The Badass and the Beautiful

It's Monday afternoon. Well after noon. Let's get something straight - I'm not procrastinating. I spent the weekend at the cottage and need a little warmup before launching back into serious writing work... this is just the stretching before the marathon of the week. It's the vocal warmups before the concert. Je me dis. 

Besides, I am waiting for my sun tea to steep. Sun tea is an alchemical marvel: I don't understand why it works. It's somewhat related to gardening - because it sits in the sun, and it makes use of the copious mint patch gaily laying seige on the whole extents of your herb patch at this time of year. 

If you've never tried it, try it. Put some tea bags (any kind) in a clear glass vessel (plastic just won't cut it, I have been told). Muddle in some mint leaves or whatever. Put something lid-like on top to keep the flies out. Sit in sun - outside, or in a sunny window. After some time (maybe an hour?) when it looks like it has become tea, add honey and ice and maybe lemon and voila! Drink it, while cackling: nice try Nestea, you drool. 

Here are some hibiscus bags dropping delicious pink swirls into the water.

A brief foray into the cute: 

My first wee zucchini tackling the weeds, making its way into the world. How adorable. I can't wait to grill you. 

ON THE BADASS AND THE BEAUTIFUL

Duncan was recently commenting that his garden had maybe too much pretty and not enough badass, so I thought I'd write some more badass tips. 

I think badass is best thought of as a state of mind. Sometimes it's your mind, sometimes it's the plants' mind.  And like one's own mind, the badass parts are often simply hidden behind a harmless-looking, don't-ask-me-i'm-just-doin-my-job, vulnerable, crunchy visage. So I have listed a few important badass themes, or archetypes if you will, that I have found represented in my own postage stamp.

SABOTAGE

Take this lettuce for example. Lettuce is basically the milk-sopping pantywaist of the plant world, right? Not a chance - as the Whole Foods Companion* reveals, it was traditionally known as the Eunuch's Herb, because the resinous white goo in mature stems suppresses sexual desire. Not such a retreating plant after all. Lovers of the world beware, and don't overdo the salad. 

DEBAUCHERY AND THIEVERY

I think this broken gnome statuette is pretty badass. It looks like it's had a little too much dandelion wine, which is why it's hiding from the sun behind some virginia creeper. Oh, and it was stolen it from an old lady's lawn. . Well, this isn't strictly untrue . It's possible that an earlier tenant of my apartment *could* have stolen it. I mean, who actually buys those things?

WARFARE

I have an old tree-stump in my garden which supports many types of fungus and critters. Not that I really like critters, but I hear I'm supposed to. I do think it's kinda cool when critters take down other critters, as in the time when I saw an earwig try to make it across ant territory... man, did he get it. In any case, there was some mad ant action in the stump last week. Strangely, it has stopped as mysteriously and suddenly as it began. In the meantime, they made one hella pile of sawdust for having such wee mouths. 

These mullen plants emerged all on their own so I decided to let them do their thing. I think they're kinda pretty. Oh, I mean, badass. Watch the blog for tickets to the end-of season mullen swordfight.

DO-NOTHING POLITICAL REVOLUTION

Here, I am subverting the tyranny of the capitalist seed distribution system by making my own spinach seed. The trick is to be lazy, and let your spinach patch get completely overgrown.

Well, that's all the badass I've got for now. 

A brief, earnest remark: I recently went to the beautiful, woodsy wedding of some eco-conscious friends who don't like piles of stuff. Awesome. They asked for donations to Seeds for Survival - a project to "promote long-term food security for marginal farming communities in developing countries....  using time-tested farmer knowledge and practices" .. that is, to support biodiversity + local crops + sustainable farming practice. It made my inner gardener happy. And I didn't have to go the Bay at all. 

Sun tea time!

*Product endorsement - The Whole Foods Companion by Dianne Onstad. This book is amazing. If this wasn't a completely genuine endorsement, and I was at all profiting from endorsing it, I would probably be able to own a copy, instead of just coveting it. Did you know papaya seeds are edible and taste like really peppery capers? I didn't either. But it's seriously true. 

Mid July Melvegas Photographs

Some mid-July pics from Melvegas Garden. It's looking a bit pretty to be honest. Not badass at all. I really need to figure out how to infuse some badass into this thing.

Nasturtiums to the left, broccoli is the big leafy stuff in the foreground, you can see the peas and beans racing up the front trellis

the 'garden path' with zuchs on the left there. They are decidedly not of the 'vining' variety which I was hoping for (thus the trellis). Something that could be a cucumber is making use of the trellis though. Having spent some time perusing pictures of cucumber plants on line, I dont think that's what it is. Although I could have swarn that's what I was planting. . . a good link on zucchini flower here, which incidentally confirms my suspicions about female vs male flowers. The males are the ones with the skinny stems.

Nasturtiums and Broccoli, and CORN! Yeeeaaaaa - I'm very pleased about how that corn is doing.

Tomatos on the right there

Bottled Dandelion Wine and Some Garden Pics

So, a few weeks late, typical of me I suppose, I finally got around to bottling the dandelion wine that we started back in mid-may. For the last month or so it had been sitting in a lovely old earthenware jug into the top of which I had stuffed some bunched up cotton. This allowed for the appropriate gas-exchange to occur for the fermentation but also prevented bugs and stuff from getting in. It didnt prevent a raccoon from almost getting in however! When one got into our back room in June (I think hes friends with Gus) amongst other antics (including pooping in my seed trays) he pushed this makeshift stopper into the jug. Fortunately he didnt actually get into it though, or knock the jug over! Now basically we wait until winter to drink this stuff. I tasted some while bottling (pretty much inevitable with my syphoning skills) and it pretty much tasted like acetyl acohol mixed with water and ginger. . . hmmm. . . I dont know what this means, but I didnt keel over or go blind so it must not have toooooo high methyl content.

And here are some garden pics I took back at the end of May and just found on my camera.

Varmint Cong & The Unhappy Gardenerd

"License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit - ever. They're like the Viet Cong - Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that's all she wrote. " - Bill Murray, Caddyshack (1980)

SO... my first contribution. I am slightly embarrassed at the effort I have put forth, however, at the same time, my own blog was abandoned at nearly the same time as this one, dare I say it, sprouted. I just want to clarify that this blog wasn't ignored, my love of blogging was in general... and while life chores have eaten up all my blogging time. My "garden" has been eaten up by pests...

Of the 18 date palms I planted in November, 0.5 remain. The culprit - squirrels. Now, I would not have a problem with this if these squirrels were hungry, or demonstrated a shred of intelligent / adaptive behaviour (ie. all date palms look and taste the same, if you didnt like it the first time, dont eat 17 more). That being said, they have grazed on every potted plant I have, usually chewing off a limb / stem and just leaving it on the ground. This leads me to believe they are just bored with life (explains why so many jump infront of moving vehicles) and take pleasure ruining potted plants. Even with my degree in animal behaviour, there is no logical explanation for this maniacal, clearcutting-esque behaviour as of yet.

That being said, there has also been an explosion of earwigs with all this damp / cool weather in London, Ontario. Earwigs love chewing up foliage. So whatever stems/branches the squirrels are leaving, the earwigs are climbing up and chewing the crap out of. Earwigs are the worst insect ever, so nasty. I am a trained entymologist, so don't question my ranting.

Additionally, the plot I created in March to plant my indoor potatoes, is now completely shaded over. In fact, the entire back yard is shade. Where I used to be able to go out and do exercises in the AM in bright sunshine and gaze lovingly at my crop, is now a mosquito filled, creepy, sun-permanently-blocked, bog-like area. I am growing more and more restless with the amount of shade, mold, smell of rot and the amount of foilage in the tree's above. If only i could launch the earwigs up there... sadly no, so I will wait until my roommate / landlord is out of town, before I get to drinking one afternoon and fulfill one of my life goals of being a lumberjack. My fellow contributors are welcome to join, we can even blog / document while we get down to work. [Potential Title "Gravity and The Unbalanced Gardener"]

Roll Clip...

Foraging for Sunshine, More Melvegas Pics

First of all, I'm sorry for disparaging gardenerds. The truth is that I am probably just trying to compensate for my own geekdom, or at least obfurscate it. I have tonnes of respect for the true gardenerds who know so much more about gardening than myself. I in fact don't qualify as one myself, my geekiness is manifest purely in enthusiasm.
But I also feel nothing is quite so badass as blind enthusiasm. . . in the spirit of which I share some more photos from mid-may in Melvegas:

our trellae: the stand-alone is for peas, sweet peas, and beans - the second layer, hanging from the house, is for zuccini, 3 types of cucumber and morning glory

The peas gettin goin - eggplant to the left

Korn!!

Onions, herbs & Gus, who loves to lie onto of seedlings

I agree with Laura, Gwar would make an awesome candidate for agricultural balladeers, but I also want to put in a good word for Korn, as well as The Black Eyed Peas.

Laura also put me in mind of some foraging I also got up to a couple of weekends ago: dandelions, baby! There are so many good uses for dandelions - I had no idea. You can boil the roots, you can roast the roots and make coffee of them, you can steam the little proto-buds, you can eat the leaves . . . but my favourite is the dandelion wine, aka liquid sunshine. I made a batch a couple of years ago, and by the time it was finished fermenting it was so potent 2 litres lasted for months, warming up the cold winter. Anyways, this year I thought I'd try it again so we got a small team together and gathered dandelion buds on Victoria Day weekend. Consequently I now have a big yellow gurgling batch of the stuff fermenting in my back porch. (or at least in my imagination it's gurgling)

Dandelion heads ready to be viciously stewed

If anyone in Cambridge wants Broccoli seedlings, I've got a bunch, also a few tomatoes.

badass plant propogation

I'm not sure how unlikely it is that I am a gardener, since being in the garden is the consummate memory of my childhood summers. This image is probably proof enough that I am indeed a "gardenerd". These are my pea sprouts earlier this year, growing up tender and fast. Here is my vegetarian confession: I like to eat vegetables voraciously. I find great pleasure in chomping full leaves of lettuce pulled directly from the head. Since I still had to wait a couple of days before making a feast of these pea sprouts, I set this wee dinosaur prowling among them, to, um, encourage them along. I'm sure the fruitarians of the world would be horribly offended.

But back to heads of lettuce. It reminds me of a conversation I had once about the cannibalistic overtones of the way we use the same words to describe human heads, and vegetables shaped like heads. There are the obvious heads of lettuce, cabbage and broccoli; there are also the melons and gourds. Perhaps I am simply trying to support the point that the desires for gardening are indeed significantly more layered and badass than we generally suspect. Also, gardening is probably completely fit material for the next ACDC record, although I think we might arrive at an even more significant and insightful cultural product by entrusting the album idea to Gwar.

Of course, guerilla gardening is a fairly well-known school of badass plant propogation. It's pretty cool, usually involving digging up asphalt and planting stuff. This weekend I engaged in a couple of types of gardening I'd put in the category of badass plant propogation (b.p.p). The first was gathering wild mushrooms. I'd say it's pretty badass because it can kill yuh, although it really needn't. Anyhow, on the vague advice of a friend, I looked into a fantastically statuesque bracket mushroom found growing on a log. It's really common at this time of year, it turns out. It's called Dryad's Saddle, and is best eaten small (bigger ones, more than about three inches across, get tough). It doesn't apparently have any very close poisonous look-alikes (you might want to verify this info), so it's a pretty safe bet. Other tips: if you leave it sitting pore-side-down on a piece of paper, the spores that fall out are white. Also, it smells like watermelon rind. It's very nice sauteed *immediately* in some oil... apparently the subtle flavours of wild shrooms dissipate within an hour or two. Hey, if you're going to go to the trouble of getting your mushrooms from the woods you might as well eat 'em fresh. I guess picking wild mushrooms is more gathering than gardening, but I *did* try to infect other logs with the spores while I was out... cultivating my fantasies of making a vast mushroom forest garden...

b.p.p. experiment #2 : embasilment. Def'n: the placing of basil seedlings in other people's gardens. I hit my landlord's herb garden right in the center with a nice fragrant cluster. (I tried to shyly embasil the edges of the herb garden sometime in the past, and my unrecognized efforts met their end under some serious weed killer). Let's be clear: there's a big difference between badass embasilment and first-degree herbicide.

Melvegas, May 07 09

Some pics from the beginning of May. . .

Seeds sprouting in my sprouter, getting ready for the seedling beds.
Seedlings getting ready for the garden.

Broccoli reaching for the sun