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.
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.
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