Is it gardening blog night?

Who knows what night is is around here with respect to blog updates... The super Robertson entity is like a random glob moving in various directions.  Be able to laugh at yourself: that's my advise... if you want another hot tip I can give you "don't spend money you don't have".  I got that one from a 3 minute commercial from a radio in a bar, but i distilled it for you... the add was kind of strange... some dude with an annoying clear voice going over various ways in which you can go into obvious financial ruin.  It was strange for sure, you see i set out to try to see the third period of game 2 of the Stanley cup finals... not an easy thing to do in this town... there was a playoff basketball game that some people seemed pretty concerned with... but i did end up finding a TV that was in a room with  blasting rock music and full of dirty tables, but the god damn hockey game was on. No sound just loud radio...  At one point, i believe a Nickleback song was blasting... something about "everybody wants to be a rock star", and Pierre McGuire was talking, and for the first time in my life i found myself longing to hear what he had to say.  Write that one down.

Earlier, our family did eat a full hearty Victory salad... the one i planted in the garden back when i was trying to put spirit omen energy into the biosphere for the Canucks to come up big, but clearly my calibrations were off a bit and the energy went to Vancouver's formidable opponent the LA Kings, who just went up 2-0 in the finals.  I tell you one thing, watching hockey in Portland is almost harder than keeping a peanut fed squirrel out of a peaceful garden.

OK let's talk garden, since this is a gardening blog, or a Man Gardening blog for that matter... remember good living philosophies and Hockey and omens for that matter are all part of Man living well.

What do we have in this photo:  It is a stake i made from a stick to hold a plant line for a row of beets... and it is sprouting!

You see a tree branch had fallen in the front and i needed stakes for plant lines so i snapped off that and stuck it in the ground.  Now it is sprouting... what can we learn from that? 1) SR is very consistent with the water hose. It is really the single most factor that determines how well a garden will grow... if you can sprout a stick that you stuck in the ground to hold twine, then , well you are not bucking for the bronze in the watering competition.  And the other thing... 2) I would say the power of life is strong...  life finds a way to live, cause that's what it does.  In some ways it's good news with respect to the massive, ill fated, short sighted, money grubbing manor in which the human population lives.  Life will go on... it will just be lacking genetic diversity, and clean water, filled with pollution and random mutations.

This next photo is a good one... it's of a little girl in her pyjamas  waving a hockey stick in the air shouting threats to the local squirrel population.  A most excellent way to start the morning.  I always make sure to tell the kids not to grab the squirrels, because they are swine bastards and will turn tail and bite you... much better to try to hit them  with something firm.

At one time there were 2 Kohlrabi plants here now there are one.  I believe what happens is that the brain damaged neighbour puts out the peanuts and the squirrels grab them and look for a plant to  bury them by (as a marker) and then later when the squirrel wants a peanut and it's too fucking stupid to walk back to the never ending supply then it just digs up the plant and has a peanut.  It can bury the peanut by the plant and keep the plant alive cause it knows it needs a marker, but yet it's such an ass hole when it wants to dig it up... perhaps that's it... may as well kill the plant so we don't think there is a peanut there.  At least a crow looks and knows it is evil... these squirrels try to pretend they are all cute wining over the hearts of the mentally challenged.

It's important to remember that if we did go back to the garden, as Joni Mitchell sang about in the song Woodstock, vermin are really the big threat.  sure sure, easy to forget in our new world order of oil spills and insane companies spraying the earth with toxins... that's just a money thing, when it's a food thing one has to remember everybody likes to eat.  talk to a chicken farmer about a fox and see how much sympathy he has toward the cute fox.

What about snails and slugs?

Hot damn it's 1:13 am, time for our fearless leader to get out there with a head lamp and murder some invertebrates.  It actually looks pretty clear out there... nothing eating the broccoli, but then that large snail i found loitering in the rocks is no longer... aloha sucker!  I could probably have done a more thorough search but since we have suffered such a high concentration of squirrel plant murder from the terrorist squirrel population i have things oddly planted and since i saw no slugs or pests on any plants before i stepped on a cherry tomato plant, i figured I'd cut my losses.

This is garden with Garlic, peas, greens, roses, tomatoes, strawberries and plum tree (left to right), in the pots are more tomatoes to replace terrorist squirrel murdered plants.

We like our garden, the girls picked a salad tonight and peas will start in a few days... all i need is a red tailed hawk.

Now let's try to focus on the negative...

Never underestimate focusing on the negative.  It's true that good thoughts breed good thoughts and good actions... but it also breeds wordy hammerheads trying to sell you self help manuals.  Sorry, just calling it like i see it... there is always some fuck up who can't get their head out of their own ass chirping off about how to live right, and you find yourself thinking if you would just shut up i would live better instantly.

So the negative, and focusing on it as a positive.  True story:  I was at a tree planting camp (justifiable for a gardening blog) and i was about to quit a shitty company called Wilderness Reforestation because they had willfully screwed me in many different ways, but part of me wasn't a quitter and that part of me was winning the moral battle that was going on inside my tormented soul.  It was odd because there were 4 of us that were going to quit and my earlier anger with respect to the negative helped the other 3 decide we needed to move on.  Keep in mind we were in Northern Ontario, far the fuck away from anything, in a block of forest, or a block of land that once was a forest and is now, as we say in Portland, stump town. So at the 11th hour i begin waffling with the reason quitting is not an honourable thing to do, when Jason Potts comes over to me (one of the 4) and looks very seriously at me and says "you have to focus on the negative"... so i did and then i quit and then 2 days later i was in another tree planting camp a few hundred miles away in a company called Outland, that was filled with some of the greatest people i had ever met, we had a blast, made great money and made some connections that ended up landing me out west which basically set the stage for everything that has happened in my life for the last 20 years... my wife, my kids, my bands, my gardens.. here i am.

And so are the fucking squirrels.  Lets put it this way.. i have a hockey game in Beaverton next week and a few squirrels will look to find their new home out there at that time.  It won't be the easy life they are use to, but they are cunning little bastards, maybe they can survive out there.  It's not really the squirrels fault, it's the idiot neighbour's fault...  she feeds them non stop peanuts, lets them nest in her house... they are just like "shit man I'm so stuffed, well we better bury some of these peanuts in the crazy guys garden just for safe keeping... think we can waddle over there?"

As a result I have been over planting... it seems like 40% of the plants get dug up as a result of "collateral damage" due to peanut burying.  Why you should never feed animals, birds a possible exception (habitat loss), as they say in the wild a fed bear is a dead bear.  the reality being that if you feed a bear it will grow accustom to the easy food and become a menace and then rangers will come in and shoot the bear because it is mingling  in human territory and has become "dangerous" to precious stupid humans.  And it ends up dead, which is not ideal at all.

If the people who write for the show portlandia ever need a concept for a show look no further than some of the fucking loons around here that feed and harbour squirrels.  It's vintage shit... crazy too, i mean sure squirrels are cute, to some, but if you look in the city records of house fires you will notice that many a fires have been started by squirrels chewing wires causing houses to burn down... and perhaps a neighbours house too.

As expected, the marigold experiment didn't maintain the success it had in the first few days and we need to now focus on the negative.

The positive is that i replanted the bald spots with some of the many random "starts" i planted in the little plastic planters i have accumulated over the years.  I laid down a line of leeks, I collected a cash of Kohlrabi, i banged in a future bushel of beets, i tucked in three tomatoes. 

It's time for beans, but I'm running out of room... i think that means pole beans... I have always been a bush bean kind of guy, my father was a bush bean man, and as the song that never got finished goes "sooner or later we all turn into our fathers".  In fact the classic Dad vs Squirrel or Chipmunk epic battles are still to this day some of the greatest childhood memories... Dad would shut down the rodent and be just a glowing, and then the rodent would get around Dad's system, and Dad would be fuming, and then dad would adjust the system, watch the rodent fail and be in a state of glee until the rodent found a new way around the problem, which would then stimulate Dad to spring back into action.  Lets put it this way: 3:00 AM Dad is awakened by a chipmunk rolling acorns in the ceiling above his head at the family cottage... his son is then awoken by some serious pacing and the words "that bloody S.O.B!"... one of the rare times in my life where i actually liked to be woken in the middle of the night.  In the end there was sheet metal all around the area where the outer wall meets the roof of the cottage.

By the way, saw a neat potato planting idea a few streets over.  It looks like the dug a tough and planted the potatoes in there which will make for easier "mounding" in the future.  if you are going to "build up" why not start low.

Tomatoes: i hear through a "friend of a friend of a friend" (name the song lyric and win a 5 cd Canada Lynx records CD pack) that you should pinch off flowers of a small tomato plant so it gets bigger.  What the hell, i did it to my cherry tomato and my Roma tomato.. they say to do that with the blueberries too for the first few years but i just never had the heart.

lets replace negatives with positives and see how we grow

Not to claim victory at all... not even close, but since i put some marigolds in the garden i haven't seen a squirrel in there.  Mind you it's only been a few days, but definitely better to not be hating little rodents.  You see i got involved in a facebook thread where i was calling for squirrel death, and that caused various opinions to be shared and one of them was killing is bad.  Killing is bad, like fair is fair, and don't let any rich religious based political war profiteering pack of ninnies tell you otherwise... killing is bad.

Once you accept your thirst for revenge has boiled over into a justification to doing something that is wrong, you can begin to look at the problem from another way.  How do we make the garden undesirable for squirrels so we can all live in harmony?  The two things i  have come across, or have been pointed out to me are;  planting marigolds and spraying Cayenne pepper.

Luckily there is a lot of squirrel friendly territory around here and an unlimited supply of peanuts, so the hope is we can define my vegetable garden as a net negative, and everybody can carry on.  If i were to trap these guys and relocate them far far away, i believe i would be giving them a death sentence.  If i were to put a family of life long fed free peanut and free house lodging squirrels out in the wild nature would make quick work of them.  I wouldn't actually kill them but the proper relocation would... i guess i could swallow my science background and throw up a short term economic face and justify it, as we do so often as humans, but i like the mantra "see the wrong and then and change and they will see the change in you and learn".

What else have i learned lately:  Lots of clay in the Portland soil.  I bet you i could i could file a yard of sand into my garden in the fall, till it all in and that would help with the water seeping into the soil for better irrigation.

The last 2 days around here have reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which is apparently 32 degrees Celsius.  So obviously i have been worried about my spinach... when it gets too hot the spinach wants to "bolt" meaning it senses sure death and tried to make seed as quickly as possible...  So far so good.

The mason bees have 6 tubes plugged up but we had a bit of a setback today.  A few prized mason bees got into the basement today, because the door was open by a blueberry bush.  Clearly we can't have 2 quality bees out of commission on such a bright pollinating day so it took me a while to get them safely out which cut into my time to prepare for my mother-in law's arrival today.  I had big plans for how the house was going to be a just shining, but then 2 of my star pollinators fell into the trap.  For the record what you do is hold a towel up and use it as a barrier to guide the bee back towards the door that leads to the great outdoors.  An old Robertson trick... dad and i would help bats find their way outside by holding up a sheet and cornering them towards a door (at the old Robertson cottage).  Simple fools will say you can hit them with a tennis racket, and you can, but that's not really helping if you know what i mean.

Is it time to thin your carrots and beets?  Perhaps you got lazy and planted too many seeds in the rows cause it seemed like too much work at the time.   If you did then now is the time to think about thinning the next time you are weeding.  Try to envision the plant and see the space it might need to grow into a fine edible specimen...  In fact my garden needs a good weeding... starting to see some grasses and other undesirable plants to take hold.  I'll draw the line on killing weeds... It's OK to kill weeds, just don't be a dumb ass and use herbicides (chemical weed killers), know for sure that the world needs no more chemicals poured on it's soil.

Fire in tomatoes, you started from seed a while ago, get you damn beans in the ground, and water water water.  He who waters their garden gets plump vegetables, he who forgets learns a lesson in plant drought development.

Still haven't seen many honeybees... what have we done?

Spring garden progress report

We shall try to stay on topic this time and not focus on any various non gardening rage issues.  Although gardening does rely on the growth of life which often forays into segments that ideologically oppose our foolish little consumer impulses... but hey who's counting, besides me, and other various loons. Click on the pictures to enlarge if you feel like it.

The good news is that the mason bees have taken quite nicely to their new home... you see i thought i heard one of them hatching so i set up the camera for a little time lapse filming and it turns out what i heard was bees in the little holes doing their mason bee thing.  Multiple bees using multiple cylinders getting down to business.  Even at night tonight i went out and there were multiple bees in their tubes settling in for the night.  Most pleasing for sure!

Of course things are flowering, and pollination needs to happen, strawberries, blueberries and plums are flowering now but it won't be long before we see some pea flowers.

(for the record all the white things are hail stones) I went and put up a vine and veggie trellis net for the peas to climb up using some bamboo stakes and some twine guy lines... i was fairly pleased with the outcome, and then i just did a replant in the spots where there were no peas because squirrels had dug up the damn place.  it should be noted that squirrel families are booming in both of my neighbours houses, and there hasn't been an incredible amount of digging lately.  Perhaps my flying out of the back door slashing a hockey stick has had an effect, but i think it's more the fact that the delinquent rodents are now nursing young and hence don't have time to bugger old man Robertson's set up.

Better them than me, but i have a hard time understanding how people can live in a house infested with squirrels... i actually did once it was in 2001... i remember one of my drunken Quebecois roommates was referring to the squirrel as "Squirrel Laden" because it was hard to catch much like Bin Laden at the time... uh oh teetering on a political rage here... in the end the house smelt like death and one of the guys ended up getting lice...  rent was cheap and i wasn't home much.. i went to work, played in the band ROADBED and hiked mountains on the weekends.. but soon after the squirrel CT and i bought a loft and started living the good life.  If there was a squirrel living in my house now there would be no other focus than evicting the squirrel... period.  In fact squirrel death would be automatic, and then the problem fixed so that new squirrels live without the knowlege that a great place for them exists.

Potatoes are up and rolling... i was talking to a neighbour and he mentioned a system of growing potatoes in a barrel like item and continuing to put more soil in throughout the season and in the end you get a barrel full of potatoes.  My father would "mound' his potatoes pushing dirt up over them which worked on the same principle...  i think i shall experiment with something along those lines... perhaps put a bucket with the bottom cut out of it over the potato plant and fill it in as the plant grows, and see what happens at the end of the season...  probably more potatoes.

The reseeding of tomatoes from the greenhouse baking fiasco is inching along, but that said i went to the local nursery and grabbed a sweet 100 cherry tomato and a Roma tomato... both are large and healthy.  I also split a tray of broccoli with another neighbour so i have 3 plants in the back garden now.    I waffled on where to put them... they do become very large plants with big leaves that produce very well in the pacific northwest, so i threw one in with the row of spinach with the idea being that when the summer heat comes and the spinach is over the broccoli can have that space, and then i threw a few others in spots near the garlic, as Garlic and broccoli are apparently companion plants according to a few websites.  Remember a companion plant is a plant that grows well with it's companion.  That's why i threw in a hops plant... Zeus to be precise... well there was another reason, but a good one is that ladybugs love hops plants, and lady bugs love eating aphids and other garden pests so by having a hops plant one gets the added benefit of a healthy ladybug population for pest control.  Remember i wasn't going to plant a hops, because it is an invasive species, but hell something needs to do battle with the ivy, and seeing that the hood is full of squirrel feeders i hardly see an issue.

Rhubarb-  we bought a good strain from a nursery and put it in the back and i think it was getting too much hot sun cause it didn't look good so i put it in the front yard where it should get some nice shade and we shall see what happens.  Seemed like a pretty easy crop... hopefully i didn't kill it, time will tell.  i have a weird energy with rhubarb... simple thing, always causing me problems.. kind of like a cell phone... which i don't have... just kind of misses me.

Beets, Spinach and carrots- because i was a lazy ass i planted them too heavily randomly sprinkling seeds into the ground and now i am soon due for a little thinning.  One of your key things in growing vegetables is to give each plant the proper space to grow, thrive and survive.

I also picked up a Thia Chili Pepper plant just for laughs to see if these supposed hot Oregon summers can produce.  I have been using a lot of hot peppers lately trying to make various curries and Mexican dinners, so why not try and grow something.  i was thinking of a small greenhouse like structure but remembering the last bright greenhouse idea i had that set me back a few valuable weeks on the basis of a mind boggling gap out I'm not sure... perhaps a fall issue to bring the peppers home.

Oddly enough i planted a ton of cilantro, a plant i have publicly loathed for many years... but for Indian and Mexican food cilantro is a must.  My problem was that i met too many knuckleheads who's idea of a fancy new age salad was too cook up some Bulgar throw in some chick peas and douse the shit out of it with cilantro and think that they were doing something radically "organic" and perhaps "gourmet".  And then you are the in the park trying to toss it into the bushes while some pea-head  raves on asking for a recipe for this nonsense.  The problem is cilantro is not a great primary flavour, I'm sure some might disagree, and i would encourage ridiculing them!  Cilantro is an excellent secondary flavour bringing body to the sensation of hot food... it works well in Mexican salsa, and i have a date with some Mexican people who are going to teach me how to make Mexican food... I will report back.  For my purposes cilantro is an essential ingredient in chicken curry and dahl, which i can dial in now and my family likes to eat, so it makes sense to have a fresh supply.  that is the other key thing... fresh... spices need to be fresh for food to be scintillating.

Of course there is a secondary man garden now as well... you see swell friends  Fire-Man  and Sharon came down for a visit...  i might add that Sharon brought me a hat she wove from my Vancouver B.C. hops vine. It might actually be a fruit bowl which is what it is being used for now although i have worn it around as a hat... what happens is some fool sees me wearing one King hell vine woven hat and tries to be a smart ass by saying something and then the said person gets a pretty thorough lesson on Humulus Lupulus... which is of course Latin for hops... if you hit the bastard with that you can stall them and get ready for a good hops lecture.  So this the initial construction of the secondary garden:

Anytime you get to smash concrete with a 16 lb sledge hammer it's good. Smashing is one of the finest tonics around, but then to have that said smashing turn concrete into full sun garden is the kind of transition that I'm all about.  it is by the sidewalk so it will have it's dog piss issues, but really that is just an honest source of fixed nitrogen.  In reality, my testicles probably have more radioactive nuclear waste in them than they should.. but hey accidents happen... so really worrying about a little dog piss seems a little silly.  For the record no root vegetables... so far 2 blueberry, 3 poppies (cool flowers), a cherry tomato (the sweet 100 i mentioned earlier), a grape vine and some rosemary.... i might fire in a hybrid raspberry from another neighbour this weekend.   I think most of those can have piss protected elevated plant regions, so one at least has an alibi for some paranoia that might jump on his brain from time to time.

Mason Bee... did i mention i was susceptible to rage issues due to the lack of pollinating insects

So this is my mason bee sanctuary on the east wall of our house... the bees like morning sun... that is my kitchen window that looks out over my new Man Garden:

  The little box is the cocoons, approximately a dozen, some are big and some are small... the small ones are the males and they will only be around for a short while to fertilize the females of course, and then the females will go about the business of filling the cylindrical tubes with larvae and packing mud in between the larvae and then on the ends of the tube.  That is why they are called mason bees by the way... for their mason skills.

  Pretty sure this one is a male by the size guesstimates of a professional eye-baller, he was the first one out and then did some sunning and then he was off... it worked out well as I have some plums and some blueberries that need a good pollinating.

 

Later in the day I was on the front porch blasting out some S Robertson style banjo for the neighbours to digest and I saw a very similar bee trying to crawl under the cedar shingles... I tried to alter my song and tell the good bee that the sanctuary was at the back of the house, not this decoy east facing pillar that you seem to be so obsessed with... it got to the point where I was about to put the grab on him, but then I remembered the obvious... he is a free spirit, he will do what he needs... he doesn't owe me anything for the 24 bones I spent on this exercise... and most importantly. Don’t put the grab on things that can sting.  Actually male mason bees cannot sting but years of mental bee sting phobia still play hard on the mind.  What the hell you start going around grabbing male mason bees cause you can and then all the sudden you make an identification mistake and put the grab on a killer bee that whiffs out one of them swarm scents and next thing you know you are writhing around in a ditch being stung 400 times per minute while neighbours try to soak you with underpowered garden hoses. No thanks!

I'll try and do a time lapse of a cocoon hatching tomorrow, I guess they will come when they come.

Oddly enough I was in charge of the mason bees last year at our community garden... I got some smart-ass answers from some Vancouver mason bee suppliers. It is quite possible that I missed the deadline, although it appears that the bee cocoons are kept in a refrigerator and then when you bring them out the heat activates the bee... as which is normal for invertebrates that don't regulate their own body heat internally.  Perhaps it was too late in the season, so what I did in that case was just wash and prepare the mason bee nesting plastic, and put it out as an environment for natural mason bees to find and use.  I guess there is no real guarantee that my bees, or the cocoons I bought will use the house I have for them... I believe our location is optimal (morning sun), so we shall see.  The lady at the bee store... it wasn't actually a bee store, but I kind of like that idea... very human... well she was very nice and walked me through the whole process.  You don't actually have to stuff the cocoons into the holes... just create an exit hole in the box by opening one side and let nature take it's course.

For the record I also replanted a bunch of tomato seeds... my neighbour and I collected a bunch of heirloom varieties... Burbank slicing, Silvery Fur tree and Manitoba... why not try again now.  Buying tomatoes from a greenhouse is always an option, but a wise man takes as many paths as possible, when reasonable of course... reasonable being a word that has great flexibility... reminds me I should some yoga rather than streaming hockey games and cursing events.

That's why the bees make it a good day... I have to say I was pretty stoked to see the first bee.  I like bees, I like the bee mantra... ultimate teamwork... do this! Well I don't feel like it... OK everybody, let's waste no time and sting this fucker to death and keep this machine moving.  You never see an old fat bee trying to tell the other bees they need to do this thing to help make the old fat bee fatter and more comfortable... no no no the others would have dropped his youth full carcass off the edge of the hive the moment the said bee bastard started coasting.

Why are bee colonies collapsing?

They say it's debatable, but those who are "they" happen to make a lot of money making things called insecticides.

Insecticides- icide, meaning kill... death, and of course insect, meaning insect.  Hmmm i think we need more research... perhaps it's this climate change thing we have been denying but also saying it occurs naturally i guess to cover the bases...

Meanwhile the idiot Prime Minister of my home country is fishing for investors of other countries to extract more natural resources from the said country... but that's another story... mother of mercy how did we get to the point where we mentioned that stugot?  Oh yea it was the plight of the bees, and so naturally our hate would be directed at corporate lackeys always interested in selling out human and national long term interest to corporate bidders.

Killer Bees are from south America... perhaps we could all prey that a swarm of killer bees will descend and bring some "sting therapy" to this nonsense... we will probably find out that prayers for impossible things don't happen... which is good to know by the way.

That's why you should dig up your lawn and get a proper habitat in there... to provide bee habitat think natural... they like leaves to shelter ground burrows, different plants that will flower at different times... perhaps we should make new shirts "he who has the greenest lawn is the biggest fool"... I doubt you could sell that, but I have been wrong before

The season is in gear!

There have been some successes and many failures… the greatest failure being the greenhouse fiasco... you see I built this greenhouse:

My problem was that I wasn't in a "greenhouse state of mind"...  I am a greenhouse rookie so to say.  What went wrong?  Two words: Blast furnace!  Put it to you this way... since we went with failure before success lets look at the positive in the failure...  So,  say some moron forgets to open up the greenhouse on some suddenly hot day with peak sun and the temperature rises inside... well we now know that beets are the species most likely to survive this insane indiscretion, followed distantly by kohlrabi, and a lone cherry tomato plant.  Clearly ventilation and temperature regulation are key elements of greenhouse mastery... call it a learning failure... making it a good failure!  Once again I will buy big tomato plants from the nursery paying for the head start (or wait until they start blowing them out… most likely). This growing plants inside in suspect conditions with little children bombing around is perhaps a net negative.   Comparing a small tomato seedling and a large tomato plant from a greenhouse you will see that the greenhouse plant has probably more than a thousand times the chlorophyll filled energy producing green matter.  And that is your head start, and it is a race, make no doubt about it. That plant has to get big, flower and produce tomatoes before the fall monsoon comes in.  On a financial issue it is a failure because seeds are much cheaper but at this level it is about the joy of growing your own food. With that logic we are here to get in touch and to be comfortable with growing food... I would even  go so far to say that it would be negligent to deprive our children from growing up and not seeing food grown by the people that sit at the dinner table.  Too busy my ass... that's the thing, the plant does all the work... you just set the parameters.  Gardening is very spiritual on that level.  I haven't yet abandoned the idea of a shelter for the tomato plants...  my reason being to keep the rain off them and discourage the growth of blight.  Did I mention I might have done the same greenhouse “blast furnace” bit on my neighbours plants... the ones I stood in front of and stated my word as a man gardener that “these plants will not die”... I guess I still have a few weeks to work some magic... I'm thinking of an illusion where I replace the heat baked crumpled sprouts with some king hell plants and just eyeball the bastard when he gets back and say... "Yea that's the way I roll, what can I say, I have a green thumb"... or I could admit failure... but I think if he had some real nice plants he would be happy and I, for some short period, could avoid the tagline "absent minded savage maniac".

Blueberries- I have a Patriot and a Duke by the plum tree... I have 3 Chandler (red stalk), another 3 Duke, 3 Early Blue and a Ruble (keeps leaves)...  these notes are for my use.  That is a lot of blueberry bushes for our hero, but you see I got a deal...  At the local Nursery, which is a very good Nursery the Blueberry plants were going for 20 greenbacks.  I located a guy and his brother that sell bigger plants from a farm down near Salem Oregon for 6 dollars so I went down there before a hockey game I had in Sherwood.  Holey mackerel it is a long way, and I almost missed the game cause some jackass in a sports car tried to turn around on a narrow farm road rather than back up a half a kilometer and got stuck... I was figuring I am not coming back here (due to distance issues... excellent plants I might add) so I bought as many plants as I could fit in the car and for a while, a short while, I became the neighbourhood blueberry broker.  Alarming lack of bees of course, which reminds me to get a mason bee colony... a nice buzzing honey hive would really do the trick... we shall see.

Random planting notes starting with planting a blueberry. Notice the soil prep,.. Potato- every eye will produce a plant cut 21 hours before planting to develop a scab to help prevent mold growth... Plant red onion starts in rows with room to grow... imagine large red onions and plant accordingly.  Strawberries... It was recommended I buy "hood" so I did, CT also bought some ever bearing variety and there are some others that were in the garden before... should give us a good variety, even though as you may remember, I swore off growing strawberries given the Vancouver fiasco.  Basically I have strawberries at the base of the fruit garden (plums and blueberries), and in the rocks that support the garden, so I am not really losing space, I am just using space that is not ideal for vegetables:

Garlic- coming along quite nicely... a few suffered collateral damage from the squirrel insanity, and that whole plot has taken on a new level of mind crushing.  I hate to get off topic again, but we really do need a neighbouhood wide cull of the squirrels… but murder is such a harsh word to the local squirrel sympathizers.  It's really my time for a BB gun; I never had one as a kid... too dangerous, so now as a parent I am moved to the line of justifying bringing one into the home.  Oddly enough my father had a BB gun... he just failed to mention to me that he had one... probably saved him having to replace windows at the cottage... and outdoor light bulbs.  My "community together" project that starts with a major coordinated squirrel eradication, has received divided support, so in pulling a page from the great community activists I have welcomed the dissenting voices to the conversation... "Very interesting you feel that way... perhaps we could get a taxidermist to set a squirrel stuffed pelt on you balcony that you could enjoy until the new squirrels move in for the next scheduled slaughter".

Yes the garlic is growing well.

Beets& Spinach- are up and off to the races... bare patches where fucking squirrels, dug fucking peanuts supplied by fucking neighbour

Peas- are up... similar squirrel issues.

Did I mention I planted again?  The greenhouse fiasco lay hard on my heart... what to do, what to do,… and then we came up with (we... me and silent Internet partner) the idea that a Stanley Cup victory salad garden was in order... plant the salad and by the time the Cup has been won the salad will be ready... excellent idea for sure as it has now begat a salad eating frenzy, and how can that be bad?

Being more experienced this time I used the greenhouse material and some chicken wire to create a seed protected zone (A barrier where squirrels cant get at to dig in peanuts).  I sewed the chicken wire together with the PVC piping... we cannot tolerate this nonsense:

Who knows what new failure is around the corner?  We are better off this month than we were last month.

 I guess I should mention... a man took a poke on the index finger from some chicken wire that he had on his garden plot of land.... he did it too himself.

No pain no gain.

The new Man Garden

When it comes to Man Gardening one of the fine tasks is the initial preparation of the garden... the separation of the men from the boys. It's your biggest and most unique opportunity to affect your growing medium... you can go soft, or you can go hard, this is where you set your garden's potential... the culling of undesirable plants, the moving of stone and earth, the engineering one has to do while pacing and rolling their moustache ends around their index finger. Peering out the window, watching the sun, calculating what will happen in July, and then just plain getting in to it. Life is an amazing thing... you think you are seeing something but it's not until you get up close and start doing that you really see what is happening... the essence of gardening!

From the photo above you can see where the garden goes and the most obvious problem is the dubious infection of Ivy. Ivy is one nasty bastard, I believe it is called English Ivy and it is a non-native species that does very well... Ivy’s resilience and lush growth make killing it or removing it a difficult task, but difficult tasks is what man gardening is all about... to shy away from labour is a clear admission of failure... totally unacceptable! That said the roots are everywhere and if you think for a second that you got them all you are a simpleton fool with a small mind that would do well to vote Conservative. But that's not Man Gardening... we observe, take knowledge, process facts, and make decisions with respect to gaining the highest vegetable yield. The sun isn't going to rise and set where you want it to, it's going to do what it always does, Ivy will out compete peas and do nothing for the palate... not to mention supply far less Vitamin A, C and K and of course Folate... so the Ivy has to go, and it's up to the man to deliver the Ivy it's walking papers and he does that by digging the damn roots out! That was actually a rose bush (Oregon being the Wild Rose State) that was overrun by Ivy... so to get the Ivy roots out, lets just say the rose bush took a pretty bad hit. It might seem simple but rose bush roots entangled with Ivy Roots and a sawed down cedar tree root make for a gnarly mound of roots that needed to be removed. My wife saw what was left of the rose bush, and immediately identified me as a "savage plant murderer" oozing hate in my general direction, but I was busy sacrificing other species for the greater good to pay it much attention.

On this weekend I filled my own and 2 of my neighbours green bins full of ivy, lemongrass and their roots. Also seen here is a fence part blown into my yard by some natural hurricane that happened that week. Also there was the rock wall that needed to be taken down so that the garden area could be expanded to maximize crop yield... there was a delicate balance between leaving some yard for the children to play in, and some yard for them to learn how to grow food in.

I got 4 yards of triple mix soil, if I could do it again I would have gotten 6 or 7... for some reason I pulled back thinking that, yes I am a natural maniac who has historically overdone everything, and the "new me" will be different... I let it go. I will get more fresh soil next year... I will have a better idea of what happens after next year. Not to mention this fact: I went to a Yoga class last week and while everybody was in their postures breathing deeply, and I was cramped over trying to suck breaths into my fat collapsed diaphragm, the teacher said something prophetic... she said "when you are in your practice, don't be there criticizing what's wrong with your form, if you practice that, that is what you will become good at... criticizing yourself". I kind of have the market cornered on that one, so lets turn the page.
This is 4 yards of soil:

Soil going into the garden... with 2 photobombers Hailie and Emily:

And then Peter, my good neighbour got in on the action... a swell man who said "my doctor said I should get some exercise but the gym costs a lot of money so helping you actually saves me". With a beard like that you might even get a plaque in the "man garden".

After the soil got moved to the garden area I needed some help "stomping down the soil", so like my father before me I put my kids to work... actually my Father put his son to work while his daughter claimed to be too busy with various excuses... I have 3 daughters… equal treatment for all: I puzzled and waffled for a week before I put the rock wall back up... Should I make a staircase up to the garden? But that would create a pathway for the children to lead them for some "stomping... And as I was tinting my fingers thinking about what I was going to do a squirrel came along and buried a peanut in my garden, and then another, and then a rat went by with a peanut. Upon further investigation it appears my neighbour has squirrels living under her roof area of her porch and her answer to that is to feed them peanuts! Perhaps I mentioned that. Yes I did. OK so this is the garden with the soil minus the rock wall:


It takes a while before you accept somebody as a "squirrel enabler", a rodent sympathizer, but in the end all you can do is build your garden and defend it.