A Tale of 2 Gardens

Our hero is back, and what's better than one Man garden but two... you see i managed to secure a spot in the new community garden at Mt. Tabor... 200 square feet of garden space far away from any fool who thinks it's a good idea to feed squirrels unlimited peanuts.  Yes indeed i have yet to see a squirrel or a peanut shell anywhere near this new garden, and i have yet to see a single rodent hole dug in this plot... it's like a dream.

An easy thought was that I could do without the cover crop as i have found digging in grasses kind of a pain in the ass so to say... i noticed some people have put burlap over their plots perhaps to kill back the cover crop, me I imported a yard of fine soil called "white lightning" and dug like a savage for many  hours.  The cover crop is re establishing itself, but I'm on it.  I'll have to research cover crops... i know farmers do it so perhaps it is a good idea on a number of levels.  It's the old be presented with some work that you weren't planning on and find a negative, and that's never positive, cause sometimes in life you just have to do some work and you will find opportunities open up.

 And look at this...  a lock on the gate.  No need for any unnecessary loiters  over here.  Some may argue community gardens should be open for the peasants to go wandering through, but i don't mind the lock. 

So far i have filed a blueberry, some garlic, some "Red Zeplin" onions, some peas and some potatoes in there and there is room for plenty more.  I see a lot of food being produced in this fine "squirrel free" zone and it tickles me plenty to be able to say that.

Back at the home front  i have restructured things as well... the big thing in gardening is to learn from the seasons before. Be honest and scientific, what worked and what didn't and why... don't be emotional with your assessment, don't confuse what you want to happen with what will happen, know your strengths and your weaknesses. Remember nature ain't fair and what happens happens and the best suited survive.  My main 2 weaknesses from last year were too much clay soil (bad for water penetration)   and of course, the number one thing being,  fucking ass hole rodents with their unlimited peanuts. Now it's possible for a gardener to become obsessed with certain aspects of their garden and obsessions can from time to time lead to clouded judgement... you know rage brings hate and hate is the path to the Dark Side and once you start down that road forever will it dominate your destiny... or something like that. I like to believe that you can spring back from the dark side if you give your head a shake every once in a while.  One thing i find in life is that if you catch yourself dealing in absolutes then you need to step back and see the big picture and build a different house that you can live in in peace.  Otherwise you spend your life living in the wrong house, unhappy thinking that circumstance has you pinned... this is not the case, your mindset has you pinned.

So i banged in a couple yards of sand and chopped it into the earth, i also had all of the maple leaves from the tree in front of our house in there, so we have our organic material and our sand for drainage... for sure it was many hours of work turning soil, but it's the kind of work i like to do.  Working soil is good for the soul, a great metaphor for life... get involved in a task that appears to be endless but just keep doing it and then some time later you can feel the results.   I also snagged a few planer boxes from a neighbour who had no use for them anymore (be social keep an ear to the ground) and here we are...

 I see me in way better shape this year than last... mind you last winter we just moved here, i had to remove ivy, make the garden, start fresh and learn the ropes of this particular land. I have installed as you can see a few SR squirrel guard 3000™.

 It's is my first time gardening in beds, my father was a field gardening man, and that's how i learned but sometimes you have to break tradition  The planter boxes have been seeded with peas, carrots and beets, with plenty of Canadian Peat, some "white lightning" soil and some sand so the carrots can get down into the ground and grow.  Best of all of course is the fact that the beds are sealed with chicken wire so that some furry prick can't get in there and dig up all of the seeds.

I have of course started many plants inside so that when the get moved to the garden they might be big enough to survive a squirrel attack. Also it's too early for tomatoes to be put outside, that broccoli plant will probably go into the community garden this week although one can still be bitten by a frost this time of year... sometimes you gamble a bit with getting a head start on your garden.  The big thing is not to be too late getting things going... you want an established garden when the prime weather hits so that your growing becomes exponential.  It takes a long time for the roots to become established and the plant to have enough green matter to turn the sun's energy into food growth.  The Oregon farmers almanac tells me potatoes can be planted and this year i will box up the area around the plant adding new soil as needed... apparently this is the trick to growing potatoes... I'll give it a shot and we shall see what happens.  Dad would "mound" his potatoes, meaning putting more soil around the plant with the idea being the plant will fill in the "mound" with more potatoes.  Last year i was stung with the clay soil dilemma that hardened and stressed the plants to the point of little return.

Every day is a new day in life and in the garden, treat it with respect and it will give the same back to you, dream big but understand reality, swing for a home run but take a single when you get it cause at the end of the game you need points.

Monsoon season is upon us

A wise man once said "you gotta get what you can, while you can",  right now the pacific Northwest Garden is screaming that at it's caretakers.  I have 3 buckets of green tomatoes in my kitchen... gone are the good old days of  a fresh tomato off the vine in the morning on a bagel with cream cheese and seasoning.   You have to play the game you are in... one of the key things missed by the average chuckle head consumer sheeping around this wonderful planet.   Not everything that comes out of a garden has the look of the kind you might come to  expect from a lifetime of seeing vegetables on a supermarket shelf only... remember everything has a purpose. I reduced a collection of rogue tomatoes in a pot with garlic and onion for future sauce,  it was kind of random and a half distracted on my part... I wasn't really into it but it was that or provide King Hell habitat for the population of fruit flies i seem to have swarming ever so close to the beer brewing carboys.  The green tomatoes will turn red in time...  make sure you monitor them for trouble areas.  Sometimes spots will go bad and you will have to make some executive decisions. I left some of the plants should they manage to keep producing... I've always been kind of a Hail Mary kind of person.. sunny today so perhaps i was on to something.

My melons are in, all 5 of them, and i have a fair collection of peppers, many of them dragon hot... you see i made a salad tonight and cut into what i though might be a small red bell pepper, but that was not the case... as they say in yoga: i was doing a serious round of "lion's breath".  I picked all of the beans, but of course you leave the bean roots in the soil, as they will put nitrogen back into the soil, and perhaps squeak out another round of beans.  I also picked a bunch of heirloom purple beans from a local neglected garden, which was a good call.  I should mention the beans were all dried on the stock from general neglect... they will provide fine seeds next season.

The carrots, beets, chard and spinach can hang for now, in an "eat as you need" type of relationship, and the kale is going steady.  I believe i have red Russian kale, and it makes a fine kale chip.  I do eat kale chips now... perhaps i mentioned my kale chip experience... i went to learn about Cob house building and the damn hippies were just sitting around making kale chips.  Clearly it angered me, but i have changed my tune... or flip flopped as they say in political jargon.  Apparently you can't change your position in politics... it's a sign of weakness... gathering facts and re-assessing changing landscapes is for silly fuckers and not strong leaders.  Strong leaders have a position and no amount of enlightenment can change that... enlightenment is for the weak, apparently.  By the same token oil and salt and secret Robertson spicing methods on baked to a crisp Kale leaves, is also for the weak... i wolfed back a bushel of kale in a day... shit happens.  I never would have bet on me eating a bushel of kale in a day, in fact i often associated the word "kale" as synonymous with the word "unpalatable"... live and learn.  I was also part of an online community of people who hate cilantro at one time, but that was before i learned ho to properly use it.  The lesson... well there are a few...  1) never let some dip shit hippie try to tell you that cilantro, garbanzo beans, brown rice and vinegar is a delectable treat, and 2) Learn from people with strong cultural culinary backgrounds on how to use cooking ingredients.  A little bone wisdom for you out there... rather than hate people who come from different cultures, because they are different, embrace them and milk them for culinary and life wisdom.  Other gardening note would be that slugs love cilantro.. do unto them before they undo to to, as  the bible hints at... it's really a translation issue, my leaders tell me this is the way and i pay them handsomely for the guidance.

Soon i can dig up those potatoes... you see i didn't want to dig around the roots of the other plants to harvest potatoes given that the God damn squirrels were so busy digging up all of the  the plants I fell into random planting disorder.  Kind of modeled after the sea turtle life cycle survival pattern... the sea turtle lays a shitload of eggs and only a few will mature as they will be picked off by scavengers hungry for an easy meal...  so basically i just ended up planting everywhere and hoped something would survive, as my loon neighbour's plan of "hopefully the family of squirrels that i have had living in my porch for 3 generations won't dig the endless supply of peanuts i put out for them and the rats into your garden" didn't really work out... hope is for suckers.

It's fall now people!

What good is a garden if you are not feasting from it come harvest season?  We are, and have been in harvest season  for some time people.  I kind of got involved in a major project the last few weeks so the garden was a bit neglected, of course it got watered... this is not the kind of criminal neglect that some of the amateur gardeners out there are use to laying on their rookie plots.. I'm talking about the general maintenance... the gentle eye monitoring progress, the constant harvesting and finger tinting that comes with supper preparation.  Me, i was high up on a ladder fighting hurricane winds protecting an investment so to say.

A garden is an investment, but more of a lifestyle investment.  Many people put more money in a garden than food they get out of it if you look at the raw economics of it, given your time and all.  But time spent in a garden is good time, a kind of Zen peace, a footprint model on how to live the good life.  Less trips to the produce store means less passes through the salty snack food isle.

Tonight i made chili and when i got to the part where it asked for a can of tomatoes, and i had none, for a moment  i thought i was in trouble... and then i realized i had many dozen ripe tomatoes all over the place.  My problem was solved before i even knew i had it... i solved that problem i would have in the fall last spring... pretty smart I'd have to say.

This weekend i see a bean and chard feast, a Greek salad and another round of kale chips.  Kale chips are pretty good even thought i thought i hated them before... it was the people making them i hated only because i wanted to learn how to make a cob house and when i got there hippies were making kale chips and very happy about that i might add.  I saw it as a blow to progress, and i also saw kale as an inedible shade creating menace.  i have met many people who claim to love kale, only to later dig out mounds of brown juiced soggy kale from the crisper.  Oil and salt and spice that kale and bake it to a fine crisp (don't fucking burn it) and it's like that tasty seaweed you can get in your fine asian markets, minus the radiation.  It was only a nuclear reactor spilling into the ocean... what could possibly go wrong.  That's why i am against Nuclear energy... as a human that naturally fucks things up i like to look ahead at my losses.  When this goes pear shaped what do i lose? But remember we live in a world where the economy, or some shallow views of it, rule the day.  Maybe if people could go to space and look at the earth as an entity a light might go one and they might think "holy shit, let's not fuck this up".

Did i just go off on another one of those tangents?  When shit get's you down and you start felling the hate walk away, find your love in your hear let it stay.  Ahh lyrics, my bible.

And we've got to get back to the garden...

I think this is a melon... after those bastard slugs murdered my first round of squash/ melon's, because of course i let them... i wasn't out there @ 3am in a killing frenzy, i was stupidly trying to live my life... that won't happen again.  Anyhoo it's getting late in the season so i did this:

I pinched off all of the extra flowers from the plant... the idea being, let's try and bring a few of these melons home.  Never mind trying to produce 30 melons just let me sink my fangs into a few.  For example, as i spoke of before, i believe i spent $3.99 on this plant from the local Portland nursery.  I knew it was late and the garlic was coming to an end in this part of the garden so it was kind of a hail mary pass.  The question is: Will i get a melon from this plant? Cause i could get a melon at the store, one that i chose for less than that.  A minor economic question that deserves consideration, but for me plants are my pets, just as squirrels are my nemesis... the time i spend gardening is as good for my soul as a $15 yoga class or a $25 hockey game.. they are just all different.

I take it personally when things in the garden don't pan out... as Rodney once said "i go down with my ships".. like a true captain.  What is life without passion?  Remember blind rage is just misdirected passion, or perhaps passion that is politically incorrect to flow with.  Speaking of that, isn't politically correct one of those things that makes no sense?  Everything is incorrect about politics, so to be politically correct would be wrong... right?

Little hot Thai chili peppers have a king hell fire to them... i guess i should figure out a way to dry some of these little reds.  My kids have a thing about hot peppers... my bad.. they love broccoli however because no fucking hammerhead has ever told them kids shouldn't like broccoli.

Speaking of broccoli i am getting some in now, after that bastard squirrel ate my whole plants i had to start fresh again with a Portland Nursery special.  I have definitely not got my money's worth yet but then again broccoli can go long into the season... we shall find out what this Oregon fall brings us.

Soon the maple tree will shed it's leaves and i will mulch them into the clay and triple mix soil that i have in an effort to make it better.  It takes a long time to get your garden soil just right, that's why it's best to not move every 5 years, but every negative has it's positives.  In the end it's all just memories and the memories are of the great yields one has from season to season.

Tacos, turnip and sanity

This is a Kohlrabi, or German turnip for the record, a solid anti-carcinogen as Dad would say... a crisp fresh peppery turnip that was thrown on my plate as a child while the health virtues were toted.

I shave it and lay it on a taco with Mexican cheese, and the man meat of choice... for the record that is how you do tacos.  The hybrid Canadian taco way is to season some ground beef in a bastard "taco" mix and pile with lettuce cheese ET AL.  The pro way to make tacos is to cook something properly, a meat or veggie option, and cover with Mexican cheese and a shaved Cabbage option, and don't forget to hit with fresh lime juice.  You can make different kinds of tacos but the trick is to stick with a simple flavour... we never learned that before... cook something properly and let it be the flavour of the taco... you can make different kinds of tacos, just don't start a competition within the taco. Competitions are good for games, eating should be a win win type of scenario.  It's OK to spell flavour as flavour, but just don't make a taco like some hybrid Canadian might, it's an insult to the culinary art.  For the record, shaved fresh garden carrots will be a good addition to your grilled and cheesed option... don't forget the fresh squeezed lime... and if you are man enough hit it with some hot peppers.

This is the kind of hot pepper a Man can take on his taco... you can do your best dragon imitation and the hydration that comes as a bonus will come in handy later should you fall into an accidental drinking session. By the way that is celery to the left of the pepper plant... good for man made soups.

Speaking of drinking, i have been noticing a sever lack of watering on some of the neighbourhood gardens.  Growing plants is easy... sun and plant genetics take care of most of the battle, all you have to do is make sure your plants are watered... I have heard many bogus watering rituals.. i have a simple one... if it's a hot sunny day you plant is probably thirsty, mind you later in the season like this the garden is lush, or should be, which provides shade for the soil which helps keep the moisture in the soil.

Again, don't wet your tomato leaves... wet the soil... actually soak the soil... we are coming into the blight season and the thing that spreads blight is moisture on the leaves... if you do water them make sure it is in the morning.  Dad's rule was to not water tomatoes after 4:00pm so they would not be wet throughout the night... There will be natural dew that will eventually take down the plant, but there is no point helping this disease.

Again, don't water beets @ peak sun, their leaves don't like that and will turn brown due to some physics magnifying affect... i guess if you believe in physics that is... if you don't believe in physics because science is against your religion then i would suggest praying after watering your beets in peak sun.. that way GOD will know to intervene and fix the human error.

Again, If you stay on task and keep picking your beans then they will flower again and produce more beans.

Also, if your squash, mellon or zuccuni are showing powdery mildew (a fine white coating on the primary leaves), then you want to keep an eye on what's happening.  You need to think in terms of cutting your losses.. will this fruit or will it be a source of disease?

As we close in on the season, we need to remove sources of disease and encourage sources of food. I know i have to kill a few squash plants that just aren't in the right place and big enough to star in the fall.  I of course blame the slugs and the squirrels for setting back my first batch of squash and melons.  Clearly next year i will have to defend better.  How will i do that?  Bigger seedlings, more barriers, set traps and be more vigilant on night killings.  I guess it would be ideal if i could win the lottery and then buy my neighbours house and then bring in the new rodent order over there...  but alas, lotteries are for suckers.  You don't throw random seeds in a garden, fuck off, and then come back to a bounty... it just doesn't happen.  You need to be smart, put in the work, observe, defend and do what is needed.  That's why gardening is a perfect metaphor for life... shit doesn't happen accidentialy, it happens becauese you worked for it.  Happiness is the state of knowing what you are doing is right and it will work out in the end... put that in a tweet and post it.

The best garden is the garden that feeds you

I realize there are a bunch of chuckle heads out there that like to plant a garden and think that they are all "green", whatever the hell that means.  Many of these simpletons forget to harvest the food... perhaps the tumbleweed that is rattling around in their head still makes the sound "I am a gardener".  Who knows, everybody is busy... too busy to get their food... only enough time to slog through traffic to go buy food from a food serving establishment.

If you are a chuckle head  i implore you to find the power within to change your ways, you can do it.  Or get in touch with myself and i will come and harvest your food... we are in that time of year where the weird line between stealing and salvaging start to blur.  Walking around the neighbourhood there are a few roadside gardens with produce starting to rot in them... like they say you can always tell a human but you can't tell them anything.  I'd even be happy to harvest the food for these people and get it to them like it would be in a store, but you know, start messing with somebodies garden, you are messing with their space, and taking their freedom... a real no no.  There needs to be more emphasis on food harvesting... because the stores sell vegetable starts they are promoted and there is a buzz among consumers to buy them and get with the program, but yet there is no consumer triggered response to harvest the food.  We need more harvest festivals... more harvest alerts... community "things we can make with tomatoes" contests.  Yes Yes, frame it in the idea of a contest... we like contests, everybody wants to be a winner!

Don't get me wrong, if planting a garden gets you outdoors in the spring touching the soil, then that's a good thing, i just hate to see waste.  Apparently North Americans throw away 40% of the food they buy... not to mention the idea that we shit in drinking water... but hey we share facebook links promoting environmental stewardship. Sure sure, it's easy to be a critic of a politician who is a puppet for polluting industry, because their line of crap just doesn't jive with reality.  What is reality?  Slippery slope for a gardening blog.  Reality is, if the food you grew is ready to eat you should harvest it.  Cut your broccoli before it is a mess of pretty yellow flowers, grab your tomatoes before they ooze back into the earth... and if your cilantro went to seed, then harvest the seeds... it's coriander, a fine spice.

Heirloom Tomatoes-

I planted a few this year... i will never go back.  Silver fir is a neat one.  They are a bit more susceptible to earwig infestations, but if i were an earwig, that's where i would want to be... inside of a delicious tomato.  The flavour and structure of the fruit is unparalleled and you can cut away the bits that have earwig infestation.  Some people get real squirrley when it comes to bugs in the food, but the alternative is chemicals on the food, or a tasteless tomato bred to look good on a shelf in a store.  I'll put it to you this way... a slug or a bug has probably been on your food  if it's worth eating.. that's why god created running clean water for the chosen folks like us... maybe it was science and technology that created running clean water... it's so hard to tell in these election years what the facts are.

Roma Tomatoes-

These are the tomatoes you cook with, they reduce down to a fine sauce.

Cherry Tomatoes-

Are for snacking on, or throw them into a salad.  Or you can get fancy and cut in half add basil, feta cheese, balsamic vinegar and a touch of spice to make a king hell salad.

We have been eating beans and Swiss chard at will, and a second round of hood strawberries is coming to fruit.  i have eaten a few carrots that my daughters washed up for me, and the beets are looking large.  I did waste the Vancouver Canucks victory salad... i put it back into the earth to fertilize for next season, if you know what i mean.  Will there be a next season? Or will some bizarre global weather phenomenon that nobody could have predicted shut things down.  Ahh the unfortunate side effects of of the human love of money... if i can have more money then screw the masses.

Living with less money should be the foundation of gardening, but it often doesn't work that way.  A poor man with a rich life grows his own vegetables and poaches his own meat, which reminds me to buy a fly fishing rig.  I need trout like i need omega oil. 

It's true... a vegetarian diet will cure what ails the man and the society he lives in, but for tomorrow i might have a BLT, to really use those heirloom slicing tomatoes.

Summertime will end when it's over

My tomato plants are stomping balls... trying to focus on the positive and not mention the "S" word... Let me tell you a fine heartwarming story.  Lets say there was this guy Mr. Schnrub... and say Mr. Schnrub went to Home Depo to pick up some bamboo stakes for garden support, because Mr. Schnrubs'  wife Mrs. Screetch likes to think tomato cages and hockey sticks are ugly... anyhoo we are getting off topic.  Schnrub goes into the store with a pack of maniac children to grab the bamboo, and notices one stack seems a bit fatter, so he just grabs that one, out of natural habit and checks out.

It's not until he is in the backyard later that he realises he bought 9 packages of bamboo for the low low price of one... they were all just taped together... Schnrub went looking for the receipt to rectify the system but ran into a beer, and then another, and next thing you know he was giving lectures to the local wives on "neat ways to stake your peas"... he gave away a lot of bamboo that day.

Mr. Schnrub had no bamboo left when i was poking around looking for some. Being a man who discovered that his tomato plants are killing it, i was in need of stakes.  Enter happy Sam... one of the guys on the other side of the street.  Actually back up to the other day when i was tying the grape vine up the telephone pole with my dwindling twine collection, and i lost the tail end of my twine collection... gone somewhere into the soul of a healthy vine.  Happy Sam is always happy to help out... Hell i still have his tree saw and he is loving my presence.. I ask him for bamboo stakes and twine... he comes up huge with the biggest smile on his face... he had twine in the trunk of his car and the motherload secret.  Earl has bamboo.. he gave me a few stakes from Earls plants.  Earl had planted the bamboo as a bit of a privacy wall but now the forest was descending... so when i went to ask Earl if he had any surplus Bamboo his face lit up and asked me if i wanted to prune for him... pretty much the answer i was hoping for.  Harvest your own Tomato stakes.  Bamboo is amazing stuff... I've never gardened it, but i was a bit intrigued.  Considering how expensive bamboo stakes are, i had visions of going to the Farmers market selling "artesian tomato stakes" at a grossly inflate price.  The selling point would be that these artesian tomato stakes have a series of 1/2 inch leave stock stems which will help to maintain twine line verdical from installation to harvest.  It's funny when you start dealing with sticks... you get a full plant specimen and you cut it down to what you need, and then for the first time, when presented with options you realize the possibilities... the kind of thought pattern that can really throw you into one of those "why are humans so fucking stupid mind tirades"... and then you snap out of it and remember to BE the change you would like to see.

But really a fine moment in community.  I was faced with driving a car out to a store to buy something when i realized i could harvest a better version of what i needed from my neighbours backyard doing him a service as well.  One of my aliases by the name of Ziep Poberson has an album cover titled "everything you ever need you already have", he never made the music, but the music is right there... the answer is learn how to find it, or recognize when it is there.

So i guess I spent the day sorting the tomatoes with a sidebar into custom stake building.  It's true i did break out my high powered radial arm saw to make the cuts... i was using the clippers but we were getting stress fractures on the bamboo walls...and the saw kicks ass.  Tomatoes like to collpase on themseoves... well they probably don't actually like to but they do as a result of gravity.  Stake out the branches finding a balance between space and light and the future. The plants in the pots are so thick i had to find new places for some of them, which i had having eyeballed the sunspace on this new land i farm.

Speaking of tomatoes, my old Man Garden took 10 or so new runt tomato plants that the good people at Home Hardware on Commercial drive gave to Gardener Pete.  They charged him for stakes but figured that the tomatoes are kind of late so better to get them out of the store and into the ground somewhere and hope for the best. I think if they get regular regimented watering they will produce some fruit... you never know... one may receive a nice Indian summer (hot september-Mid October).  Once those tomatoes get moving... they like to move it move it!

And i had some of Brian and Ann's tomatoes in a diner today... you see I am on water duty and there were a few ripe tomatoes, so of course i took them.  Was i being greedy taking them?  NO NO NO! This is important... you need to harvest ripe fruit to sent the signal to the plant that it's original mission to reproduce has failed and it needs to make more fruit...  you need to exploit this biological trigger for greater gain in the long haul.  You plant food to eat food... don't be one of those hammerheads who plants food to say they plant food and then have that food go to waste because you just didn't pick it in time.

Harvests sneak up on you... have you bagged your garlic yet?... you better cause it's about to go bad in the ground... get it up and get it drying in the sun, this can garlic your kitchen an provide you for starts for next years crop.

I hum in B... which makes sense now that i see it, and the mouse clicks in F.  I know this because i happen to have a tuner hooked up to the mic on my desk.  Just more facts, take them or leave them.

a tale of 2 gardens

Should we go with some slug killing tips first?  After all, knowledge is power and power corrupts and that's good... right?  Sorry quoting Knockin' Dog songs again... and the song never even got recorded, so it's even more obscure.

So i broke out the slug scissors... you see i inherited about 9 pair of scissors, so i dedicated one of them "slug scissors".  You can just snip the bastards, although some mend and the head half tries to make a getaway.  It works well... you get an effective easy kill, but I'm kind of partial to crushing them on a rock.  You see i like my slug carcasses in one spot because slugs like to carnivore the dead slugs, so if i have all my kills on a rock in a known place then the slugs will then come there to feed on the dead slugs and then whamo! A second round of crushing or snipping.  I'm not crazy about just snipping a slug, say that's on a bean plant, and having it's carcass fall to the base of the bean plant.  The reason for this is because the carcass will just encourage other slugs to come and feed at the base of the bean plant and then of course when that food is done maybe the slug just move on up to the bean plant.  It appears that slugs are creatures of habit... if you see a plant with lots of slug damage in the day then there is a good chance that the slug will be back on that plant in the night.  Come back at night and, as Dad would say "bump them off".

I had a neighbour over who has enlisted me to help with a garden at her aunt's house down the street about 50 blocks... a good bike ride and an excellent destination.  Big yard, shady play area for the kids... all the right things we need for a good time.  She was in my yard the other day to drop off a map shortly after a squirrel ate my whole broccoli plant... i showed her the holes where the peanuts go and what was left of the broccoli.  Her words... "holy shit, i would be seriously pissed" and then "SHE FEEDS THEM!"... and then "you have to get more traps up".  Perhaps my insanity is justified after all... if a loving mother can feel that, then a man gardener is not a savage for thinking the same.

The grey bastard squirrel ate the whole broccoli plant... Hopefully we win our hockey game in Sherwood tomorrow... maybe i will stop at the pond on the way out there to smell the beautiful flowers, hear the birds, feel the sun and take care of other minor business.  You want to be dead sure that your pests don't come back.

So we were at this garden out by 52nd and Woodstock in the fine city of Portland. I of course forgot my camera, but fortunately somebody had a cell phone with a camera so i could take a photo and email it to my desk for the report.  The only problem is that i can't email a photo from a phone... i got into all kinds of strange menus after i tried to change "2" into "@".  I'm a natural Luddite... do people actually have small enough fingers to type on those slide out keyboards?  I'd rather become proficient on the mandolin.

OK back to the garden... Apparently this garden has been a garden for like 60 years... there was a grandfather working the land years ago who wasn't shy about dousing the soil with chemical herbicides and insecticides...  Old school like.  I remember my father actually had DDT for his garden, but he didn't really use it being a man of cautionary paranoia, and a fan of peregrine falcons as well.   I remember he did say "it works really well".  Here's to hoping the soil has returned to a more "organic" nature... apparently they have been working the land for a decade (chemical free), so it's probable that they have eaten all the toxins through the garden vegetables.  Have no fear... there will be no shortage of toxins in the future... shall we say all elements (air, earth, water and tire fires) will be ripe with toxins.  It's is a guarantee, make no mistake, in fact the economy dictates that it must be so.  There is nothing you can do, but you should still grow food... it's a good think to know... things might collapse... it might come in handy.

The soil in this garden is a dream for sure... beautiful stuff.   Old Clay Robertson's cement garden has a long way to go, but fortunately Robertson has the will to change the land. They have added a lot over the years, and I'm sure the tilling and growing of roots for the past 60 years has been excellent.  I did a fair bit of weeding in this beautiful soft soil and then started to tend an old neglected lilac tree by the garden, and then i threw in some beans and did some solid pruning on the tomato plants (cutting away the lower and browning tomato leaves to help keep disease at bay).  This garden is up and running pretty good... tomatoes booming, beans a blasting, grapes and raspberries beets, lettuce.  I think its a matter they they are busy so more people tending can help assure the garden will get the best care.

It was really nice to see a garden not so fucking savaged by squirrels.  No holes beside all the plants, no chews, no peanut shells, no unearthed seedlings dying in the hot sun.  It was like a dream garden, big and open and full of sun, just remove the little weeds around the big plants and let them roll.  We put a few bags of compost soil around the plants for nutrients and further soil amendment and it was all good. Grow plants rather than the fighting pests to keep plants alive.  I looked into some pepper spray to put on the plants so the ass hole squirrels won't eat them, it was pretty pricey stuff at the high end nursery, so i will try a SR jones special pepper concoction.

Make a pepper spray by mixing 1 tsp. of mild liquid detergent, 1 gal. of water and 1 small bottle of hot pepper sauce. Mix these ingredients in a gallon jug, then transfer to a spray bottle. Spray this mixture on plants.