By
Administrator on September 15th, 2006
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
We have had some visitors in our yard for the past couple of weeks. They don’t come every day, in fact it’s more like once or twice per week. We have had female wild turkeys visit before, but they never brought the whole family. This time it’s a female and six babies! I never knew that they had so many at once. We unfortunately did not get any pictures on their first two visits and, boy, do they grow a lot in one week’s time! Anyway, thought that you might enjoy this wildlife photo. (My husband had to run outside in his robe and pajamas to try to get the photo and one of our cats appeared right behind him. I wish I’d had my camera handy to snap a photo of that parade.)
By
Administrator on September 7th, 2006
Posted in Organic Gardening | No Comments »
Well, it’s getting to be Autumn again. There’s that definite “turning of the year” feeling in the air and I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll get any more ripe Brandywine tomatoes from the vegetable garden. There are lots of green ones out there, but the plants look anything but healthy at the moment. The weather here in the Northeast has been extremely non-cooperative this year and most of my tomato plants seem to be suffering some kind of blight. A friend of mine told me yesterday that all of her cherry tomatoes are literally exploding just before they get ripe enough to pick! Between the extremely wet and chilly Spring and the horrible high heat and humidity in July, the vegetable garden has taken too many hits.
Since I view organic vegetable gardening as my “gift” to the earth, I feel compelled to do it even when I just don’t have time to do much of anything with the produce. At least I hope that I’m helping to improve the soil and give a little boost to the beneficial insects, birds, and other wildlife in the area. This year, however, my poor garden has suffered additional onslaughts not only of the dreaded cucumber beetles, but of swarms of squash bugs! I’m afraid that it’s time to bring out the “big guns”. Since I don’t like to use insecticides (even the organic ones) unless I absolutely have to, my pyrethrin/rotenone concentrate has long since past it’s expiration date and is probably no longer effective. Now comes the problem of figuring out how to dispose of it safely! Since rotenone is now suspected of having a link to Parkinson’s disease, perhaps it’s just as well that I haven’t used that much of it. Guess I’ll have to purchase one of the pyrethrin/oil mixtures and hope that does the trick.