off to the races

80 degree weather here this week, that will pay huge dividends for those that have had plants in the ground developing root systems that have been watered adequately.  If not don't worry we have a long season... but get on it!   My hops have reached the top of the line this week to give you an idea of the power we are dealing with.

I just came in from a slug an snail cull, another important thing to get on at this time of the season as you want to really get the population of these pests down.  Sure some softies don't like the idea of bumping off organisms, and i get that in a sort of philosophical way, but in another more harvest centered mindset it makes no sense.  That is why it was easier to sell pesticides to farmers back in the day... this chemical will take care of things and you don't have to witness the horror of the carnage.  The trick is to develop a healthy hate for your pest that will power a will to get out there and meet them Mano to Mano.   Obviously if i had a hundred acre farm i couldn't possibly be out there killing pests one at a time... i would have to choose my crops wisely, and learn.

I could never condone pouring chemicals on the earth... there has to be another way, and the chemicals can only come back to hurt you.  Like the bees... apparently conclusive studies have confirmed that pesticides are mainly responsible for the decline of the honey bee.  Imagine that... a chemical designed to kill insects is killing insects!  But if that chemical makes a lot of money for a said company then perhaps it's OK... that is the story we get apparently... but that is another dark rage to fall into at another time.  For now we need to bask in the glory of the 20 plus snail and slug kill i pulled off tonight... that is 20 less snails and slugs reproducing in my little micro ecosystem.  I get the story all the time from other local strawberry farmers... all my strawberries get eaten by slugs they say... they say.  You see my strawberries have a patrol Sargent with a heart full of hate and a keen eye for late night revenge... but that's just me, and remember I'm a weirdo.

Luckily for me i live in a city the celebrates weirdness... believe me it's a lot easier to be weird than it is to be "world class"... first of all what the hell is "world class"?  The dictionary tells me that it is "being of the highest caliber in the world"... does that mean arrogant, or just a term thrown out as a result of a marketing study to sell sell sell.   Getting off topic here... i love all of the cities i have lived in even if their choice of Mayors is bat shit crazy.

Apparently bat shit makes good fertilizer... most fecal matter does for that matter, bird guano is very good i have been told.  But as fun as it might be to have a colony of blue footed boobies  above my garden, i might regret it on other levels... and it's not going to happen given the geographical limitations.

OK, the garlic i transplanted that i mentioned in the last post is far behind the garlic that i didn't transplant... therefore my assumption about transplanting garlic may have been flawed, although i still say given the price of garlic if you need that space for a better cash crop go for it.  The garlic is alive and doing well, it is just not nearly as robust as the garlic i didn't transplant.  I mention this as a matter of scientific fact that came about from an ill planed man gardening frenzy, that said I'll take a man gardening frenzy over inaction any day.  Looking back i could have done a better job of transplanting taking more of the soil around the root base as i transplanted, but that is the thing... we learn as we go. Don't be afraid to make mistakes if the alternative is inaction, and of course do observe with a mind free of prejudice  to what you thought.  So many times in life people refuse to learn from things gone wrong because they can't accept they might have been wrong.  That's why the garden is the key to life... the garden teaches you how to live if you let it.  It is just life growing under your guidance and the cues and keys are all there if you choose to see them. 

Fluid Gardening

My community garden plot has plants that overwintered (garlic, leeks kale), there are also some annual plants... I call them Blueberries, although an egghead botanist might use the term Cyanococcus within the genus Vaccinium.  As a result, tilling the soil in one swell effort is not really in the cards.  Apparently the garden now has a tiller... which of course will be broken in a few weeks when some hammerhead puts the wrong kind of gas in it... but that's another story.  You have to be fluid. That sounds good too,  I can see a book on "fluid gardening"... it caters to the idea of dealing with the various things that happen... and that is so totally now.  Perhaps statements like  "Now I don't want to force my plants into being something they are not so i am just going to be open to the changes that they present to me over the course of this varied growing season" could be presented in a group setting and then discussed.  Selling points are everything, but i never cared for them myself.. mind , body and garden need to keep fluid.

 You see it's still Man gardening... focusing on techniques like "savage attack weeding", combined with fluid thinking... allowing nature to guide you.  What is this fluid thinking our man is dancing around? WHAT DOES IT MEAN? I'm getting there...

Now your Onions and Garlic and Leeks and such are plants that transplant very well... you need to get them in the ground (often to over winter), and that's OK.. it doesn't mean they have to be in that defined spot forever... you can move them to a spot in the garden where perhaps you need them once you have decided how your garden wants to Flow... get it!  For the record, you can't transplant peas.. they need to go where you want them, but you can transplant Beets with some success, carrots not so much.

Ideally it is best not to transplant... in a perfect world the plant would grow where it needs to grow with the right space around it.  But due to circumstance that can't happen right now, so you do the best you can and you get things in the ground and growing.  You know get the flow happening... start the process... just by getting the process flowing you will do yourself more good than you could ever comprehend from your static viewpoint.  Even if you went in and made a bunch of mistakes, you would do yourself more good than bad because you would be involved.  Just like a molecule of water flowing down the river drawing ever closer to the waterfall... but the waterfall can't hurt you... you are  together with your kind and you will all fall together.  OK lets stick to fluid man gardening and keep away from fluid existentialism gardening.

I started a bunch of beets indoors and put them out in my garden by the house and that little insufferable squirrel ass hole came and ate the tops... so i might have to start again with chicken wire all over that box... Fluid eh!  The squirrels and I are on better terms ever since the peanut feeding stopped, and although i was thursting to avenge the attack I'm OK with it.  I put the plant out there without proper protection, i need to be smarter, more fluid in my thinking.  I hit a block, it could be a rage trigger but perhaps i need to ride this river and flow to another avenue.

So you see, perhaps beets are the thing to grow at the community garden where the squirrel population is less absurd... fluid thinking... don't jam a round peg in a square hole... notice the energy, feel the flow.   So I threw about 50 beet seeds in a square area in front of the peas.. we need to get the beets going.  Now i am not sure if that is the ideal place for them but if it is not i will move them later when i get that sorted.  Most likely i don't move them but since i have embraced fluid gardening i am not afraid to plant them there given i am able to contemplate moving them if need be.   Sometimes think of your garden as one of those plastic tubs you buy vegetable starts in at your local store.  You take them out of the box and put them in your garden.... well get things growing.    I have some Tomatoes started but they will be a while before they get in the ground... perhaps a yield of spinach before that spot gives way to tomatoes... that could be planted in a field of spinach for that matter.  When you have a fluid gardening mind anything is possible.

Should we spend some time ridiculing the opposite... why not.  Probably better than raging on about the asshole cat that has been digging up my peas and then shitting on them.  Imagine that... say i go wandering into the house of that cat and into the kitchen where that cat has it's food bowl and i just take a shit in it... maybe i wipe my ass and drop the toilet paper in the water.  I bet you those cat owners will miss the irony and try to call me crazy and have me arrested or shot, rather than taking responsibility for this outrage.

The opposite of fluid might be rigid, good for a tool brand but not for a farming mindset.  As the old saying goes "things often don't go as planned" so if you are rigid in your gardening you are bound to miss opportunity.   So many people wonder why certain things they plant don't produce, and they try and try again.  There is a mindset that say's "i want to grow this", but if it's not working why box yourself like that.  The plants and the season's particular climate don't give a rat's ass about some vision you have about your garden... get things going and observe what is working and let those observations guide your process.

Fluid... what is the key fluid?  Please tell me you just shouted WATER at your computer screen.  Yes you need to water you garden like an obsessed badman.   Soak it down early every day.  Remember that is my secret... my secret that i typed in CAPS.  The secret that i have been telling people for years, but they manage to forget... It's OK i like being good at something, so thanks... a little thing called garden dedication.

Before we forget lets go over a few things from the previous years on Northwest gardening...  Now I'm not saying it can't be done but these are 7 things i have observed from many plots, my own included.

1) All Brussel Sprout plants infested with aphids... never seen a yield
2) Densely packed squash family plants overcrowded and covered in powdery mildew
3) Too many fucking zucchini
4) Bullshit avant guard forms of zucchini that suck
5) Water starved cabbage plants sickly and covered in aphids using that plant as a base to attack the garden.
6) Tomatoes rotting on overcrowded plants
7) Portland is a Bean and tomato town

I just throw this out because i happen to be a scientist at heart, and maybe you know a way to grow brussel sprouts, that i don't, but i want you to know it and not just think you remember somebody saying something about it one time.  Well of course you can do what you want, i just happen to want yield, and i hope you do too, and think about how nice it would be if the produce for people got some good beets rather than a 9 foot zucchini.   I know, i have been really giving it to the zucchini... I'll give you a tip.  Grow the yellow zucchini and when it get's ripe shred it and then salt it and let it sit... this will bring out the water... then squeeze it out and mix it with Emmental cheese and bake it on a pizza shell as you would a pizza...  It's a winner.

So yes be open to your garden, react to the climate of the summer we will have... we don't know that answer yet... it's OK. Get some oars in the water and some bets on the table, plant things you think you will use, or would be nice to give to somebody... you can never have too many tomatoes if you have the balls to do some mad canning come summertime.  I still make curries and soups with my tomatoes from last year... lots left still.

one more note... the massive kale plant in the left... has the yellow flowers.  The yellow flowers are awesome on salads... also a good thing to have to bring bees into the garden... i saw 5 bees on that plant today.

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.