Most of the requests I get for posts deal with pests and, while I hate to get caught up in a negative spin on gardening, sooner or later the topic has to be addressed.

I am going to handle this by breaking it out into three main subsections and two lesser ones:

A) Garden generalities … principles and procedures that you can follow to ensure a generally healthy garden. This will be further broken out into:

1) discouraging pests and

2) actively eradicating them … two entirely different topics.

If I never write on any other subject, those two, alone, would make for a full career.

B) Plant-by-plant growing instructions which will, necessarily, treat the pests that visit each plant along with other factors of cultivation such as lighting, germination temperatures and so on. I might even toss in a particularly interesting recipe or two.

C) Treating each pest as an individual, paying attention to life-cycle, means of control and factors to weigh before deciding to eradicate.

Organic gardening is a blend of encouraging the positives such as healthy growth, presence of beneficial organisms and reasonable tolerance levels with appropriate levels of control when these are threatened or insufficient.

Keep you chin up. First we’ll paint the big picture with the broad brush and then we’ll home in on the details that stitch everything together. Finally, we’ll try to keep a good attitude and have a bit of laughter at how things never seem to work out perfectly, but they always seem to work out well-enough.

–Bill

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Food, inc. takes a fact-supported look at agribusiness. It’s not a pretty picture.

This book is a companion publication to the movie by the same name and includes much material and additional detail that simply could not be reasonably crammed, wedged, shoehorned or otherwise forced into the movie.

If, like me, you missed the movie, you want to get this book. Really … you want this book. If you saw the movie, you still want this book … because you’ve already forgotten most of the movie.

The impact of the food we eat on our health, the impact on those who produce it and the impact on our precious natural resources must be met by a personal determination to ‘do better’ with our food choices and practices.

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

Normally my interaction with oceans is limited to looking at them or, just once so far, swimming a few feet from shore. A quick glance at the horizon tells me that there is much more to know about them.

Oddly enough, that one salty swim seems to have instantly cleared up a patch of psoriasis. Now, a little more than a month later, it is returning.

While I was in Aruba in March I got a small glimpse into the power of the sea when I noticed a wreck –  half of a cargo ship, actually – that had been dredged up from deep offshore and tossed within yards of the beach. Aruba is off the beaten path for tropical storms … this was just the power at the edge of a dying storm. That wreck wasn’t there in 2008 when we had visited previously. And it may not be there when we return.

Yesterday my wife and I went to see the Walt Disney movie, “Oceans.” I found my store of knowledge regarding them greatly enlarged, all the while being entertained and filled with a sort of awe.

Whether you are more interested in the incredible size of the blue whale (~100 ft, ~200 tons) or concerned for what industrial farming waste does to the smaller organisms that, in a size cascade, all other life relies upon (not just that in the oceans), you will find something worth the price of the ticket if you can just get out to see it in time.

“Oceans”. It’s a good pick. Leave the kids at home … this is a movie you’ll want to pay attention to. — Bill

I don’t collect a lot of statistics about my readers so I can’t be certain that you will be interested in this.

It is only tangentially related to gardening. Well, maybe in the sense … Actually, it probably isn’t related at all, but I thought you might be interested in it anyway.

This is an example of the cool stuff that I encounter using Stumble Upon that I probably would never have seen without it. Hopefully you will take a moment to ‘Stumble’ this page using the (ShareThis) social networking link below.

Well, enough about that. Here’s the link you need.

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/posters/chromosome/chooser.shtml

When you get there, you’ll be able to order a free 24×36 poster of the human genome.

–Bill

The non-selective use of antibiotics has long been a major issue in agribusiness. If you’ll read the text of this bill, you’ll see that a great deal of the antibiotics used in raising animals for food is simply to promote growth or to permit the animals to tolerate otherwise intolerable conditions, such as extreme over-crowding.

The only function of such overcrowding is to increase profit at the expense of the humane treatment of the animals. Everybody who eats that meat ends up eating the antibiotics that remain in the meat.

The folks of PETA are not what I would normally call ‘well-balanced’. But they have this point dead to rights: overcrowding is not good for animals and it is not good for people, either.

Here’s the full text of the bill:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-1549

Sometimes allegations such as I have made above are easy to wave away as just the ranting of a fanatic few, but you’ll find them noted in this bill as facts supported by rigorous scientific research; not allegations or ranting.

So, in the interests of your own health, that of your children and theirs, I hope that you will take a few minutes to read and consider the text of this bill.

Perhaps that will lead you to push for labeling that separates organically produced foodstuffs from the rest. If you do not have this information, you can not make informed choices about your family’s diet. The use of antibiotics in livestock is strictly prohibited by organic standards. This does not imply that an animal can not receive antibiotics to deal with an injury or illness; it simply means that it cannot be sold as “organic” thereafter.

Note, too, that these antibiotics find their way into our water supplies (the stuff coming out of your tap … or in the bottles from the supermarket isn’t as pure as it looks) and also survive food preparation … even thorough cooking.

Men of my age are familiar with what girls looked like when we were young and the average young girl of today is easily bustier than all but the most ‘talented’ of the girls of our youth. You can thank the growth hormones and antibiotics in food for much of that. It has made our daughters desirable to sexual predators long before they have the mental and emotional toughness to defend themselves.

This is no place to deal with societal pressures, etc. But I can point to the source of the ‘raw material’ for these pressures.

Parents of daughters wondering how to deal with this should take a close, hard, look at what they are putting on the table. Feed them organically; give their minds a chance to keep up with their bodies.

Defend your daughters.

If you are politically inclined, now might be a good time to write your Senator or Congress-critter an honest to goodness snail mail. Tweets, Diggs, Stumbles and Facebook mentions will also help get this bill passed. Spread the word. This is your chance.

– Bill

Introduction

Slugs and snails introduced to North America from other continents, most notably Asia and Europe, have overpowered the indigenous – and relatively harmless – varieties. Snails carry a shell made of calcium on their backs into which they can withdraw at will. This spiral shell is added to as the snail grows and this process of gradually making the shell larger is the cause of the spiral shape. By the way, their shells are one of the examples of the Fibonacci mathematical series appearing in nature.

Slugs also have a shell of sorts, but it consists of a small plate inside of their bodies and is not visible. Both travel by means of wavelike contractions along a single foot that is kept lubricated with a slime produced by a specialized gland near the front of the foot. Most of the time, this slime is relatively thin, but when threatened the slime becomes thick and foul-tasting.

Generally speaking, when I use the word “slug”, snails are included by inference since, from the perspective of a gardener, they pretty much occupy the same biological niche. They eat pretty much the same foods. They succumb to pretty much the same poisons. They share, to a large extent, the same natural enemies and so on.

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

This post inaugurates a series directed at the needs of new gardeners who are about to take the leap from wanting a garden to having one.

It isn’t intended as an all-inclusive guide, but rather as a starting point because gardening is a skill and a passion which can never be fully mastered. We can never say “That’s it. I know all there is to know about gardening … no sense doing it anymore.”

A garden is forever sending its best and brightest students back to the bottom of the class. I know this because I go there frequently. Ask me about last years potatoes. Or, better yet, please don’t ask.

The peas came out pretty nice, though. I just wish I’d planted enough.

We will consider:

* Choosing a site

* Preparing that site

* Starting from seed v. purchasing potted plants (there are a couple other alternatives that we will also consider)

* organic methods and (some – a very few) chemical methods

* fertilizing (under organic management, seldom necessary)

* various gardening philosophies

* About 10,000 other things … one at a time and in no particular order.

So, are you up for the ride?

– Bill

I suppose by now that you are hoping I will leave off the rants for a while … and in a while I intend to do so.

What kind of gardener would I be if I was afraid to stir up a little dirt when the time comes?

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

From the “I told you so” department.

I hate GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and their insidious sidekick, chemical farming, with the same passion I reserve for pedophiles, politicians, drug sales reps and big bankers.

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …

Or, at least, the uglier parts of it.

If you haven’t given any thought to becoming a Guerilla Gardener or, if you have thought about it but simply haven’t taken action, you really owe it to yourself to see how much beauty one guy with buck teeth has brought to Zurich, Switzerland.

http://www.maurice-maggi.ch/blumengraffiti/guerilla-gardening/ggtv-guerrilla-gardener-maurice-maggi-zurich/

Read on, my gardening friend. Read on …