Farm Livin' That's The Life For Me!

Hi Guys!

This is babs's paramour, nic, (lj-name dustindwynde), babs has graciously allowed me to guest-post here today.

The subject of gardening came up here this past week, and I was going to make a brief one line comment about it, but everytime I was about to, it turned out I've got volumes to say on the subject.


Like a book's worth, so please bear with.

For example, last night, for dinner we had us a nice meal of freshly grown corn, little bit of butter and salt to go with.

Nothing short of heavenly, I got to tell ya.

For lunch today, I'm gonna have me a BLT sammich made with our own lettuce and tomatoes.

No, I didn't make the mayo, or grow the wheat for the bread, that'll be next.

Or kill the pig, even, though I did see my cousins slaughter one pretty much with their bare-hands, a strong rope, and a very sharp knife, on their peasant farm, in what used to Yugoslavia, about 30 years ago.

One pig squealing, on its deathbed, at the top of its lungs, is enough for a lifetime, thank you very much.

(For those that are visually inclined, here's a link to the pics that I've taken over the last two years, divided into separate albums.

Which is really funny, because if you were to tell me that at this juncture of my life that me, the aging Punk Rock, Mr. Urban Cosmopolitan Concrete Jungle person that I am, would be so getting into this, I'd a told you that you were nuts.

Yet, here I am fretting about the crabgrass and what to plant next year.

Go figure.

It's easy to say that babs loves me, and I her, and she loves her garden, and so "whither thou goest I will follow," and that's a big part of it, but I'm also getting a lot out of it on a mental, emotional, spiritual level that I totally wasn't expecting.

For one, with all the crap that's going on in the outside world this has become a real place of solitude for me.

We live about a two minute walk from the Washington DC's Rat-Race's Ground Zero, Whiskey Hill, better known as Wisconsin Avenue, and what we've basically got us here is farm living.

Minutes from The Metro.

How cool is that?

That's a good thing.

So far, this year, we've got the following crops:

Cucumbers

Corn, Silver Dollar and Yellow

3-5 varieties of lettuce to include:

Arugula
Romaine
Endive
&
Mustard

Tomatoes to include:

Cherry
Roma
Beefsteak
&
Heirloom

Zucchini
Broccoli
Asparagus
Eggplant

Okra! Okra! Okra!

Peppers, Green and Purple

String Beans
Wax Beans
Italian Green Beans

Parsley
Sage
Rosemay
Thyme
Oregano
Basil, green and purple
Cilantro

Acorn Squash
Squash Squash
(see Misc Silly folder , Joel, you should really like this one, feel free to pass it along to your friends on the internets.)

Pumpkins

Watermelon
Cantaloupe

Sunflowers, little ones and some fucking spectacular  12'-15 footers

and....

Catnip, because they're GOOD Cats!

Whew.

Until I actually sat down and wrote this above list out, I had no idea that we had this much going on.

Wow.

This is really cool.

Of course, me being the Bizness Man that I am, there is a matter of expense involved in all this.

The greatest being is the labor costs involved, but since we do that on our time, we'll just write that one off.

Next is the water, especially this year since it's so dry, and according to our bill for this summer, we're about $150-200 over normal useage for a household our size.

Then comes the seeds, which at most was $50.

So the break-even point for this cornucopia of ours is between $200-$250usd.

That's pretty good, considering that it's a little over a month's worth of groceries at the Safeway.

Added bonus, the time we're out in the garden is time that we're not cruising Safeway's aisless getting visually assaulted by all that Madison Avenue Product Packaging Come-ons that infest every shelf.

Anything that helps preserve my Mental Health Bandwidth and away from flashy, eye-catching, logos that peddle toxins passing themselves off as "food" is awesome.

Ya think?

Now, with a garden like this, there is a lot to keep track of.

For example, the Okra, Okra, Okra!!!

Jesus H. Christ on a shingle, does that shit grow fast.

If I ever get into Time Lapse Photography, they'll be an excellent subject to do that sort of thing with.

One thing we learned this year, from a passer-by, that you can't let them get too mature on the vines because they tend to get tough.

The trick is you've got to pick 'em when they're young and tender, which is, since they grow so fast, practically a full-time job, in and of itself.

Not that I mind.

One unexpected thing that Okra has got is that they have these intensely beautiful yellow and black flowers that bloom as the sun comes up. They're practically hallucinatory to look at. I've tried to take some pictures of them to capture that, but that one is harder than I thought. I'll keep trying though.

The Catnip was a bear to get started, ended buying bunches from the local farmer's market that were already past seed, and some of those took hold, but we also had some spring up this year, all on their own that did really well.

Makes the cats happy, and that's all that really matters.

The Corn is cool, but I totally disregarded the suggestion on the seed package that said to only grow one variety if you don't have a lot of space to work with and some of the ones I planted grew up stunted, while babs's shot up like a rocket.

Lesson learned.

The Cucumbers are the most prolific crop, it's surreal how many come in all at once and how big they get overnight. We found out that letting them grow huge is fun, if you're into that sort of phallic thing, but what you want to do, to maintain their flavor, is to pick them at the point where they're about the size of the ones you find in a typical pickle jar, which will be strategy for next year, since I also want to learn how to pickle, which is a more complicated process than you may think.

The Beans also came in in a mad rush.

That crop is supposed to die off somewhere around July and here it is with September more than halfway through and the other day I stepped out just to do some light weeding and spotted a few on their vines and started picking.

By the time I was done, I completely filled one of those plastic rain bags that the daily newspaper comes in.

Oops.

Who knew?!?

Up until about two weeks ago, I thought the Watermelon and Cantaloupe were just a bunch of gold-bricking malingerers.

The Watermelon I used came from store-bought seed, while the Cantaloupe I started using an innovative planting method.

That is, babs had bought one from Safeway this past spring and forgot to cover it and put it in the fridge and it was starting to go bad and instead of just throwing it into our compost I took that badboy out into a clear spot and just chucked it into the ground as hard as I could and then ground the seeds into ground with my bare feet.

Within the next few weeks we are going to have more of these melons than we know what to do with the vines are now full of babies that are about to pop in a really big way.

My major contribution to all this this year has been the Sunflowers.

Holy, flying fuck, they are so freaking beautiful, quite a thing to come home to.

One of my favorite writers is Rex Stout, the author of the Nero Wolfe Detective Stories.

The Nero Wolfe character is a bit of an eccentric who keeps to a very tight schedule.

He lives in a 4 story brownstone on West 35th Street in New York City, that he never leaves, and on the top floor he has a flower nursery that he spends the hours of 9 and 11am and 4 and 6pm in with strict orders never to be disturbed when he's up there.

With good reason, he's tending to his 10,000 Orchid plants that he's got up there.

More than once he refers to these flowers as 'My Concubines,' which I used to laugh and sneer at, but now that I've had my experience with these Sunflowers, I now know exactly what he's been talking about all these years.

:P

I'm in downtown DC during werking hours and there are two spots downtown, one on 20th & P and one around the 1400 block of 18th Street that have these clusters of Sunflowers that are about the size of the ones we grew, and that's it for downtown really. Really makes me feel for those that only have those to look at.

Especially since they're so easy to grow.

Amazing to watch the whole process.

I've got more to say on all this process, like I said, I can write a book on this subject now, but all this typing has made me hungry, and there's a BLT sammich w/my name on it waiting for me, so I'm gonna go to it.

Thanks babs for letting me write this, and thank you guys for reading it.

(The lj-cut was HER idear, just so you all know, m'kay?)

Peas the fuck-out,

nwa

ps: in case the above links don't work, please use this one:

http://photobucket.com/albums/v377/fabucat/