How to Squirrel Proof Your Fruit Trees

...g, killing, hunting. I don’t have the heart to do this and it’s illegal in urban areas but it is what professional orchardists do. Electronic or visual frightening devices. According to UC Davis, these don’t work. Squirrels aren’t dumb. Dogs. Maybe, but it depends on the dog. Our late doberman was more interested in alerting us to the mail carrier’s rounds. He was more interested but, ultimately, unsuccessful in his 13 year battle against skunks....

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The Rat of the Land

...ry and Global Positioning System (GPS) rarely work because of interference from buildings and hard surfaces. At the end of his blog post Frye has a nice collection of research papers on urban wildlife. I highly recommend one of those articles, which was published in Science a few years ago, Evolution of life in urban environments....

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Saturday Tweets: Cutting Through the Kudzu

...sal http://t.co/ZnUwxviSBp via @DiamondBarPatch http://t.co/UeoVXo2uuu — UCUrbanAg (@UCUrbanAg) August 26, 2015 Oslo builds world's first bumblebee highway http://t.co/ZbSwjYWW9E via @TheLocalNorway — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 26, 2015 Plant from 130 million years ago is among 'first flowers': study http://t.co/cPjiftSKZK via @YahooNews — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 24, 2015 Summer of Science | Even When You Go Off the Grid...

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

...a biodynamic compost pile or, gasp, thoughtstyle my way to some new, alternative method of sacramental gardening. So I decided to try straw bale gardening again. My last attempt, that I blogged about and even did a video of, worked great. If you’ve never tried it, the process is simple. You get straw bales, water them, add nitrogen in the form of either blood meal (organic) or urea (conventional) for a few days and then let them sit for a month w...

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My Big Fat Greek Squash

...eds and plants. He visits Greece each summer and comes back with seeds for plants whose names he can’t translate into English. As a result I always have a few mystery Greek vegetables growing in the garden. This spring he gave me a squash seedling he had propagated. It grew into a massive vine and produced two winter squashes whose weight exceeded the capacity of my kitchen scale. I harvested them last month and we’ve been eating a lot of squash!...

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