Onions, December Gardening and other insanity...

So i am at the end of my onion stash... i have about 10 red zepplin onions left and not a lot of them are in the greatest condition.  Nothing that can't be compensated for with a little minor surgery of course but i actually bought an organic onion at the high end produce store down the street... my options were to pay cash, card or have my left eyeball gouged out... i paid cash thinking that later if i needed protein in my soup that eyeball might come in handy.

I had a bunch of onion starts come up from seed from the flowers i left for the bees i transplanted them to where next years onion patch will thrive.  If fact i let a lot of things go to seed this year with my bee bias and all and the local birds have had a heyday out there.  Obviously you need to get your diseased plants out of the garden (like the tomatoes), but in that instance the seeds are in the fruit so it's a moot point.  On any day junco's are found feeding heavily in my garden while the neighbourhood cat's try to catch a feed of their own.

The hops by my front porch didn't get harvested do to the insane bounty of hops i have, so i just left them, it was also a fine bird feeding area.  I hadn't thought of that before i observed it... kale seeds, arugula seeds and all of the flowering plant seeds that i saw as weeds before they fed the bees.

December is a good time to move dormant plants, so there is always something to do in the garden.  For now i will redistribute the blueberry bushes to spots that make sense.  You see when i got the bee's in June last year i put the hive in and things were where they were and we got use to how the new order might run.  So my job now is to locate the blueberries, the grape vine, the echinacea, the dalias, the black eyed susans and all of the other plants i might have forgotten the names of.  We will need trellis's built and irrigation systems installed to really bring this garden into it's new era of productivity.  The fruit trees should come out stronger next year and we can just hope the hive makes it through the winter.   Oh yes i was going to make a shelter for the hive... i was thinking of something made out of plexi glass so the sun can get through but maybe a little less monsoon storm water gets on.  Some people insulate their hives although i have heard mixed reviews, the con from what i understand is trapping moisture.  It's always a worry about what to do but a law i like to follow in beekeeping and in life is that if you are not sure what the best course of action to take is then don't take any because more often then not human meddling causes more harm then good.  Maybe you try to warm the hive to help them out but then it ends up helping a parasite more... it's one of those weird things.  I actually had somebody tell me there is no chance my bees will survive and then offer to install mite poison strips in my hive.  It was all well meaning of course, but i say if my bees die then i get the honey that i left for them and if the honey is infused with mite poison, than am i better off?  Sure the company that sells the poison tells us it is safe, but apparently cow's milk treated with bovine growth hormone is safe too... so safe in fact that it is apparently required by law to have a label on all milk stating such a thing.  Of course i find this very odd and having 3 young girls that drink a lot of milk, and being aware of the connections between early puberty and growth hormones in food products i err on the side of caution.  People say climate change is a hoax and neonicotinoids aren't proven to hurt bees even thought they are an effective insect neurotoxin that kills insects... last time i checked a bee was an insect, but I'm sure some idiot might argue that point if they could make a buck off it or it wasn't written in some almighty religious book. 

Whoops, did we slip off in a tangent again... don't worry nobody has time to read blogs anyway, and i have been known to hug trees, believe it or not.  I mean i do love trees, hey they turn CO2 into O2 (Chemistry jargon of Carbon Dioxide and Oxygen)... an insane person who hated the economy might even insist we undertake a massive effort to reforest the planet, but that would cost money... right.

Did i ever tell you about my tree hugging story?  OK, so i was doing my mail route and there is a massive old ceder on 11th avenue in between Glen and Windsor streets in Vancouver Canada.  So there were some native elders out there one day visiting the tree and of course we got to talking about the tree's history and how great it was and that they had hugged it and i should take the opportunity to do the same... so i guess I'm hugging a tree right... i gave it a nice hug and that night the Canucks won a key playoff match. Well you know me and sports omens... what am i going to do?  I'll tell you one thing... hugging a tree in front of some native elders that love the tree and believe in a good tree hugging is a totally different game that hugging a tree in front of a real estate agent in a suit and his clients while you are in your postal uniform (the house next door was for sale).  Of course you have to hug the tree with the same passion because the Hockey God's might be watching... at the same time it did serve notice to potential buyers that there might be trouble if somebody got the insane idea to take that tree down, like they did to a massive stand of cedars on Hawthorne a couple weeks ago... good progress of course, could be a fine spot for a shit together apartment complex with no land left to garden. 

Perhaps it's time to register Gardening as a religion and tree stands a sacred Gods, we might then have to hug, or pray to them... as insane as that sounds to your average "economy at all costs" deranged lunatics it just might work.  Get the kids off the ipads and out climbing the trees... good for an exercise tax credit i say... family bonding excursions where you plant a hundred trees and get another tax credit.  It would put us back in touch with nature, bring us together, open the souls with a little menial labor, and then of course a nice tax break provided one fills out the proper forms in a timely sequence. 

I'd be in , but i won't hold my breath less i start turning a deep shade of blue.  You know once you start embracing nature it leads you down a dark path and forever might it dominate your destiny.  You start planting gardens and rejecting plastic packaging next thing you know you might take action to protest human activities that will destroy the balance of nature for the short term gain of a few... then you end up on a list somewhere of persons known do be dangerous to economic freedom...

It could be bad.

Robertson's Almanac

I believe i was eating grapes from our front garden on September 20th last year.  This is the garden that Fire-Man and I smashed out of some concrete that was there before.  Imagine somebody thinking it would be a good idea to pour concrete in a perfectly suitable, if not optimal gardening space that I would one day occupy. It's not the first time i smashed concrete out of a fine garden spot, and given the amount of concrete in this world i doubt it to be the last.

Anyhoo... i was eating grapes today, a full month before last year.   They are very tasty grapes by the way, but they are a month early... this is what a steady summer of "blast furnace" weather will do to the plants... provided they are watered properly.   I believe i noted earlier in another post about how my beets that overwintered were suffering the signs of drought in April.  Imagine drought in April in the pacific Northwest... just a minor fee we pay to keep our awesome economy rolling along. I read a story about somebody harvesting bananas in Vancouver B.C, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of fresh bananas but this has got to be a bit weird.  Yes it is weird but remember, weird is the new cool so in effect we are collectively killing it, until of course the glaciers all melt and there is no water, but I'm sure that is they type of thing that "nobody could have ever imagined", except of course the lunatics that have been screaming about it trying to threaten our economy that is doing so well for all citizens.

Now Robertson's Alminac is more of a undocumented recollection of things i have observed than a detailed quantitative study, but I'm smart you see... why waste time with detailed quantitative studies when they are dismissed as "alarmist" and countered successfully with tested "talking points".

I think i was part of the Jim Bailie Bird-a-thon in 1982.  I believe i saw 143 species of birds in one day during the spring migration at Point Pelee National Park.  The years following there were less and less birds until the point where it became depressing and i stopped going.  Apparently the culprit at that time was the rapid destruction of the Amazon Rain forest where our songbirds wintered and the loss of habitat was responsible for the decline in bird species.  Insane to think that that was over 30 years ago and we still are arguing about the idea of human activity affecting the planet that we need completely to survive on.

But hey do i got Tomatoes... I got Tomatoes... they are fantastic tomatoes. I'm thinking including the cherry type tomatoes i probably have about 500 ripe at this point in time.  Last year i was canning like a maniac late into the night heating the house up with the boiling pot raging... i needed to know it could be done and how to do it.  This year i am spreading goodwill among the neighbours, and saving myself the workload of canning something i can buy for a buck a can.  Mind you i make a pretty killer tomato soup and that can be frozen and saved for a cold November dinner.

I planted a melon in July to take over the pea trellis before i left on vacation for a few weeks... it was a long shot but after holding off putting tomatoes in the ground thinking there might be a cold spell  i thought  why not... the thing is now a monster thanks to Josh's dutiful watering with many fruit almost ready.  My key problem here is that this is at the community garden and i am noticing signs of powdery mildew on many of the neglected "cucurbitia" plants in the garden.  This will spread like wild fire and might strike me down before the harvest is complete.  In a moment of inspired genius i almost pulled all of the powdery mildew plants out of the garden, but then remembering the concept of "community" i got cold feet.  Somebody might get offended by me robbing them of their diseased plant that might produce some food that they will let rot in the ground... don't want to step on any toes.

Likewise a month ago i pulled out all of my cabbage related plants due to severe whitefly infestation... and i fired in some beans.  The beans are now stomping balls in the garden space. It's amazing how many beans a single plant can produce and the lesson i see is to give each bean plant more space.   I believe i have said it before and in this extreme year it is even more apparent that "Portland is a bean and Tomato town".

I think I'll stop growing hops now that i have my neighbours growing them for me... it's the zucchini argument.  Why grow something that somebody else will grow, get too many and try to give you?... there is no lack of free zucchini or hops in my world... another piece of life advice, always live in the world that suits you.

So we are a month ahead and there still might be plenty of growing season ahead of us... are your plants ready?  Now is the time you need to start culling the disease... let your horses run into the latter part of the season.  If a plant is doing well let it roll, keep your tomatoes off the ground,  prune back the excess and keep the plant healthy... you might get another month of solid production.

Onions... i have about 9 bags of onions from my bumper crop earlier this year, some i let got to seed for the bees.  Now it looks like onion seed will be scattered all around the garden.  This shall be a neat experiment seeing that i bought onion starts this year.... will onions come up naturally next year?  Time is the hunter and it will show the truth.   For the record all of my beans are saved seeds, i just saved some pods from last year and planted.  It's the weird thing about gardening, people take master gardening courses and then head to the nursery to buy plants... all plants can be propagated by plants themselves, but yet we need plant stores.

It's not to weird, it's the new normal.

Buzzing

Getting a beehive is a perfect accelerator for an insane maniac's changing local view.   Bee's make honey yes, but we don't actually eat a lot of honey... clearly that will change, but i secured bee's for pollinating, intrigue and motivation.

Once you have a hive you see the world differently... every where you go you are looking for bees, and more importantly what they are attracted to... and then why.  Bee's need pollen (protein) and they need nectar (carbohydrate)... they need a source of this throughout the year.  Obviously there are plants that provide this throughout the season, and clearly one wants to assure a quantity of this at all times.

I'll give you an example... Mint, I hated it...  it ran wild on my property before we got here and i set it eradicating it with a religious like fever.  I believe i might have even gone on last year about how some mentally impaired person brought some into the community garden... a plant clearly on the list of "do not plant ... invasive species" in the garden handbook.   But then I find out that mint, when it flowers in the fall is a good source of food for the bee's... my small mind opens up a bit and i change the way i see things.  Was that me watering some mint that came up in my garden? ... yes it was... you see what is happening here.

In fact this whole beekeeping thing might be good for my marriage... I have been importing bee balm, and lavender and other flowering plants that i am allergic to.  You see "the old me" had this opinion that if you couldn't eat the plant there was no use planting it, and my wife is kind of a "flowers are nice to look at and have around" kind of girl.  Now through the bees i can see this new love of flowers... perhaps i am obsessed.

Did you know that honey from rhododendrons is poisonous?  I didn't, but this is what i found out doing my research... so i set straight to work cutting down my neighbours rhododendron bush... she came rushing out of the house kind of vibrating and was cutting all over the place in animated fashion and at the time i was in the mindset that she was doing a bee dance to try and tell me in "bee language" where other rhododendrons were so we could set to work on more eradication.  I figured she was wagging to the left of the sun so i tried to rub antennae with her and i set off to the left of the sun to find other offending rhododendron bushes.  It turns out that wasn't the case and she seemed more pro rhododendron even after finding out about the honey.  She might even be a bit mad at me even though i offered to replant her yard in mint and lavender... some people you just can't please them.

OK maybe that didn't happen, but it's the type of thoughts i have been having lately.  My cousin called the other day to tell me he bought a new car and was very excited about it... I asked him if there were any bee's in it... i sensed alarm and a mild paranoia mixed with a fleeting sense that he hoped that there were no bees in it, and perhaps he should go check to be sure... it really knocked him off topic in a confused kind of way.

 Honey from fuchsia is insipid i have read. Oddly enough I had always like fuchsia's... my parents had them at the cottage and the hummingbirds would come and feed on them and there were good memories... memories that i had mentioned to my wife, who this year bought two hanging baskets of fuchsia, and i went out and bought clips and chains to hang on our front porch... and now the idea of insipid honey threatens to destroy that dream.   In reality I'm sure a few fuchsia flowers will not sour a honey batch... it's the thing about urban beekeeping... you get averages.  The good thing about urban beekeeping is there are less pesticides in the city and a great variety of flowering plants, although i did notice some hammerhead spraying the sidewalk with round-up, and i tried a more diplomatic approach in an effort to curb this insane behaviour... it didn't work.  A sick human determined to pour chemicals on his land in order to conquer the landscape to make it a more consumer driven idea of what a yard should look like is no match for logic.

My oldest daughter has now dubbed herself a "honey detective" furrowing her brow at rhododendron bushes and planting a large mass of sunflower starts.  Our plan is to gorilla garden as many sunflowers in the neighbourhood as possible.  Of course sunflowers are a good source of late season food for the bees.  I figure if i send the kids door to door asking to plant a sunflower or 200 in somebodies yard they will get a better response... use the resources you have always.

I have a bunch of flowering onions... if you overwinter onions they will then go to seed this time of year... I always let a few go for the bees and it looks kind of nice in the garden.  Interesting fact... leek flowers are purple (at least the kind i have) while red onion flowers are white... who would have known?

The other crazy amazing thing about bee's is what they accomplish with steady work.  Gardening can seem overwhelming if you visit your garden infrequently in rushed bursts of time... even me who is always in the garden I find myself saying to myself "there is so much i could do.. how far do i go?".  I of course am a person who sees gardening as more of a religion in a way that i can only guess religious people practice religion.  Practice is a good word... a defined allotment of time in which you focus on doing the work you need to get done, and in the end you feel better and see the world in a better way.  Well of course the bee's are the stalwarts of practice... it's all they do... make wax comb, fill it with brood, pollen and honey and work constantly to enhance the hive.  You see what the bee's do in a week of steady work and you can't help but feel humbled by the progress.  Do you know how bee's make honey? Check this ... if it was marketed as double regurgitated stinging insect serum it might not sell... but don't let the truth get in the way of a fine toast garnish.

I get an immense amount of good feeling nurturing food grown in the ground, it puts me in touch with the natural planet... my other "religious like" devotion.  Hiking a mountain, walking the forest, on a canoe on a lake, standing in a river... birdwatching trips with my Dad, camping in Algonquin park and hearing the wolves howl one night. All of the special memories that are "spiritual",  are nature related my whole life.  So somebody asked me... Is having bees labor intensive? Because they were thinking they would  like to do it if it wasn't labor intensive.  Now the answer of course is Yes, it is labor intensive, like gardening is labor intensive.  I would change the word "labor" to "opportunity" and the sentence takes on a whole new meaning... it turns from a negative to a positive pretty quickly.  If i can find something to help give positive meaning to life, something i can practice that gives back so much in so many different ways, then labor is not the word i use... i use opportunity.  In fact the other night at dinner where we fed heavily from the garden one of my daughters reminded me of the time i received notice that i got the community gardening plot.  The story goes that my wife was upstairs reading stories (it was bedtime) and i started screaming and making a lot of noise... My wife sent a girl down to find out what the problem was and in fact i was just celebrating the opportunity i had been awarded for more gardening space.

Imagine if i didn't have the community garden? That's where the twins learned to bike to last summer...  imagine not having that goal? Imagine not knowing all the new people i have met?  I wouldn't have seen a few great films because i didn't know about them... i wouldn't have have found homes for my excess plants? There would be less victims for my sunflower population project... right... we haven't forgotten about the bees... let's not get too off topic.   Life has a strange way of coming full circle... bad news can be good news if your focus on the end goal stays paramount. If something bad happens there is probably a reason, and so rather than dwell on the bad thing you can focus on the big picture to work to alter the chances of that "bad thing" happening again.

I'll leave you with a story i read a long time ago... not sure where it came from, but it helped reinforce my beliefs at a time when they were wavering:

A farmer left a gate open one night and one of his horses got out and escaped.  When the neighbour heard he said "this is bad", the farmer said "we will see".  The next day the horse came back with 3 wild horses, the neighbour said "this is good", the farmer said "we will see".  The next day the farmers son tried to break the wild horses and was thrown to the ground breaking his leg, the neighbour said "this is bad", the farmer said "we will see".  The next day the King's men cam by to collect the young men to go and fight in a far off war, and the farmers son couldn't go because he had a broken leg...

Life's decisions sometimes take a longer time to show their value, as we are seeing with the insane consequences of the money profit driven world... that's why I'll always ensconce myself with the gardeners and the beekeepers.

It's June... where is your garden at?

I know it's old hat, but I'm gonna say it again... Gardening is not a competition, but if it can be turned into one to give yourself a yield boost, well then that's an advantage one should seriously look at.

Another advantage is a honeybee hive, and a colony of mason bees and the dogged determination to get out there and pollinate with a hand device if your observations lead to to believe you might be exposed to a weakness in the food growth cycle.

Here in the spring i am pollinating a plum tree with a cue tip.  The cue tip was kind of thrashing at the flowers as the cotton fibers rip at the stigma and stamen  kind of damaging it.  Obviously you are getting pollen however but i also tried using a flower to pollinate other flowers.  In the end I have plenty of fruit on the tree which is sure to leave me in a nice fine rage when the squirrels bite off all the fruit a week before they are ripe.  Don't think there won't be a war over this... Old Man Robertson will throw everything he has to respond and put an end to this wretched habit the local squirrels are accustomed to getting away with.  It's one of the problems of being aware of things... it can be a curse sometimes... might be kind of nice to be able to just show up smiling happy in the thought that you are a gardener, because you have a garden and it's so nice and fun and relaxing.  Maybe you show up smiling up at the sky because it's a beautiful day and then you look down and see... "Oh something is eating my food", and then think "oh well better luck next year".

Not me... i drive my ships home or i go down with them.  If you fail to solve your problems in your garden you run the risk getting in the habit of failing in other aspects in life.  "I don't feel like watering today on this hot day because i am kind of busy" can be akin to "i don't feel like making the effort today to make this day awesome". 

I really believe routine menial labor splashed with a dash of observation is one of the great inherent resets for the human brain... now i haven't done any scientific studies on this, but then why bother... we don't listen to science... we are more of a "wing it" with respect to personal beliefs and economic opportunities kind of species.  I believe the name of the species is "Consumers"... But lets not get on that tangent lest we slip onto the wrong side of this razor wire.

On a more positive note it was a good slug killing day.  Because it was rainy and cloudy today and the slugs were out on the spinach in the daytime thinking it was free buffet day... it turned out to be dead slug day.  It's important to take advantage of these opportunities when they are presented to you... that way you don't have to be out in the garden with a headlamp at midnight catching in action the things that you see the evidence of during the day. 

So right, our observation skills noticed a lack of pollinators so we set the tone and took care of business... it was kind of an early spring this year, surly due to factors nobody can explain and will require much greater study in the future in order to craft smart governmental policies that balance the needs of consumers and business alike. So when going gets weird, the weird need to turn pro... great and fitting advise from the late great HST.  Even though i was set with a mason bee colony the mason bees didn't hatch until the fruit tree flowering was half over.  We shall see what the honeybees can do next year.

Blogging time is up... me schedule calls for yoga... stay tuned for the next installment where our hero discusses some of the positive idea sharing things that have happened at the community garden this year. 

Have a good night and remember to let all your seeds grow into their opportunities you give them.

Early Spring 2015

   I realize I am courting the Omens by titling a post "early spring" and in fact may be challenging fate to deliver an ice storm... but every once in a while one has to live dangerously.  The crazy thing is that the garden has had a bit of a problem with drought this spring... not a good sign for the long hot summer coming up in this part of the Pacific Northwest.  Who would have ever thought we could end up having water problems?  Well lots of people actually, but those are the tree hugging fools that thought that ecosystems should be protected... we don't listen to those loons with their wacky, baseless, social media sharing, Domesday scenarios constructed to destroy the economy.

In the end I'll have enough water to soak my gardens, so it won't be a problem for me in the near future, so as a human i will subscribe to the age old "if it doesn't immediately affect me personally then it's not a problem" and carry on.  Heck my toilet is full of drinking water... it can't be a problem right.

So the kale is flowering, I let it go for a bit to give the bees the idea that my garden is a good place to hang, but i took it down today to cut down on the lingering white fly problem we have in this city.  I juiced the leaves with carrots and beets that overwintered and some ginger that i bought from the store and then i nursed a belly ache for a while belching like a town drunk.  I feel fine now... wondering if bolting kale is good for the digestive tract?  The little yellow flowers were very sweet and peppery and added wonderful colour to my salad.  It is now time to put some new kale in the garden that i started indoors a little while back.  I guess i have a love/hate relationship with kale... it's kind of more of a hate/hate relationship, but it's apparently really good for you so i eat it.  A good little recipe is to fry it in garlic, butter, salt and pepper and get some chick peas in there and toast them good.  With enough butter and salt even the most insipid tasting plants can be delicious.

 Kale grows easy like a weed and a half dozen plants will give you all you need all year round... just keep grabbing leaves and it will pump out more.  Another good thing is that the idiot squirrels don't eat Kale in this hood... they will destroy broccoli and beets, attack chard, decimate fruit trees, but they won't eat kale.  Luckily i can grow beets and broccoli and berries in the community garden as pesky squirrels aren't a big problem over there.

Kale salad-  wash the leaves real good, stack them together and roll them up real tight and then with a nice knife slice it real thin cutting circle sections.  This will give you long thin strands and rub with some oil and salt and let sit for an hour or longer.  You can add orange slices or nuts, cheese... anything really.  Bring that to a dinner party and the ladies will be amazed... for some reason everybody likes to coo over a kale salad... it provides a perfect decoy for you to hit the cheese plate somebody else brought.

need it on video-

When you are ready I'll tell you how to make kale chips... but for now make sure you get rid of the kale that is in your garden that over wintered now.  Don't fall into the trap where you think it is food that you are going to eat... you may, but more importantly it is a disease source that will haunt your garden and your neighbours gardens for the duration of the season.  It's one of those mistakes that is made by the same people year after year... the joys of community.

Peas should be in... don't have them in yet? Give yourself a little punch in the face... just a little stinger and make sure to hit above the eye in the forehead... trust me...  don't hit your eye... Just a little shot to wake yourself up to get into the game.  Spinach should be rolling too... forgot that?  Give yourself a little kick in the shin... make sure not to twist your knee...  you can kind of heel kick it so you get the little motivational shot of pain without risking long term damage. 

Obviously if you just want to garden then go do it... but if you want to MAN Garden then you need to be prepared to hold yourself accountable.  Don't be afraid to self loath as a motivator... i do realize promoting self loathing seems ironic in a hobby that is generally considered a peaceful and relaxing endeavor... but you have to see the garden through the plants.  If you are soft on yourself you can always find an excuse, a reason... imagine your garden as a sports team and you are the GM.  You need to be hard to set the example that this is going to be a grinding season with no days taken off... no set of conditions too steep to overcome victory.  What is victory you ask shaking your head?  Produce of course... some of the gardens out there already have eating spinach and foot high peas... some gardens have nothing but a pile of weeds.  The way i see it, the spinach eating garden is off to a 20 point lead early in the season... those are going to be big points to make up to get into the playoffs come harvest season.