I would like to know what variety of cherry tomatoes on the vine they put in those green "Desert Glory" brand socks. They are far and away the best cherry tomatoes I have purchased. Pricey at times, so I grab them when I can get them cheaply.

News about my lettuce... I may have discovered the culprit. I was yanking out dead lettuce a few days ago and discovered a bunch of fat little green caterpillar beasties. I stomped on them and green ooze spurted out. I think I can assume that green ooze was a belly full of MY LETTUCE!

The guy at OSH identified them as "cabbage worms." The only pesticide they had for it was Sevrin, which appears to be a milder form of strychnine that washes off after a few days. (It even had a picture of the same bug on the bottle. Yippee for me.)

I had mixed feelings about going to weapons of mass destruction, but the lettuce was all going to hell anyway, so I sprayed the few heads left. A couple of days later: I threw away some more lettuce and discovered another big fat green one that I had to stomp on. I did see one dead one in the dirt. So, mixed results with this stuff. Maybe I needed to really douse it!

Knowing the name of the pest, though, I was able to search it on the Internet. Apparently the best pesticide for cabbage worms is Bt, sold under different brand names, a non-toxic (to us) bacterial agent that kills many insects. I plan to get some of that next. I used to have tons of that for killing mosquitoes, and I know it's not dangerous.

(Ask me some time about my days as a mosquito larvae retailer).

__________________
**************
"And so, in my State of the—my State of the Union—or state—my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation—I asked Americans to give 4,000 years—4,000 hours over the next—the rest of your life—of service to America. That's what I asked—4,000 hours."

Ok, I'll bite. Tell us about your days as a purveyor of pests.

On BT, it's great stuff. I always used it on my cabbage, broccoli, etc. with very good results. I had no idea it worked on mosquitoes. I thought it was specifc to things in the moth family. Live and learn.

__________________

LOL!!!!

__________________

My Plucky Plan to be a Purveyor of Pests...

Back when I was breeding and selling tropical fish, I would go to different fish collector clubs in the southern California area and try to pick up some good live food. The one that a lot of us wanted but couldn't get enough of was Daphnia -- not really a pest, just a nice little crustacean that lives in pond scum. The prices for Daphnia were outrageous.

I did some research on growing daphnia at home, read some papers on it, talked to people at Carolina Biological. I erected a stand-up swimming pool in my backyard and inoculated it with some daphnia and some pantyhose full of steer manure. To keep mosquitoes out, I created a big tent out of tulle fabric (basically, mosquito netting).

Well, the daphnia didn't ever quite take off. But damn, those mosquitoes did! I sealed the tulle as best I could, but they managed to find a way in, clever little beasties that they are. I had several thousand mosquito larvae wriggling around in my pool.

I talked to the health department for tips about this. They suggested using Bt to kill the mosquito larvae. The question was whether it would kill the daphnia, too. I decided to find out.

So, I put a couple of pounds of Bt in the pool. And waited.

Well, it worked... but it wasn't perfect at all. It probably reduced the population by two thirds.

That's when I went to plan B. I started feeding the mosquito larvae to my breeder fish.

Now, I hadn't thought of it before, but mosquito larvae are actually the perfect fish food. Small tropical freshwater fish in the wild live on diets of hardly anything else. Daphnia have a nice nutritional profile, but they pale in comparison. My fish were getting fat and happy and laying eggs by the thousands.

However, I had too many mosquitoes for this. So I started bagging up the live larvae and taking them to fish club meetings. I collected enough money to make my hobby a little more excusable to my wife. Although there was still this little problem we had.

See, the tulle kept the mosquitoes from getting out fairly well. It was the mosquitoes I fed the fish. Sometimes they didn't eat them all. Sometimes they would wriggle their way behind the filter and then pupate and... I was making some enemies at home.

Aha! Never to be undone so easily, I came up with plan C. I started freezing them. At first, this did not meet with much enthusiasm from my wife, either, because ice cube trays of mosquito larvae side by side with real ice kind of grossed her out. And there were some mistakes. Oh well... Still, this helped me save the excess mosquitoes for the cooler season, something my fish could appreciate.

And then I discovered a strange thing about mosquitoes nobody seemed to know about. When you thaw them out, every once in a while, they don't thaw out dead. It took me a while to figure out this little miracle of nature. While I was astonished and couldn't wait to tell all the bio-geeks at the club about this amazing scientific discovery, my wife was throwing tantrums.

I had to stop it eventually. It's a really unhealthy practice, raising mosquto larvae for fun and profit. I hadn't planned on doing it. Mosquitoes, though, are vectors for a number of nasty diseases like Hepatitis. The power company meter reader took too much interest in my little tulle biodome and alerted me to the danger of what I was doing, which I kind of knew already, but hearing somebody outside the family say it made it come home a little bit. Even if it was just a power company dude. I had enough frozen larvae to last me years, at that point.

__________________
**************
"And so, in my State of the—my State of the Union—or state—my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation—I asked Americans to give 4,000 years—4,000 hours over the next—the rest of your life—of service to America. That's what I asked—4,000 hours."

ROTFLMAO! I'm really glad I asked.

__________________

throwing tantrums? i would have been MOVING OUT!! *L*

__________________
kims SECOND journal is HERE
kims new blog
KIMS BLOG !!
SUGARFREE BLOG

For someone from a country with a really poor selection of berries - what is a bababerry? Is it a multiple berry like raspberries, blackberries & boysenberries or a single berry like red currants?

Totally confused

__________________

The bababerry is a heat tolerant variety of red raspberry.

This berry seems to have gotten attention only recently. Living in the northeast US, I was unfamiliar with them, but some of my southern friends seem to have taken a shine to them in the last couple of years.

HTH.

__________________

Thanks Maggie.

__________________

I was not going to plant a garden this year due to my surgery in April but I couldn't resist. I've had green beans and roma tomatoes coming out my ears. Such a good year in the midwest for growing. I had to have harvested at least 300 roma tomatoes from 6 plants and 10 of those huge stainless steel bowls of green beans. Never have seen such a good crop for my little spot. I also received some everbearing raspberry plants from a friend last year and those are growing huge berries right now. Definitely going to expand next year.

yea to gardening
Julianne

Raspberries are fun. I hear the ever-bearing Heritage raspberry strain is a really good one.

I'm planning on ordering some Arapaho-strain thornless seedless blackberry bare-root plants when things cool down a little. I decided the thorny blackberries I have been growing this year are not worth the effort; I'm planning to yank them and replace them with the Arapahos.

God, I'm still having trouble growing leaf lettuce. I have tried to be scientific about it, but the hot weather isn't helping. The one thing I don't understand is that, well, I thought lettuce LIKED rain. The last rain wasn't that hard, but it still managed to plaster the little leaves to the ground and make them mildew. I have learned to not water them with the hose anymore, for the same reason. The weight of the droplets flattens the leaves and they rot. Now I irrigate them with little ditches that I have dug parallel to the lettuce rows, so no water gets directly on them. That just doesn't seem right, though.

__________________
**************
"And so, in my State of the—my State of the Union—or state—my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation—I asked Americans to give 4,000 years—4,000 hours over the next—the rest of your life—of service to America. That's what I asked—4,000 hours."