Queen City Gardener

steampoweredmedia:

“Nature always extracts justice. Defy nature and it obliterates the human species. The more we divorce ourselves from nature, the more we permit the natural world to be exploited and polluted by corporations for profit, the more estranged we become from the essence of life. Corporate systems, which grow our food and ship it across country in trucks, which drill deep into the ocean to extract diminishing fossil fuels and send container ships to bring us piles of electronics and cloths from China, have created fragile, unsustainable man-made infrastructures that will collapse. Corporations have, at the same time, destroyed sustainable local communities. We do not know how to grow our own food. We do not know how to make our own clothes. We are helpless appendages of the corporate state. We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is one assault. There are thousands more, including the coal-burning power plants dumping gases into our atmosphere that are largely unseen. Left unchecked, this arrogant defiance of nature will kill us.”

—

Chris Hedges (via azspot)

On my less charitable days, I say good riddance.

Things have been a bit slow around here and my garden lately as I’ve been waiting for the early-planted vegetables to ripen enough for them to be harvested.

Suffice to say, the lettuce, spinach, parsley and radishes are all in prime picking condition; while the peppers are not too far behind.

Anne and I enjoyed our first salad consisting of 100 percent garden vegetables the other night and although I couldn’t taste much difference in the lettuce and spinach, I certainly did feel better knowing that it came from our backyard.

I’ve got bit more lettuce, spinach and parsley on my hands that we can consume alone, so I’ll be giving a fair amount of this away in order to make room for some green beans and other early-summer vegetables.

I’ll be posting more photos of the garden throughout the week before I remove the rest of the lettuce, spinach and radishes.

As Spring turns into Summer, my garden’s first crops of lettuce, spinach and radishes are just about ready to be harvested.

The leaf lettuce and spinach are only days away while the radishes may have another week or so. I also planted carrot seeds the same time, but these are still two-to-three weeks from harvesting. I planted a row of parsley and this is just about ready to go, but could use another few days to mature. 

I’ve also began to fill out the empty spaces in the garden by purchasing a few plants at the local farmers market such as: jalapeño and banana pepper plants; a red bell pepper plant; and two tomato plants. These all seem to be doing well so far and I’ve been judiciously watering them in hopes to beef up their strength from transplanting. The banana and jalapeño pepper plants already have some young peppers forming and both show nice signs of flowering. The banana pepper plant’s leaves look to have fallen victim to a bug attack of some sort, but I’m still researching the best way to fight this organically. I currently have marigolds planted on each side of the garden, as these flowers are supposed to ward off some insects and other furry critters. The marigolds aren’t growing as fast as I would like so if the banana pepper plant’s leaves continue to deteriorate I’ll have to look into other means of fighting bugs.

I’m not one hundred percent sure what I will replace the lettuce, spinach and radishes with once I harvest, but I have been contemplating green beans along the rear of my garden and adding a scrap piece of old deck fencing to allow the vine to snake up. I only want to grow vegetables that I’ll eventually eat, so that doesn’t leave me with a whole lot of options. But I plan to begin studying what is good to plant/grow in the beginning of summer and should have my mind made up by the time harvest comes. 

I’ve been ransacked. Hoodwinked. Thieved. It was only a matter of time.

This weekend when I went to the local farmers market to pick up a couple tomato and pepper plants, what appears to have been either a mad dash of rabbits or a very hungry ground hog ate the majority of the leaves off of my young radish plants. Thankfully he had the courtesy to leave about 8 left, but he definitely ate the best of the bunch. Little bugger.

As mentioned, I went to the farmers market to stock up on one tomato plant and two jalepeno pepper plants because my seedlings that I had been growing indoor/outdoor did not survive. Despite dutifully moving the seedlings from inside at night to outdoor during the day, none of them really flourished. Next year I’ll need to invest in a grow light or two and begin growing my seedlings a bit earlier.

Anyways. Since the little furry thief ate my radishes, I’ve since installed some green plastic chicken wire attached to three-foot tall stakes surrounding my garden to deter any other furry-footed thieves. I have a feeling I’m going to turn into Elmer Fudd soon.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

jimray:

“What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward”

— Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, on [the rise of herbicide, particularly Roundp, resistant weeds](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html?pagewanted=all). Monsanto, who makes billions of dollars selling Roundp and genetically modified corn and soybeans that are resistant to the weed killer, has told us for years that this wouldn’t be a problem, while they were also suing farmers who saved seeds instead of paying for new seeds year after year. It was a brilliant sell-the-blade business model that worked really well for about twenty years but now appears poised to have some very serious consequences. Honestly, the only thing I’m surprised about is that Roundup resistant weeds have showed up this quickly, I thought it’d be at least another decade.

Quite an interesting phenomenon we’ve got here. As an aspiring gardener, I can’t be 100 honest and say that I am all organic. I did commit the cardinal sin and start my own garden with Miracle Grow gardening soil, something I went back and forth with for days. My reasoning being that as a beginning gardener, I would need all the help I could get at the beginning. I still have reservations of it to this day, but I plan to go fully organic (minus all the baggage that name implies) all subsequent years.

I’m also quite cognizant of the fact that I purchase a lot of my fruits and vegetables at a large grocer who no doubt gets their produce from factory farms participating in much of the same practices mentioned above. But I am trying to change my ways by continuing to shop at local farmers markets and support sustainable agriculture whenever I can.