Here’s a great article from Fast Company about farmers in the UK testing the use of flowers to attract beneficial insects instead of using pesticides. They’re testing using new technology to make it easier to plant rows of flowers among the crops. This attracts beneficial insects, like parasitic wasps that eat aphids. Pretty cool! And…
It’s the time of year when peas, spinach, lettuce, brocolli, and other cool-season vegetables can be planted. They can handle some spring freezes. But my worry since moving up on the ridge here at our Utah house is that that deer will feast on our garden bounty. There are a lot of articles on what…
I had a lot of catching up to do on weeding and stuff today: Weeded the veggie garden (I still need to create some kind of trellis for the green beans, which are only about 3″ tall so far) Weeded some flowerbeds Mowed the lawn Picked a bunch of cherries from our second tree which…
My beautiful Japanese maple in front of my house has a disease or something. I’m worried about it. This one main branch and all the smaller branches that shoot off of it are dying. It started with some leaves turning red about a month ago, and now they’ve shriveled up. Some of the smaller twigs…
I “oiled” my fruit trees and some of my roses last Saturday. By “oiled” I mean that I sprayed dormant oil all over the trunks and branches to kill overwintering insect eggs and things. I believe it kills some diseases, too, like fungal spores. The oil I used was Volck Oil Spray from Ortho. It’s…
I’ve been waiting to harvest the Granny Smith apples, because they haven’t been ripening well this year. It could be a number of factors, including the spider mites that attacked the leaves this year, probably making it less productive of sugars, and it could be that our fall got really cold in mid-September and stayed…
This little masked bandit had been eating my cats’ food in the garage lately. I had a hunch it was a raccoon since the water dish would be really dirty, and I know raccoons like to wash their hands in water when they eat. My neighbor has this live trap, and it worked like a…
I’ve been laboring under the delusion that I was growing a Rocky Mountain Maple from seed I collected up American Fork Canyon. Well, I now think this is probably just a lousy Box Elder tree. It’s awfully similar to the small Box Elder I was growing in a pot until someone at GardenWeb identified it…