The October garden, triumphs and failures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The September garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

harvest season is upon us... time to preserve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dirt under the old fingernails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potatoes in boxes and flowers and peas by the truckload

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

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

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

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

Back at home the strawberries are coming in like gangbusters:

 

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

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

Were going on a slug hunt...

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Nobody was harmed in this story.