Hell, with you, Grandmother

Old woman walks by the other day and sees my plants and asks what kind they are. Mostly vegetables. The look on her face was pure disgust. No flowers? she was thinking. No pretty, useless flowers? Well, you won't have to go to the supermarket so much, she left with.

"Some of them flower" I said.

Or a lot of them. I hear the Yukons have a rather pretty purple flower. The strawberries, have this:

which is pretty nice and getting nicer. Plus, y'know, fucking strawberries. Fuck you.

I guarantee if I put a camera out in front of my house I see that bitch stealing my cukes.

You Need a Team to Root For

The Julie Baker Memorial Forget Me Nots are starting to come in.

I was worried they wouldn't.

Hunter Gatherers Moving Towards a More Agrarian Society

"There's a big ... machine in the sky, ... some kind of electric snake ... coming straight at us." "Shoot it," said my attorney. "Not yet," I said. "I want to study its habits.” -Hunter S Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"Now Chimp," you might say, "You've done a lot of research to move your people from mere hunter gatherers to a more agrarian and civilized people. What have you learned?"

The thesis is all wrong and so your whole concept is bunk. Also I don't have a people, I have a fan base. Feel free to throw "growing" or "shrinking" in front of fan base. Which is why the title card on this page is relevant. I know very little about growing shit. There was that one episode of Little House on the Prarie where the minister had a crisis of faith and decided to become a farmer instead and really sucked at it. So he figured out his crisis and went back to being a minister. I'm trying to avoid that.

I expect to be a minister warrior poet agricola kind of fellow. That's right, I got some Latin, too. Super Intelligent Chimps erat sum or some such nonsense. Here's the deal. Usually people talk about how you should do things or what works for them. I don't know any of that. I wasn't even there. She swore she was 18. So I'm gonna tell you what I am doing, how it's working out, and what damn mistakes I may have made already. To whit:

exhibit 1

How many broccoli plants should you put in a planter? 'One' says the internet.

exhibit 2

Same for peppers. Oh well. And I should thin them, I guess. But They seem happy together. I might move some over to the community garden, but I'm not going crazy.

I fertilized today. First time and will probably do it every two weeks. Miracle Gro tomato formula, but should be good for most of it. The one crazy outlier in the Greek Oregano, Milos. He doesn't get watered every day. I water him when he wilts and he likes it. I mean I just heard you should do it that way, so I'm doing it that way. Gave him some fertilizer today, too.

ll As far as soil, it's lot of Miracle Gro going on. Michelle used it and was a fan and it's all over the place. So yeah, mostly I'm using Miracle Gro potting soil. I got a big bag of Miracle Gro Garden soil and used that for a couple of things and it has...weeds?

Check this out.

The peas I planted are in yellow. The mystery plants have the red arrows pointing at them. "Well, Chimp," you say, "couldn't it just be something wind blown?" I thought that, but it's only the garden soil planters. Those with pure potting soil have none of this. "So weed 'em. More compost." Eh. Who knows? I might rid the bean plant invaders, but I think I'm gonna let the ones in the peas go and see what happens.

This is really my first year of being a more agrarian person. I can fake it some, I guess, but I'm mostly seeing what happens. Not subscribing to a school. Not worrying whether my seeds are non hybrid, non gmo. ("Fitty cents? Hell yeah!") not worrying if the Miracle Gro people (Scotts) are in bed with Monsanto.

I'm thinking about composting, y'know? I'm thinking about how I would go about composting in my situation. Now that the community garden is open to me, I could drop a full on high volume compost bin out there. But I was thinking about small footprint, no access to direct soil composting. I'm, like, thinking about running tests on how to compost in space on my front stoop because that's an Super Intelligent Chimp thing to do.

Point is, I'm not talking best practices on this blog at all. Totally winging it. We'll see how it works. Make suggestions. Maybe I'll take them, maybe I won't. I'll say this, though. There is a satisfaction, a calm that you get from growing that garden. I've heard a few other people express this. My friend Gab's husband Barrett started growing herbs on his balcony and talked to me about how it made things make sense. I didn't get it at the time. Now I do.

I'm going for a lot less fuss. I just want a tomato. Couple of potatoes. A cuke. I'm not looking to do this high yield. I just want to grow something and eat it and move beyond a hunter/gatherer.

Self Watering Containers are Bullshit, but Still Cool

The title says it all. I have to top them off daily. Sometimes a lot. I mean, sometimes they seem EMPTY. Two weeks of water, my ass. But it's all good, because you water the plants the same amount every time. They take what they need. And you don't flood out your plants from above. I've gotten used to watering around my plants, but sometimes you score a direct hit and almost kill the little fucker. (I have a mix of about half 'self watering' and half conventional) So you prop 'em up and hope for the best and usually it all works out ok, but still. Much less stress with the quote-unquote self watering containers. So it's still a buy and all, but this idea that you can water your plants once and leave 'em for two weeks is complete horseshit.

Here in the COT it doesn't rain much or for long, so far. There's enough damn water around. Doesn't even snow as much as you would think, this close to Buffalo. The story is, it's supposed to rain buckets today in WNY. Maybe in Amherst. There's a weather change coming, but I expect it to be a pretty fine day til the sun goes down.

So I have to water my container garden, and I do. Daily. It's like a ritual. Focuses my chi. I got a lot going on now, so it's a lot more watering, but it's all good. I usually do it when I come home from work. Water the plants, pour a cocktail, drop the pow wow chair on the stoop, have a cigarette and oversee my domain.

Your chi needs to be focused, man. Don't buy into any of this self watering bullshit where you put your chi in a box and it focuses itself.

You develop the right inner calm and you aren't an asshole driver. You may drive slow, like you have nowhere to go and all day to get there, but you do it in the right hand lane, and people can pass at will. I'm not even saying you have to focus your chi. Be an asshole driver. Complain about the world's little indignities. Get upset. I don't care. Possibly I could do all this with a healthy dose of marijuana. But I can't grow it on my stoop yet and ... well, look I never even tried it. I'm more a bourbon/whiskey/vodka guy. I don't care. I don't see it as a gateway anything or think it's worse than tobacco. Just, that's not what's focusing the chi.

They're a lot of horseshit, these self watering containers, you still have to water your plants daily. But you fill up the slot and don't create a floodplain and move around the soil. They are not correct in name, but they are good in function. Once you make that distinction, all is right in the world.

The beans are currently out of control Apparently a 'bush bean' No Latin name on the package. American Seeds, on sale at Walmart. Fitty Cents. I thought nothing was gonna happen. If you look at (slightly) older pictures, nothing. Now:

Bam! Bean plants. I'm gonna try to grow them up and around the handrail. I'm not comfortable with thinning plants that look so damn happy.

The cukes have to move on up, though. They like the outside:

I already have a planter for them.

Michelle is in out of town, work thing. Normally no big deal. Work is work. But the car died today. Would start but wouldn't turn over. Oh damn. Looked like a fuel pump issue. But wait. There's a relay. Could it just be a bad relay? Swapped out the defogger relay with the fuel pump relay and I was able to drive to Advanced Auto Parts and replace the relay. 15 bucks.

Pricier than vodka? Sure, if you drink the swill I drink. But cheaper than a fuel pump.

I'll transplant the cukes tomorrow. Hey. I know you're supposed to 'mound" potatoes, but do you bury the leaves? Yukon Cornelius's main stem is blowing up, but he had a little side leaf that is gonna be buried if I mound properly. So I put it under? George and 'ouisie are nearing the same state.

Naming Conventions

I don't know the Latin names of all of my plants. Hell, sometimes I'm not even sure what I planted. I put this stuff in a pot and it's growing like gangbusters, but I'm not really sure what it is. Oh well.

But I do name my plants. And the local squirrels. And anything I deal with on a regular basis that doesn't already have a name. It's just how I deal with the world. Jen last night was unsure how I could name and keep track of all the plants I have going on, but see, that's the key. You don't really name them all. You name them, for the most part, by container.

Yuri is a "black prince" tomato plant. Which the little tag claims is an Siberian hybrid. I got him at walmart. I named him after a Russian I admire: Yuri Gagarin. Lieutenant Barkley is another space man. A star fleet officer. Apparently he became a commander or something in Voyager, but I'm going with an earlier time, where the other people in engineering called Lieutenant Barkley "Lieutenant Broccoli." He was played by Matt Frewer. Good name for a Broccoli plant.

He's actually much bigger today. And properly, a them. But Lt. Broccoli sort of expanded out of control in that one episode. That played a part. My onions are named Booker T and the MG's. Booker has the curl.

It's not very scientific, but that's the point. There's nothing serious about this container garden. If I really want onions I can be at Tops in under 5 minutes by bicycle. Well, ten, it takes me a little while to get the bike out now with all the containers on the stoop. My friend, Cormac, taught school for a year at the Lakota Sioux reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Cormac is an odd name for anyone not Irish, so the kids first called him Cornsack and then Wagmiza (corn). I'm naming my corn plants that. When they sprout I will say, "Eeeez, Wagmiz" and that will be that.

A De-luxe Apartment in the Sky

Before Jen, Chuck and Stephanie came over yesterday, I got a chance to do some gardening. I moved Yukon Cornelius out of his tiny pot with his neighbors and into a bigger self watering container. He was the potato plant doing the best. So he was movin' on up. I was a little worried that the transplant would harm him. No, sir. I woke up this morning at about 5 am (I'm a farmer now) and that little asshole was now a bigger asshole.

I moved Cornelius's former neighbors away from the wall of the container a bit and added some more soil. Apparently, George and 'ouisie (as I call them now) noticed that Yukon C got new digs and have to get a piece of the pie, because they blew up over night, too.

Just as an aside, you can see the giant planter I got for Wagmiza, my Midwestern corn. Hopefully more on that later, but it was just planted yesterday.