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.