Tight or REALLY Tight

How can you tell if you are just cheap…oops, I mean tight… or if you are REALLY tight? Here are a few examples to help gauge your level of parsimony.

If you grow and dig your own potatoes and add the potato vines to your compost pile and smash any grub worms that you come upon while digging with the back of your shovel then you are being frugal. But if you save the marble-sized new potatoes to be seed for your late straw potatoes and put the grubs in a recycled butter container to use for fish bait and bury the fish heads and bones deep in your garden, then you are really tight.

If you organically grow your own tomato plants and prune the vines to encourage more fruit production and throw the prunings on your compost pile then you are economical. If instead you replant and water the pruned cuttings to try to get a second harvest of free tomatoes just before frost hits, then you are really a tightwad.

If you find a seed company which offers $25 worth of free seeds or plants (Gurney’s Seed and Nursery Co.) and you get seeds for your garden for just the price of handling and shipping then you are pretty parsimonious. If you get several of your siblings to also get the seed catalog and offer for your benefit and buy asparagus spears and blackberries and other perennial plants which may produce food in your garden for the next twenty years then you are truly tight.

If you have your wife give you a buzz hair cut at home to save giving the barber $15 and paying for the gas to get to his shop, well that is commendably thrifty. But if you scoop up the cut hair to put around those afore-mentioned free asparagus plants to act as a high nitrogen, long lasting mulch and also as a human-scent deterrent to keep any deer from bothering your garden patch well that is getting darn near being really tight.

If you ask your significant other to make melon balls from excess melons that would otherwise go to waste so that you can enjoy melon frozen desserts in mid-winter, that’s laudable. However when she’s completed the task if you hint that she should also pickle the rind and parch and salt the watermelon seed then (trust me…) you are truly pushing the envelope.

I could go on with other examples but I think you get the idea already. I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m one of those FANATICS! I wonder if she could boil the watermelon juice down to make pancake syrup…..

Bees and the Beans

Plants talk to me. Seriously. I planted and heavily mulched four thornless blackberry plants and four raspberry plants in fertile soil in the back yard. Despite regular watering, seven of the eight were dead within a couple years. Meanwhile volunteer raspberries (and lots of them) kept appearing under my apple and apricot trees next o the garden. One day one of the volunteers looked me in the eye and said, “Hey moron, we like the semi –shade; that is how bramble grows naturally in the wild.” So I dug up some of the volunteers, stretched several rows of taut straw baling string between the fence posts at the south end of my garden and replanted the bramble just outside the garden fence under the shade of overhanging apple tree limbs. I intertwined the bramble volunteers in the straw baling string and laid a three foot wide strip of old carpet just behind them as a permanent mulch weed control which also served as clean picking path just behind the row of plants. “It’s about time!” the plants said and took off like gangbusters to form a permanent hedge demarcating one end of the garden. They were receiving both the shade of the apple and the fertility of the garden.

Then the butternut squash made eye contact and said, “Us too…We want the semi-shade too.” I had bought a super hybrid butternut squash and planted it in the field; every plant withered and died without bearing any fruit. There was a volunteer which came up with some cucumbers I planted near the apple tree. Since I didn’t want it choking out my cukes I treated it as a weed and ripped part of it out. It came back. It grew up the carpet behind my raspberries and then climbed over the fence and into my garden. Okay, I get the message; next year you go between the sweet corn rows where you can get both dappled shade and garden fertility and watering.

I didn’t know if cabbage would grow in my type of soil or not so I planted some this spring as an experiment. The plants seemed to love the soil and grew very quickly and I lost every plant. One of the hole-ridden dying plants spoke to me, “Cabbage is a fall crop; do not plant us until you have seen the last white cabbage butterfly.” So I noted that the cabbage butterflies were all gone by the beginning of August and will plant accordingly next year. One of the best organic methods to control pests is to watch their life cycle and try to grow plants out of step with the insects’ natural life span. For a lot of plants that meant planting early in my sandy soil which drains and warms up early but for cabbage it means planting later. Either I use a floating row cover or spray BT or else I plant the main crop behind some earlier crop for fall harvest.

Well, that brings me back to the pole beans. They are trying to tell me something but I can’t quite make out what they are saying. I put in some ten-foot poles. The beans grew to the top of the poles with lush vines and then turned around and headed back down, hanging almost to the ground. The vines were covered with blossoms and insect damage and plant disease seemed to be minimal. But not a single bean has developed…not one. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones…I can’t get no…pollination. They say that things go in cycles. Last year we had honey bees galore…so many that I could not help but commit apiscide as I trench composted over-ripe water melons into the garden from the melon patch last fall. (When I was a kid we didn’t have fancy terms like “trench composting” or “French Bio-intensive Gardening”; Mom just told us to “bury the garbage.”) Anyway a lot of bees got buried last year because they could not resist watermelon rind; this year I bet I haven’t seen two honey bees all summer. This year I purposely laid out some exposed rinds on the compost pile next to the beans to try to draw in a few scout bees but nothing resulted. This whole episode has given me a greater appreciation for garden produce which is not dependent on insect pollination like potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuce and sweet corn (wind pollinated). I continue to tell myself that honeybees are a European import and there must have been native pollinators before the colonists brought their bees over.

I strongly considered just yanking up the beans and cantaloupe plants and tossing them on the compost pile but if I cannot understand what the pole beans are saying to me, I can certainly understand what my wife is saying (she has a somewhat irritating habit of being too right too often.) She says let everything be until we get a return to cooler weather after this prolonged heat wave. Maybe Mother Nature will make a last ditch effort to produce fruit when cooler days and longer nights return. Straight-faced farmers tell me “you planted under the wrong sign of the moon,” but I think they may just be secretly poking fun at a greenhorn.