Posted at 10:26 PM in Pets | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 10:13 PM in Wildlife | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 10:10 PM in Wildlife | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I noticed a raised bed of potatoes was suddenly covered in webs. I know this is not common behavior for spiders, so I had my husband look at the plant, he had to go get a magnifying glass to see what it was. Unsurprisingly, he found tiny red mites and looked it up and found it was spider mites.
We have some unintended brussel sprouts. Every year, I get a little too fast throwing plants into my shopping cart and each time I end up with something I didn't want. Last year, it was cabbage which got huge and filled with earwigs. This year, it was a six pack of brussel sprouts. I never can leave little plants to die without at least trying, so I put them in. Right after I noticed the webbing, I found a white powder around them and the leaves looking wilted. Aphids my husband told me. I looked closer, yup a thick layer on the bottom of each leaf of little white bugs.
My husband put some insecticidal soap on both and it looked good at first, but the aphids came right back and the potatos immediately died.
I dug up the potatos, so it wasn't a big loss. They weren't that far from being harvested, but the brussel sprouts are laying around still.
Get a cool gardening sigg bottle with veggies on it
Posted at 09:25 PM in Gardening | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: aphids, brussel sprouts, garden, pests, potatos, spider mites
I have several types of peppers growing that I'm not sure how hot they are. I found this handy pepper heat chart at about.com Home Cooking
I have a Big Jim plant and the Sweet Bananas and some Fresno Chiles as well as some various bells and a few others. I was surprised to see the sweet bananas have no heat at all.
The chart below rates chile peppers, with 0 being mildest and 10 highest heat.
| Sweet Bells; Sweet Banana; and Pimento | Negligible Scoville Units | |
| Mexi-Bells; Cherry; New Mexica; New Mexico; Anaheim; Big Jim | 100-1,000 Scoville Units | |
| Ancho; Pasilla; Espanola; Anaheim | 1,000 - 1,500 Scoville Units | |
| Sandia; Cascabel | 1,500 - 2,500 Scoville Units | |
| Jalapeno; Mirasol; Chipotle; Poblano | 2,500 - 5,000 Scoville Units | |
| Yellow Wax; Serrano | 5,000 - 15,000 Scoville Units | |
| Chile De Arbol | 15,000 - 30,000 Scoville Units | |
| Aji; Cayenne; Tabasco; Piquin | 30,000 - 50,000 Scoville Units | |
| Santaka; Chiltecpin; Thai | 50,000 - 100,000 Scoville Units | |
| Habanero; Scotch Bonnet | 100,000 - 350,000 Scoville Units | |
| Red Savina Habanero; Indian Tezpur | 350-855,000 Scoville Units | |
Posted at 09:14 PM in Cooking | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I've found a couple of interesting blogs that are documenting efforts to eat on a reduced budget. My reality TV instincts kick in and I find myself reading these things with a weird fascination. My own food budget gets out of hand regularly giving me a constant guilt complex, the result of growing up the 4th in a family of 5 competitive children with a father who felt it was his honored right to eat anything in the fridge that didn't have a screaming daughter attached to it.
Posted at 09:22 AM in Cooking | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
This weekend we took a bike tour of community and urban gardens in Sacramento put on by Slow Food Sacramento. I took my camera along and documented what we saw.
Southside Community Garden
We started out at this fascinating if somewhat unruly community garden. Community gardens usually are fenced off, a product of their urban location. The standard process is to divide up the area into plots and have a signup with various rules. Usually the city pays the water bill. Interestingly enough drip systems are discouraged to be sure the plots are not neglected and weeds usually gets you a warning letter to come tend to your plot. This one had a beautiful hand made gate.
Posted at 08:15 PM in Gardening | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: community gardens, gardening, urban gardens