In other words,
BUT, like I said, eating melons from the greenhouse has been cash money millionaire. Here is a pic.
I know you're asking yourself, why the f*** did he pick that one to the left? Isn't it still unripe? Thanks for pointing that out. I totally screwed up when cutting out a dead melon plant. Apparently one of the plants decided it was time to shit the bed so I had to go in and cut it out. I suspect the plants were (there were four of them two to a rockwool cube) strangling each other and were also strangled by vines growing up from the floor, not to mention the weight of new melons pulling the vines down across other vines. So there I was cutting out the dead plant and I cut this one by mistake because I got confused and lost the game.
I also harvested some other stuff but before I talk about that, I want to talk about a comment I got, which was about my last post. The faithful reader (LOL WUT?) will remember that in my last chapter of this epic saga about the struggles of modern gardening, I meditated on the business of killing hornworms. The commenter said the following:
"Killing something because it is trying to eat. cool. Why not just throw them in a field? Amateur farmers who like to propagate life AND kill, i'll never get it."
Now, I'm not going to disparage this point of view, especially because it appears that I did not fully explain myself in the last post. After all, not many have the desire to read that much about my views of nature and whether anybody should feel bad about killing pests. But I should take the time to do that in this post, because I didn't mean to offend anyone by giving the impression that I enjoy killing hornworms or any other pest.
I don't like to kill the hornworms. In fact, I'd really rather avoid it, since they can't seem to die without shitting themselves and vomiting all over everything. It's disgusting. Even trying to pull them off the plants, they often hold on so tight that they get squished, and therefore mortally wounded, even before I actually kill them. After the last post, I killed 15 more or so over the next few days. By the time I got to the last ones, there were three gigantic worms and one sickly small one. The fat ones had no intention of going quietly. When I reached up I tried to pick them off and they would vomit on my fingers when I tried. I tried to pull him off with force and I don't know if it shit or just popped but it basically blew up in the air above me as I was looking up so it landed ON MY FACE. Again, feels bad man. Actually, it was more like feels mad man.
So believe me, I don't enjoy it at all. But it has to be done in some circumstances. Personally I think it's worse to spray insecticide on plants, but if I had done that, I'm sure that hardly anyone would have been troubled because massive use of lethal chemicals is for some reason more accepted. I agree with the commenter that even pests are lives deserving of respect, but by the same token, I also think plants are lives deserving of respect. Yet in my garden I weed out plants that invade on the space I have provided for my selected plants. That's what gardening is about. You have to control other predator species, and you can't give any quarter. Even in the greenhouse, where I took such great care to remove the possibility of weeds, vines grow up and choke my plants and I have to go and carefully cut them out. I don't see any reason to give the vine any less respect than the hornworm, and so I give them only the respect that I wouldn't arbitrarily kill either of them. Also, when I mow my lawn, I kill thousands of insects every time. Should I abstain from this as well?
For example, I don't have any inherent animosity toward rabbits, but this year they absolutely destroyed my beets NONE LEFT and decimated my peas and ate so much else that I don't even want to talk about it. They live in my rock pile. So I went out and bought a shotgun to do something about it. One morning I come downstairs with my boy while my wife was still asleep, and I'm getting ready to make a smoothie when I look out the window and see two rabbits on the patio. I get my child to the window to show him the cute little rabbits and instead of seeing them on the patio, they are now munching on my blueberries. ICH SEH ROT. So I put him back in the chair, get the 12 gauge and run out in my underwear ready to kill. The rabbits take off across the yard, one out of sight and the other just sitting out about 35-40 yards away under an apple tree. And he's just staring at me all cool thinking he's way out of reach. I take steady aim and let loose. BLAM. He starts doing the electric shock dance. I just did that rabbit's breeding population a favor by weeding out the one that doesn't flee far enough away. And yeah I smiled when I saw I had hit it. But only because this (gardening) is an ongoing battle and once in a while I like to see some evidence probative of my eventual (though never total) victory. All of nature is about murder and dominance between species, but it goes largely unnoticed by us because civilization has done such a good job of removing us from our original state. This is why I like what Werner Herzog says about nature: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24j_wfkX5AU&feature=related
This is the sugar snack tomato. It has had trouble with the tomatoes coming ripe, because there are probably over a hundred tomatoes trying to come ripe at the same time. So I took off one branch and hung it from the light fixture in the dining room.
The quality of tomatoes I've gotten from the greenhouse has been amazing. Oh and for all the haters who say hydroponic tomatoes don't taste good, don't speak for mine.
My kid looks at a green bell pepper I picked out of the greenhouse. We also let some ripen up to red and roasted them. Very delicious.
