I am brainstorming on how to put together what we have done on our homestead, here on this site and elsewhere into a project that others can become invested in to facilitate a move to the next phase of food production here – a permaculture aquaponics greenhouse.
Stay tuned for more information as the project proceeds.
Can you ID what this is? mostly impacting our oaks (severely) – adjacent non-oak trees much less affected.
I have many theories but none of the oak diseases fit well into our symptoms.
Here are some more photos.
I am still trying to identify the weeds that inhabit and terrorize my landscape. Their fecundity is a sight to be seen and I definitely respect it I just wish I could get tomatoes to do the same thing!
Today I am going to show some of my main weeds and identify where I am able.
Pennycress – Thlaspi arvense
Thlaspi arvense (common name Field Penny-cress) is a foetid Eurasian plant having round flat pods; naturalized throughout North America. It is also related to the Lepidium species in the cabbage family.
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(Please refer to this newer post for an update on our personal views on vaccination. We still very much advocate elderberry elixir, just not as the single means of fighting an increasingly virulent H1N1 pandemic)
Early on in the pandemic, a bit less recently, I immersed myself in flublogia. These are long standing flu communities, lots of intellectual capital out there.. people I really admire and who really know what is up with the pandemic (doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, scientists in the field and those not in it – like me, am not a viral biologist).
In one of my many-a-day strolls through the garden, I was looking at one of the tomato patches, lamenting the loss of most of the leaves on my calabash tomato to some sort of wilt (I hesitate to says its one thing, I am guessing various things are going on here) and I found, hanging from a tomato branch, this caterpillar beset by eggs and what looked like flying ants.
My first reaction was revulsion (OK, that remains my reaction) but I left it there because:
Radish leaf.
To a plant, water management is personal, very personal.
Capturing and managing the use or loss of water is not an idle activity, its not passive. For the plant it is hardwired. Just as we have arteries and veins to conduct blood, our little ocean, throughout our bodies, so too does the plant have tubing to route water across it’s body plan.
Corn sprout.
Activate the Wp-cumulus plugin to see the flash tag clouds!
We are a family of 5, including Nika, Ed, Q (14), KD (7), and Baby Oh (4). We garden 1024 square feet of raised beds plus assorted permacultural plantings. We also have 13 LaMancha dairy goats, 40 chickens, and one guard llama.