by Greg Alder | Jun 8, 2018 | Avocados, Pests |
If your avocado leaves are getting holey this spring, you are due for a night hunt. Every May and June, I find myself going out after dark and finding the same culprit: June bugs. Here’s what I do: Grab a flashlight or better yet, a headlamp. Bring along a cup...
by Greg Alder | Feb 2, 2018 | Pests, Vegetables |
Aphids in many Southern California vegetable gardens are particularly bad this winter. What a good opportunity to test some control methods and make observations about aphid behavior. Brevicoryne brassicae, that’s the scientific name for the particular aphid I’m...
by Greg Alder | Jul 27, 2017 | Pests |
In my yard, the most damaging, relentless, and challenging pest to control has been gophers. Birds peck plums and squirrels may steal plums, but a gopher will kill a plum tree. While I haven’t lost any plum trees to gophers, I’ve lost other fruit trees and innumerable...
by Greg Alder | Jun 23, 2017 | Pests |
I shot the second rabbit, but not as cleanly as Chance had shot the first one. It was bleeding on the driveway next to the passion fruit vine and the vegetable garden, from which it had occasionally dined, and I felt terrible. Chance felt bad too, which is why he is...
by Greg Alder | Dec 20, 2016 | Fruit, Pests |
I love avocado trees, and I sure love my son Miles, but toward the end of the summer his placenta tree started to lose leaves and then lose more leaves and then have some die back on branch tips, so I got emotional in a way I never have toward a tree. I’ve...
by Greg Alder | Jun 17, 2016 | Chickens, Pests |
Joel Salatin advises that you wake up every morning aiming to attack the weak link on your farm. That could be soil fertility, irrigation, labor efficiency, anything. The weak link in our yard has been — for a couple years now — a proliferation of earwigs...
by Greg Alder | Sep 21, 2015 | Pests |
Spent the last couple weeks in Oregon and Washington, and came home to notice a lot of leaves missing from an Early Girl tomato plant. Figured a hornworm had done some munching, but when I went to find it I found a second, and then a third, and then I kept finding...
by Greg Alder | Aug 19, 2015 | Native Plants, Pests |
A couple of the native plants I put in last fall and winter, 2014: The goal is to grow a hedgerow along the dirt road in order to mitigate dust created by cars and give more privacy to the yard and house. I’m using native plants for a number of reasons....
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