All the Dirt on Gardening

I wish everyone could come spend some time in our yard right now. Not that it's reached any level of perfection, but it is definitely having a beautiful moment. So many things are blooming - from leeks and tomatoes to lilies and campion. We had a bit of rain today and a visitor on the back porch. Wildlife is having a field day, too. There are baby bunnies scampering out from under bushes, baby mice running out of the vermicompost bin, and baby birds poking their heads out of birdhouses. Possoms dig holes all over the yard. Do you know what Leaf Footed Bugs are? They are a kind of stink bug, which you find out when you hand pick them off of the poppy seed heads and leek flowers. Insect Identification dot org is a great resource for identifying bugs you find and I used it to decide what they were so I knew whether to leave them of send them all to heaven. Robert Durgy, Dept. of Plant Science, Uni versity of Connecticut wrote: "They are members of the Hemiptera, the...

The Leaf Footed Bug is highly praised by someone at this website but let me tell you I don't enjoy them crawling all over my summer squash plants. We are in the buggy season and they are driving me buggy. Mosquito bites from picking blackberries, squishing mating beetles and leaf footed bugs on the cucumbers, washing squash bugs out of the summer squash and scraping their eggs off the bottom of the leaves, things I've never seen before on the amaranth. Makes me itch all over sometimes. Photo: I think we need some bug eating chickens! On the happy side, there are big fat butterfly larva on the dill that we grow for them. How do the butterflies find it? Everyone is talking about how many butterflies there are this year. And, small frogs jump out from under plants where we water now. They must have moved in when we had the 36 days of rain. POLLUTION FROM FARMING Today I interviews a PhD candidate in forest ecology at Oklahoma State University. We met at a recent Living Kitchen...