Panthy's Garden

My homeboy Jesse is a bold visionary. A few years ago, he got it in his head that he should buy some land for a future homestead, summer retreat, or just a place to burn things unimpeded by the law.

He secured 30 wooded acres of central Maine sweetness, located in a tiny town, two miles down a seasonal logging road. Every year he convinces a few dudes to camp there in the dead of winter. This year, I was one of those dudes.

Jesse’s closest neighbor, Old Man Pritchart is still a good 20-minute walk away on a day without snow, not that you’d ever want to walk to his house. He lives there year-round with no electricity or running water.

He collects old speedboats and engine blocks in his front yard. The most recent addition to his collection is a dilapidated trailer he stole from Jesse’s property.

We only saw his snowmobile tracks which is good. I didn’t want to be there for the awkward “hey you stole my trailer” conversation. Also, we don’t know his real name.

It can be said that men lack a genetic predisposition for planning which can both a strength and a weakness. In the strength category: we make shopping quick. Our entire shop at Walmart essentially consisted of sausages, beans, donuts, and a machete.

In the weakness category, we’d be eating nothing but sausages, beans, and donuts the entire trip. Sorry, in the strength category, we’d be eating nothing but sausages, beans and donuts the entire trip.

Plus, hey… machete.

We opted to drive to the camp through a foot of snow in three SUVs. With The Final Countdown blasting, comfy leather seating and the four-wheel drive engaged, it’s hard to believe this is a terrible idea. Until you have to get out, dig, and push over and over again for an hour and a half. Then it’s obviously a bad idea.

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Growing heirloom vegetables isn’t just for extremely pretentious gardeners. Well, yes it is. BUT, there’s a good reason to beyond thinking you’re better than everyone else. Hell, you might just save our food supply by growing heirlooms!

If you didn’t know, heirloom varieties have been handed down for generations and are often regionally adapted. They are unusual, unmodified by scientists, and typically tastier than their supermarket counterparts. Most of what I grow in Panthy’s Garden is heirloom. (Which basically means I’m better than you).

Commercially grown crops often come from a handful of genetically modified varieties developed to be pest and disease resistant. Problem is, if some organism figures out a way to take them down… our dependance on so few varieties could cause big problems, like the Frito-Lay factory being shut down, or worse.

You may have seen this out in the internets, it’s a pretty clear case for why we need to continue to grow these babies. Perhaps we can make even more heirlooms? Maybe a Panthy-specific heirloom tomato that makes squirrels explode?

Original from National Geographic:

“As we’ve come to depend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegetables, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It’s hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation International gave a clue to the scope of the problem. It compared USDA listings of seed varieties sold by commercial U.S. seed houses in 1903 with those in the U.S. National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. The survey, which included 66 crops, found that about 93 percent of the varieties had gone extinct. More up-to-date studies are needed.”

In between episodes of Doomsday Preppers, I stepped up to ol’ Panthy’s Garden to see what our bizarre weather has been doing to my garden. Half of it is still pretty dramatic looking.

The other half just looked a little discouraged. Not dead, just, uh… deflated.

Even St. Whatshisface was a looking a bit sullen up there.

The crazy “passive” brownstone being built nearby has completed it’s infrared, radar blocking rooftop.

It’s hard to know what’s going on over there but I suspect it has to do with stealing cable and converting it into plant food for the hidden aquaponics system in the basement. Talk about doomsday prepping, damn son… take it easy!

Courtesy of my pal Pete.

I understand people’s general aversion to bees, in particular, being stung by them. But I have to say, it doesn’t scare me much. There was that time that I went running and literally ran into a bee who stung me. I was already out of shape and the bee sting was really just insult to injury. But it wasn’t a big deal, mom’s old advice of “don’t bother them and they won’t bother you” has held up pretty well over the years.

But pumping smoke into a bee hive? Pulling out the teeming inner sanctums of the hive? Is that uh… “bothering them?” If done right, I guess not. Can I do this? Can I do this on my roof? In the city? Most importantly, could I display this man’s swagger, casually handling bees with my bare hands? I like to think I could!