i was thinking of doing a second planting of seeds to fill in areas of the garden that have space.  Hopefully the more mature beets will act as a decoy, but i can imagine any smart bird will always go for the newest, most tender snacks.

We shall cross that bridge when we get there... a great life philosophy, and one that is poignant in gardening.  You see last week we thought we were in summer with the sweltering sun blasting away and the locals in their summer shorts.  Did i start my tomatoes early enough we were wondering... and now mired in a frigid monsoon we have different concerns.  Perhaps more like should I have constructed a makeshift  tomato hothouse out of plastic and PVC tubing?  If i do tomorrow will that guarantee hot weather to cane me into a "will i burn my plant's paranoia"?  It actually happened to me last year... i build a little greenhouse and fried some plants in a few hot days when i let my guard down.  The bridge was there but i didn't see it because i had my head up my ass thinking i was all pro and all, and i went from being ahead of the game to being behind the game.  It's about recognizing where you are vulnerable and then reading the signs properly to avoid the disaster that has you in it's sights.   Avoiding disasters, is one of the best games known to mankind... that's why thrill seekers have such a blast, pretty much an adrenalin addiction when you look at it with a clear head, or a fogged head focused on a task.  My argument would be... rather than jump off a cliff in a flimsy flying suit to fly past rock mountain faces at incredible speeds that equate to sure death should a mis-calculation occur, why not change the bar with respect to your vegetable plant survival being the life and death line and you reacting accordingly.  You get your obsessive attack orientated daily mindset, which i find healthy, you can scheme, counter attack, pre attack and ride a big harvest... all of the elements are there.

The important thing is to pound yourself on your failures.. make it hurt.. that's what keeps the bar in place... remember of course that this blog is about Man Gardening.  If we were writing about a sissy gardening blog, the kind of blog that doesn't even deserve capitol letters... well it would be different. It would be a different blog... shall we pretend?

"Well i went out to my garden the other day... i hadn't been there for a few weeks because i was feeling a little ache... my psychotherapist thinks I am not getting enough Argon, so i started eating mushroom roots because my roommates bearded cousin came over last weekend and told me a bunch of things i wasn't aware of.  Apparently the best way to absorb Argon from Mushroom roots is to do a lipper... that's right get it in your mouth like a plug of tobacco.  The Argon gas will react with the scintactilaze enzyme naturally occurring in human saliva and your body will set back to natural Argon levels.

When i got to my garden, i smiled and felt good that there was my plot of land and i was a gardener... i figured there was no point snapping into the reality that my garden was in fact a weed infested example of neglect that showed clearly all of my glaring betrayals to the concept of gardening but instead posted a picture of myself on instagram with my gardening hat on... it was then that in noticed that somebody had commented on a post i made in facebook so of course i had to give them a LOL".

OK, enough with that insipid diversion... remember we are just doing comedy here people... don't ride a horse called failure if you ain't ready to be bucked off.  Failure complexes need to be fought through with shit eating grins... and beers of course,  Me, I always like to have an extra hundred beers on hand as a simple insurance policy... seems crazy on paper but say the apocalypse hits and you have the band over for jam... clearly the thing to do in the event of an apocalypse, as I'm sure creative juices will be flowing.  You could easily down 50 beers in scenario like that, which would last you only one more jam... clearly you would be brewing like a badman with a keen focus on securing more propane for the brew kettle and working bartering deals with local wheat and barely farmers, as a reasonable human i have of course already started multiple hops plantations.  Still probably a good idea to have a grain field and a cider plantation, i mean apple orchard, for good measure.

So yea, birds eating greens.. wonder if slugs are on the strawberries... back in a few... not that many out there, and most of them were on the basil and the good news was that they were all very small, which tells us that the garden caretaker has been doing as good job with respect to managing the micro slug population.  I found a few snails on my wife's Hosta plants and dealt with them accordingly.  But i am intrigued  by this idea that basil might be planed as a "decoy plant"... slugs seem to like it the most, so you can attract them there and focus on your killing frenzy when the time is right... like every night.  Clearly it would be better to have chickens to focus on the slug and snail cull, but i don't have enough property to deal with chicken shit at this time. 

Why my pea's are stomping balls.

OK now these are my pea's, I believe they are Oregon Sugar pod II, and Avalanche Snow Pea.. there might even be some Pole Cascadia Sugar Snap peas in there.  You see sometimes in a planting frenzy it's more important to get the food in the ground than to make labels... and if you do make labels make sure you don't use your children's water soluble markers to do it.

Of course in a perfect world one would want to know what is what so they could properly assess yields to maximize harvests, but let's face it, perfect worlds are like mirages, they seem more perfect from a distance and then the more you know about them the less perfect they become.

Let's not slip into philosophy just yet... we shall get there after a couple more beers, right now we need to set the stage.  A lot of people at the Mt. Tabor Community garden have commented on how well my pea's are doing, and they want to know what my secret is... Hot damn! Talk about pitching one down the old pepper (baseball analogy in where the pitcher throws and easy home run ball to the batter).

How did i do it?

1) started early
2) brought in a yard of fine white lightning planting soil (from dean innovation)
3) i show up every day and soak the soil

You see these plots have a lot of clay, which turns hard as a rock and becomes impermeable to water... so you want your clay below but a good layer of rich organic soil above.  The more great soil you have the better... it just cost's money.  For the record i don't think it's cool to take the mulch they have for the outside garden beds for your own plot.  True there wasn't a lot of great soil in these plots to begin with, but they are great plots and one should focus on that.  You have a plot of great sun exposure, with unlimited and easy water access... all the tools are there.    I say that because i have heard grumblings about these things and i encourage people to focus on the good that you do have and not what you are missing.

Another quick note...  A few people have mentioned that they have read updates from this blog, and there is a mild fear that their garden might get ridiculed given the nature in which this blog is written.  The way i see it, if you have a garden you are doing good...  the mantra when i began this years ago was "gardening is not a competition, but if it can be turned into one to create greater yield then do it".

I mean that in the most positive way, and i am a huge fan of comedy, the idea of trash talking, and attempting to motivate others through casual threats... well i just find it funny.   I met a nice woman in the garden tonight who asked me about my peas and why mine were doing better than hers, so i basically told her the 3 steps i mentioned above, and she said she wasn't good at gardening.

I disagree, she is good at gardening, she is there doing it and she is asking direct questions... i believe she is very good at gardening, just not very experienced.  The key thing is getting the answers to the questions that come to mind and then of course remembering and taking action.

I was gardening by the time i could walk, my father was a gardener who believed that son's are had to be labourors (Canadian spelling EH!).  Dad was a production gardener, a graduate from the Ontario Agriculture College.. it was all about maximizing the yield.  But now that I'm an adult i realize too that it is also about a happy place.  For the small garden you can spend a lot of money on soil, seeds, trellis equipment, time... you name it.  In the end you might just break even, but to me it's like a religion, you put in your practice, observe, react and are given your reward with which you can do what you can choose with.  You can share it, store it, darn well better eat it. 

OK enough of this nice talk... don't be a wimp, get in there and garden.  I was actually going to tar and feather my buddy Josh a week ago in this blog... he had yet to do anything in his garden, and i felt he needed some motivation.  In fact i actually photographed my garden and his garden and was set to go to town in a satirical blog post ridiculing his garden, or lack there of... but i checked my swing,... i did threatened him outside Glencoe Elementary school one day when we picked up our children that i was going to write a blog about his no existent garden.  Let's just say he had nervous eyes and tried to explain that they did in fact have a plan... well it turns out that he did, in fact there was even a backup copy of the plan... his garden looks great now, and provided he doesn't slack off on the weeding and watering he should be in great shape.    I'm glad i held back, even though i had some good zingers lined up... perhaps the idea that my threats helped motivate his planting, maybe the did, maybe they didn't, but i did see fear in his eyes as he laughed nervously.

Check this broccoli out:

I started it indoors in February in my kitchen under a florescent light... now the thing is you have to keep an eye on these guys... don't let them come close to flowering.  Just cut the broccoli head off and it will continue to produce all season long.  This one is not ready to be harvested, but that;s the thing about going to the garden every day, i go 2x a day, but I'm pro remember (remember comedy).   Now if you go and water an weed every day then you notice what is happening, you are able to correct your problem before it become a problem.  Like my buddy Josh who's basil is taking a big hit on the slug front, holes all over the leaves and all... the way i see it, well its quarter to midnight at this time... Josh should be in the garden with a headlight bumping off slugs right now... perhaps i should call him now and remind him.  Well that didn't go too well, i guess they were sleeping after a hard day... there was definite confusion over the urgency of the situation with regard to the urgency of slug counter attacks.

Now since I'm on a roll, let me tell you about the importance of regular garden worship.  Check out this plant:

It is a broccoli started at the same time as the earlier broccoli posted.  What happened?  Well it turned out one day i went to the garden and that plant had been pulled out of the ground, and way lying there in peril.  Who knows what happened,  maybe a kid, maybe and animal, maybe a malicious bastard... it doesn't matter, it happens, the good thing was that i was there to put it back in the ground and to pinch off the big leaves (to save on water loss), and i think the plant will survive and thrive in the future.   But this is clearly a result of my devout gardening practice... I appeared when my plant needed me, or you could argue i needed my plants... lets just say we were there for each other, as any fine religion should be... it was fate so to say.

When i was in a community garden in Vancouver Canada, we had a local group that had a plot... let's just say that that it was a group of non gardeners with a pack of unsupervised children who ran amok in the garden over every bodies plots... it was a total disaster, and they ended up being kicked out of the garden, but not before i got a song out of it.  You see when things attack my garden, i go bananas, hence the squirrel theme for the past year, but that has been solved thankfully.  So i tried to build a "security fence" around my garden to keep these children from tromping on my plants and in the end i took one king hell gash on my left shin from a piece of angle iron i  drove into the ground to hold up the "security fence", so in the end i did it to myself: Sung by Genny Trigo...

The real comedy here is that i gave this album to my neighbour John who's hacksaw i dulled up cutting the angle iron... not sure if he ever listened, or if he did he catch the acknowledgement.  Anyhoo, I thought it was funny.

One last thing... i noticed in the community plots tonight that in the communal herb garden somehow we had planted lemon balm and mint, two things that were on the "do not plant in the garden list", the reason for this is that they will take over and you will spend years trying to eradicate from the garden. I was going to bump them off, but since I am not actually the king around here, besides in my own mind (comedy people)  i will wait a few days until consulting.

OK i have to kill slugs now.

Mean spinch harvest tonight

I picked a ton of spinach tonight... well not a ton, to be scientific the dry weight would weigh in multiple ounces.  I could probably salad a party of about 15 if we were having a dinner party right now... but we are not, it's just me drinking in front of a computer screen... so i say's to myself, since there will be plenty more spinach tomorrow from the home garden, how do i deal with this influx?

On the way home from the garden i had a chat with a local and we discussed the idea of "blanching" the spinach before freezing it.  That would be throwing it in boiling water for about 20 seconds before freezing it.  Once you freeze spinach it's good for lasagnas and curries and such, and not much good for "fresh salads".  I might juice some if it tomorrow with carrot and beets, but then i will have those red shits... maybe that was way offside, but it's true.  You drink a beet juice (fine stuff) and then later you have a movement, and you are for a moment alarmed... do you have some intestinal bleeding?  Oh no it was the beet juice... sorry it's not my intention to talk about certain body functions but it is what it is.  Apparently beets have been used for dyes, and a good choice they are... beets are great, but we were talking about spinach before my unfortunate yet noteworthy diversion occurred.

Yes how to freeze spinach... a quick google search will pull up many pages of advise.  I have always just washed it dried it and frozen it and it's good for a few months, but i think i will blanch this batch and see what happens.  The Gardens are full of lettuce and spinach and it's time to eat... don't be a fool and let it go to seed and develop a bitter taste, it's time is now.

Choice and life are everything... people are often stuck on the path of choice, which can be unfortunate.  I think i terms of fate... this is what is available now, use it or lose it, some years are good and some are bad, sometimes a garden doesn't do what you want, but it does what it does, and you as the caretaker needs to harvest the potential.  You grew those nutrients for your body, now make sure you use them.  I love the fact that my dinner plans are dictated by what is coming fresh in the garden... it's life in a nutshell.  This is what we have, so this is what we are doing rather than ask what do i feel like tonight? The less decisions one has to make, the better.

My big key this year is giving each plant space... i started a lot early indoors and then placed them into the garden rather than quickly funneling a pile of seeds into a row, and now my reward is big healthy plants dominating their zone rather than a tight row of plants fighting each other.  Like these people that plant a row of squash plants... do they know that one squash plant can take over a whole garden and produce many squash?  Let's call it an error of the willing...

But seriously, to let your plants thrive they need space.  Look at it this way... say you plant a beet... think about how big you want that beet to be, say 3 or 4 inches in diameter, well then that beet needs  that room to grow, so don't plant another beet 1/4 inch away from it... now i feel a bit treacherous writing in imperial and not metric,, but you can do the conversion if you give a damn and catch my drift... for what it's worth i was doing a job today and we went and bought a bunch of 8 foot 2x4's and i was cutting them at 78 1/4 inches.  As a pure scientist obviously the world would be easier if we were all in metric, but that ain't the case, old habits die hard.

Plant a beet every 7 centimeters should be about right if you happen to be from Canada... let them be.

And water...  i think it's the big thing people don't get about gardening... don't just spray your plants for a second... soak that fucking ground... put moisture deep into the soil.

Did i tell you about my neighbour who started a little garden in front of his house?  I might have, it's late and i'm on a roll so no need to check on the facts now.   He kind of giggles when i scold him for not watering the carrots i planted for him properly, not only that but he has lettuce ready to eat and it is just sitting there about to go to seed... of course I'm on him like white on rice and i believe that generally he is impressed that i would take the time out of my day to pound on his door and scold him for garden neglect... i have noticed a recent fear... he sees me and he starts watering.  My mere presence has him on high alert, and fear of a scolding prompts him into action.  I do what i can for the neighbourhood, if indeed you don't have it in your general conscience to tend your garden properly let it be up to your neighbour to shame you into proper protocol.    He tends to be giddy, happy and easy going, while i try to be the stern influence... don't just grow food, eat it.

It tends to be the main problem... your plant looks great, now eat it, rather than marvel in it's glory and watch it turn to seed.  You garden for your body, to grow food to give you good life, when the time comes the time comes, eat the damn food, or store it appropriately.

this weekend gardening notes...

Savage attack weeding... I believe i have been over this before, but since nothing around here is labeled and organized it would be easier to just state it again.

You are basically going on a week killing frenzy, a botanical cleanse so to speak, where the things you don't want growing in the garden are removed (lets call them weeds), which gives more space and less competition of light and nutrients to the plants you want to thrive (your food producers).

Get them out of there... attack a region with vigor and just around the time you think you are getting no where step back and see what you have done... you are doing it.  That's life in a nutshell... apply it across the board.

But remember the dangers of savage attack weeding... you are kicked up into a higher gear and you are on a roll and in your frenzy you remove a good garden plant.  Don't worry, this happens to the best of us from time to time... there will be setbacks.

Watch weeing around the peas however... i find it better to  pinch off the green of the weed sometimes.  If you got lazy and fell behind on your weeding you might find a large weed hidden in your pea rows...  if you pull that weed out there is a real good chance that the pea roots are intertwined with the weed roots so removing one often removes the other, and as peas get larger they have a lot of green matter exposed to the dehydrating sun and air and will not tolerate this root damage well.  That's why it is a real good idea to stay on the pea weeding early.   

Generally you want to try and get the weed's whole root system out by perhaps inserting a trowel into the ground to loosen the soil a bit where the weed is located.  Attacking small weeds early and constantly is the real key to productive gardening.  As i have said before it keeps you in the game.  Weed always in short constant spurts... you stay on task with your head above water.  Weeds are like bad debt, if they get out of control they own your destiny and cast a negative shadow on your operation which can lead to depression, anxiety and failure complexes.  Constant short bursts of weeding keeps the task manageable... Stay on your weeding and you are in control, your positive energy is reinforced leading to euphoria, giddiness and bouts of random song.

I know... lets do a sports analogy.  You are the team coach... but as they say you can't teach scoring, it's just something natural athletes have.  Your job as a coach is to put your players in a position to succeed.  The good news is that you have a garden full of all star athletes... you did buy good quality heritage seeds right?  Please don't tell me you bought rouge seeds at a corporate chain grocery store.  If you did you can still amend this fatal  brain freeze by correcting this fiasco and getting good seeds. 

Get the right seeds for your climate too... as i learned last year i am in a prime tomato and bean climate, and with some serious soil amending (adding sand to the clay) i hope to excel further in the root vegetable category.

Take your tomato for example... a heritage bred tomato is a pure delicacy where as a corporate bred tomato (bred for long shelf life) is a tasteless thick skinned insult to the pallet.  You need to ask yourself what plant you want to to put effort into nourishing.  In fact if you don't have good tomatoes started by now just go get some starts at a fine nursery.  It will cost a bit, but i don't think at this level of agricultural production cost is our real goal here... it has more to to with access to good food, and re-enforcing to yourself and those around you what is actually possible.  As they say, "a kid that grows a carrot eats that carrot", and for all of our bizarre paranoid over protective story lines we have with our youth today, this is an essential lesson.. it's also fun, positive and hands on.

I did some pretty solid weeding at the house garden this weekend, i also put up a pea lattice (a mesh for the peas to grow up).  This garden has really been served well with the over wintering crops.  Not sure i ever really got the over wintering garden concept, but I think it has been taught to me finally.   In fact i had to clip off a few flowers that were forming on some of the red onions... i have heard that you don't want them to go to seed but rather put energy into the onion.  Apparently onions are bi-annual meaning it takes 2 years to go from seed to seed... i wonder how big that onion is under the soil?  You know you have done a good thing with the garden if you are up at midnight pondering your garden... it might be an eating onion right now.  A master gardener i am probably not, but as i have learned in the music recording industry, sometimes knowing too much can interfere with doing things right.  I know it sounds odd from a scholarly perspective, but man gardening is about doing,  being involved and making mistakes... that's how you learn.  Don't be afraid of what you don't know... find out through trial and error.

I also noticed today the i have a bunch of cilantro coming up near where last years cilantro went to seed.  This is excellent news... i also saw a few young tomatoes and some potatoes coming up on a volunteer basis.  I transplanted the potatoes so they are all in one region and this year and i plan on trying this trick. Never done it before but it kind of seems like a no-brain er.   Could you buy potatoes cheaper than buying the lumber and the soil?... perhaps, but remember as a consumer you are trained to buy satisfaction... i rest my case.

I have really bought into space this year as well... give the damn plants space... In fact i came back from the community garden tonight and my neighbour a few doors down was planting his newly installed planter box... i noticed his lettuce was planted too densely and reprimanded him accordingly... and then i offered him a broccoli plant that i started indoors from seed a month ago.. he was pretty happy, so we went over what might grow well in his heavily shaded garden box.  I was thinking carrots, but he had no carrot seeds, so i said no problem and went and got some fine "purple haze" carrot seeds.  I planted them for him trying to emphasize the idea of spacing the seeds to give the plants room to grow.   I sensed mild intimidation but general happiness, so i took the liberty of leaning on him a bit more to get some water on the plot A.S.A.P.   I might give him a tomato next week if he passes his watering test... clearly i can set him up with garlic next year which is an excellent crop for the young budding gardener.  Garlic being one of the "over wintering crops" is an excellent tool to keep the gardener engaged year round.  Progress feeds progress of course and it's a pretty hard crop to screw up.

Plant, water, observe, weed and converse with your local gardening community, and work hard to welcome others into the concept of gardening.  Even if you have to volunteer your time to help somebody, who is perhaps a bit timid, into the field of gardening do it.  If you can share and foster the joy of growing food in your community then that's a better community you get to live in.

A neat note about kale

Kale is a pretty hardy plant and it will survive the pacific northwest winter providing early season food as the mature plant comes alive in the spring and shoots into action.  We got a few good kale feeds in this spring.  My Russian red kale is now going to flower and I'm letting it carry on.  A few years ago in Vancouver my friend Sharon Kallis pointed out to me that the kale flowers are real food in salads.  It gives them some colour (yellow) and a little peppery zip... it's amazing how food plants keep giving.

The other thing that has happened is that i am attracting all kinds of finches and today when i was out in the garden an Anna's Hummingbird cam within a few feet of me to visit the flowers of our fine kale plant.  It is a great little bird chirping and hovering and it pleased me immensely to share a bounty with a loving non destructive animal.

Part of me wants to just let this kale go to seed, and the seeds drop and see if new kale will come.  I do have a melon and some potatoes coming up from from last years recycled seed supply... i actually had a few melons but the slugs killed off the excess.

It was about this time last year when i went to a a city repair home to learn about building cob structures and there was a bunch of hippies with happy grins declaring they were making Kale chips.  Inside i kind of scoffed, but i was wrong. Kale chips are good stuff... if you can salt and spice and oil something to a fine crisp you are doing good.  My brain was on cob structures and it had no time for sitting around waiting for kale chips to bake in an oven, let alone be happy about that fact.

Let me clarify... if you are making something nutritious that you grew, even if it is a bit salty for the kidney... do it.  On that note; remember the loop of Henley.. i had to pass a test on that one time a long time ago, but remember my father was a staunch science teacher, gardener and consummate dietitian strictly adhering to the latest "wellness news" of the hour. Dad never grew kale, he was more of a squash and beans kind of guy... there was an asparagus patch, and carrot rowe's with the son instructed to plant one seed every inch down the line after the line was dug deep with peat and nitrogen based fertilizer. And if the son got lazy and threw too many seeds the later the son learned how to thin carrot seedlings, which in turn taught the son to do it right in the first place. Harsh lesson or good education?  I would go with good education... no point raising some soft fragile kid who thinks that their perspective is the only one that matters... for sure have your opinions and air them but be sure to check them against the facts and proceed accordingly.   Most times kids will naturally do the right thing, their moral compass is astounding... i have often thought that we should have children as judges because their sense of justice is real and not affected by politics or economics.

But this post is about kale right... i think i stated that in the title.. i guess i could could change that now, but that would mean deleting this sentence and rethinking, which might be a good idea on some levels, but goes against the mantra of the SR blog series.

I get my kids to harvest the kale leaves, and my oldest goes to town washing the leaves, and then we make the kale chips.  We use truffle infused olive oil, salt and spice and bake the foliage with a keen eye on not burning it... you can do it at 200-400 on your oven but you have to keep an eye on it.  If you want to really dial it in get some crushed nuts in on the seasoning... then you get some roasted nut salted olive oil infused spiced greens that are good for you...

OK notes on the community garden next...

SR

Squirrel trouble has been greatly reduced, but don't let your guard down

It's been sort of a strange week around here... you see the local squirrel food bank has been shut down due to a generous offer from our former nemesis turned ally.  We are all good people, and it's a bit dicey... I was thinking of baking my neighbour a cake as a token of my gratitude for the smart decision they made in stopping feeding the squirrels.  It's just the the decision didn't come through a gradual understanding of the reality of the situation, but rather a shocking and perhaps horrifying series of events.

I will state as fact that no squirrel was harmed as a result of this wonderful conclusion... perhaps one was traumatized for a few hours, but that bastard had it coming.  It was a known carrot terrorist that had a keen taste for chomping on beet leaves and spitting them out and as a result it spent a few hours in a trap (a Have a Heart™ trap).  The sight of the squirrel in the trap set off a fair amount of chaos and phone calls to various authorities, and i believe what happened was that somebody found out that feeding squirrels is a bad idea.  They are cute, if you are that kind of sucker, but they are a menace and as a  result they are classified as... well these are the facts:

SQUIRREL DAMAGE LAND OR CROPS
Tree squirrels are classified as Predatory Animals (Oregon Revised
Statute 610.002) and as such they may be controlled (killed) by
landowners or land managers if the animals are causing damage to land
(lawns, gardens ornamentals, landscaping), livestock, agricultural crops
or forest crops. (Oregon Revised Statute 498.012).
A permit is not needed from ODFW to kill squirrels unless the
landowner wishes to transport a squirrel to a location where it will be
euthanized. In that case, the local ODFW office must be contacted
and a permit obtained.

Now i don't really want to kill animals, and i don't have anything against squirrels, but when you have 4 of them in your yard always, fighting, and digging holes in your rows of seedlings it can drive you a little crazy after a year.

Luckily it didn't come to that, as the shit hit the fan early that day.  Sometimes in life it's good for the shit to hit the fan... it can sort issues out.   A good life lesson actually. You see we often try too hard to get along... you want to be good to people so you swallow the sewage that comes your way in an effort to get along.  But then one day you blow, because you have just had enough, and you don't give a damn anymore, and all hell breaks loose.  You have forced the issue which is the thing you should have done in the first place.

Good in theory right... that's what they tell you when they are trying to calm you down.  It is your fault, you should have been more clear.

I'll call malarkey on that line of reasoning.  That's like saying i like to play bass at midnight at a frequency the rattles foundations of neighbourhood houses.  It is true... playing bass at face melting volume is truly a good time, and i pity the person who never experienced this wonderful phenomenon.  The thing is i don't do it because i don't believe it is fair to the people around me... and i believe the laws of the city would support this idea.

So now the squirrel feeding hub that was once a mere 20 feet from my garden is now gone, and with it so are the never ending squirrel attacks on the garden.  A truly brilliant turn of events, and one that makes me giddy with delight.  It is actually quite shocking to see how few squirrels there are now... they really are ungrateful bastards.  Mind  you there has still been some damage, perhaps rodents looking for lost peanuts bit it's no longer a non stop daily ritual.

Now there is another loon on the next block over that feeds the squirrels and it would have been interesting to see what affect the feeding stop on our block had to do with the population biology, with respect to squirrels, had on their feeder.  Did the most aggressive squirrel take over that territory?  Probably.  Now the grey bastard that nips at the beet leaves is still calling my house home territory... perhaps some pepper might fix that.  Apparently cayenne pepper, or Capsicum annuum can be used as a garden menace repellant.. i will try.  Luckily living in a town with a large mexican food store market, i should be able to get my hands on some high test cayenne pepper... stay tuned.

When i look back at it there were always 3 distinct squirrel clans waging war in my yard.  Clearly this was a matter of being located next to a never ending food supply.  It was ace territory no doubt. Some people thought i was exaggerating but then they came and saw and the common saying was : "holy shit you are not kidding, that is unbelievable".  Now it can't be good for the squirrels either... you are teaching them to be lazy and fight with each other.  In a perfect world the squirrel population would be a relation to the number of food producing trees there are in the neighbourhood.  I'm always for planting more trees by the way... more trees creating more oxygen, sustaining more life... bring it on.

I'd like to reforest the vast majority of the continent, reduce our energy consumption, and put a focus on growing natural organic food in spaces that were unnaturally hijacked by insane human consumerism.

I was reading in the news the other day about how some company is accepting applications for humans to go live on Mars in 2023.  God willing there will be a reality TV show over the selection process as a means to fund the venture.  Not a bad idea in an economic sense, but kind of horrifying otherwise.

Call me Ishmael, but isn't the planet we live on, that currently sustains life kind of an ace in the hole?  Wouldn't an intelligent view be to maintain this planet's livability.   Now i get that science and politics and money don't see eye to eye... well i guess politics see's eye to eye with money, and money see's eye to eye with money, and science see's the result of the experiment...  and religion which has a great affect on politics seems kind of ridiculous... so that's a bit of a mess.

I think part of the importance of growing food is so that the young people in the world can see how it's done, and that it can be done. And then tell a kid that  a seed/ chemical company is trying to take control over the world's seed, and hence food supply, and the kid will say that is wrong and they should be stopped.  I also think it is important to teach resistance to bad long term agricultural policies to our youth.

It is also slug season.. the slug population is slowly building up around the garden... it's a good time to take it down a notch.  Personally i'm not crazy on the idea of slug poison in the garden no matter how safe the package says the product is safe.  Slugs can mow down seedlings like kids can eat jelly beans.  You need to get out in the garden at night with a flashlight to see what is going on and slugs need to be stopped if the object is to grow food.  A few safe methods of slug control are boards down in the garden and the slugs will hide under there during the day and you can pick them off, or counter sink a shallow tin full of beer that the slugs will be drawn to to drown in.  But that is good drinking beer right?  That's why i like to be out there at night with a headlight... nothing beats seeing what is going on.  It's kind of like hand watering... it forces you to observe your garden more, and the more you observe the more you know, and the more you know the better a guardian you will be for your plants.

Like weeding, as well... it forces you to get in and study the micro environment to see what kind of problems you have.  You see the competition of life... you see things thriving and others struggling, ask why and look for answers.  Every climate, every soil, every light profile is different.  You need to find out what plants work for your garden and where and why, and your garden will reward you with the real gift of life, and i guarantee you will be a better person with a greater appreciation of the finer things in life.  Turn off that TV and do yourself a favour... grow some food  and eat it and share it with children so that they can see a way out of this mess we are leaving for them.