Click on the link below to see a brief video of a beneficial baby on my garden roses. Beneficial babies The little guy is actually a predatory maggot that crawls about your plants and eats aphids for you. The adult is a fly that tries very hard to look like a dangerous bee that will sting you. But she can’t sting. She can’t even bite! Here’s
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A polyculture garden on a small city lot mixes fruit trees and flowers, berry bushes, herbs, and vegetables in carefree abundance. The advantages are many fewer pests and much less disease. We recently were invited guests on Kate Gardner’s show “The Manic Gardener” on internet talk radio. The interview was fun and informative and Kate has posted a podcast of the complete program. Check it out
Read more →Our new book, What’s Wrong with My Vegetable Garden?, comes out today. Timber Press has, as usual, done a masterful job and produced another beautiful book of which we can be proud. We’d appreciate it if you let all your gardening friends know about it. This book is all about growing healthy, organic vegetables at home, something that more and more of us are doing
Read more →Our next book, “What’s Wrong With My Vegetable Garden?” is coming out this December, 2011, from Timber press. It’s our third book from this premier publisher. This book is available by pre-order from timberpress.com and at amazon.
Read more →Kathryn and I recently led a birdwatching safari to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon. We saw 95 species and some very beautiful birds. This beautiful bird is an American avocet. We found him wading right beside the road. Lazuli buntings were everywhere, snatching bugs out of the air like tiny flycatchers. We found this nutria at the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge in Washington. All in
Read more →Spring is springing in the Pacific Northwest. One of the earliest signs of spring is the flowering of the native hazelnut trees, Corylus cornuta. It’s long golden catkins dangle from slender branches and catch the sunlight, lighting up the forest where it grows. Tiny female flowers are housed separately from the long, supple catkin filled with male flowers. The female flowers will mature into
Read more →We had a great interview with Joe Lamp’l at Growing a Greener World and we want to share the link to the podcast with you. Here’s the link: http://www.growingagreenerworld.com/028-whats-wrong-with-my-plant-and-how-do-i-fix-it-an-interview-with-authors-david-deardorff-kathryn-wadsworth/ Joe is so knowledgeable and personable he made the whole interview fun and informative. Check out the other podcasts on his website. They’re full of good information.
Read more →It’s August and everybody’s vegetable gardens crank out delicious organic food. Yum-oh! But sometimes gardeners find holes in the middle of the leaves of their vegetable crops. Large holes. Many of them. Who’s the culprit? Caterpillars? Grasshoppers? Beetles? Or maybe snails! Snails and slugs both glide through your garden on a ribbon of slime, the shiny, sparkly stuff the snail in the photo above is
Read more →True bugs. Forewings cover half of the abdomen (aka backs) of true bugs. They are in the order Hemiptera, which means half wing. Many other insects are often called bugs, the lady bug for example, which is actually a beetle (a lady beetle). But the only actual bugs are insects in the order Hemiptera. All of the true bugs have piercing-sucking mouthparts like hypodermic needles.
Read more →Most of these “bugs” have mouthparts like a hypodermic needle. They stick their needle-like mouth parts into the veins of plants and suck out the nutrient rich sap. As their populations build they can seriously impact the energy budget of your vegetable plants and limit your crops. Also, just like a mosquito sucking the blood from your arm to give you malaria, these insects can
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