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 →Have you ever served broccoli at the dinner table only to find green worms cooked in your food? Yuk! A client of ours says she’ll never grow broccoli again. Too many worms. And she refuses to dump poison on her food to kill the worms. We’re showing her how to grow organic food that does not have caterpillars. The cabbage worm eats holes in the
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 →It’s officially summertime. The solstice came and went. We’re tending our gardens, nurturing our vegetables and flowers. We all look forward to an abundant harvest of fantastic, home-grown, organic vegetables. Along the way we might run into beetles. Some beetles, like ladybugs (aka lady beetles), are good partners. Beneficial insects such as these help you achieve your goals by eating insects that damage to your
Read more →On a tour of secret gardens in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kathryn and I peek behind adobe walls for tantalizing glimpses of hidden treasures. Organized by the Santa Fe Botanical Gardens, the tour provides access to several small urban gardens not normally visible to passersby. A beautifully sophisticated yet rustic fence made of reddish twigs defines the boundary between the garden and the natural environment
Read more →Today we pay tribute to David’s father, Lawrence Edwin Deardorff, who passed away on May 11 at the age of 97. Larry first took David into the garden when he was 6 years old, and he learned about the world of plants at his father’s side. Larry was an avid gardener his entire life, and became our partner when David and I owned Island Biotropix,
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