How to Deal With Thrips on Stone Fruit

...ering sites are disturbed or dry up, thrips migrate to flowering trees and plants and deposit eggs in the tender portions of the host plant, e.g. shoots, buds, and flower parts. Thrips are often attracted to weeds blooming on the orchard floor. To prevent driving thrips into the trees, do not disc the cover crop when trees are in bloom. Open, weedy land adjacent to orchards should be disced as early as possible to prevent thrips development and mi...

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Bad Forager: Mistaking Hemlock for Fennel

...In this mode I am much more rooted in the senses. Touch, taste, sniff. The plant didn’t taste right. My sensing body paused to re-evaluate without input from the thinking part. The thinking part of me blurted out my sad, “Here’s some fennel?” question/statement to Pascal, already realizing, as I spoke, that the initial identification had been wrong. The sensing body said so. If I had been alone, I may have realized my mistake on my own, or I may h...

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A Cheap Soil Testing Service

...y of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Plant and Soil Sciences Soil and Plant Tissue Testing Laboratory. A standard soil test is $9, $4 more for the standard test plus organic matter. The standard tests includes heavy metals. That’s a bargain, and you don’t have to be a resident of Massachusetts. They also offer compost, fertilizer and plant tissue tests at reasonable prices. Read a review of UMASS soil testing by master gardener Amy Thompson a...

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Growing Watermelons

...es, with almost no chance of a fall freeze, I’ve begun in the past year to plant early varieties of most vegetables simply because there is less time for bad things to happen. 3. Watermelon is a living mulch. Watermelon, an enormous vine, makes an excellent living mulch, snaking, as it does, amongst our tomatoes and okra. I’ve laid down a layer of straw as mulch, but the watermelon adds a little more to the shade and water retention effort. 4. Irr...

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Tomato Review #2 Banana Legs – it don’t look like a banana and it don’t got legs

...mewhat ugly looking. We also made the dumb, lazy mistake of not caging the plant and it sprawled helplessly over the sides of the planter, probably reducing our yield. Here’s the way we normally cage our tomatoes when we’re not too busy blogging. You can also check out Bruce F’s nice staking system for his rooftop garden in Chicago. Verdict: we gotta get some of those Power’s Heirloom seeds next season, but I’ll save a few of the Banana Legs seeds...

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