Gardening
- Give a tea party, for your plants. Soak a cloth bag full of mulch in a bucket of water . When it looks like tea, water your plants with this nutritious liquid.
- Every year, Americans harvest as much grass from lawns as the Japanese harvest rice.
- Putting old tires around tomato plants can help them grow faster.
- Yard waste makes up estimated 18% of America's trash. Consider composting.
- There are over 20 million acres of grass in the US -- the equivalent of a lawn as big as the states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island... combined.,/
- About one third of our garbage consists of organic materials from our kitchens and yards. Most of this could avoid going to landfills if we compost.
- For information about composting, write:
- Seattle Tilth Association
- 2649 Sunnyvale Avenue North
- Seattle, WA 98103
- Put compost in the oven at 200ºF for one hour, if you want to use compost for houseplants. This sterilizes it.
- There are an average of 2.7 million worms in every acre of land.
- There are a billion organisms in every gram of compost.
- The number of yard waste composting programs increased by over 50% in 1989.
- In 1988, San Diego County expected 16,000 Christmas trees for recycling, and got 97,000.
- The US has over 1,000 municipal composting programs.
- The recently banned pesticide Dursban was one of the chemicals used in the production of conventionally grown cotton? Conventional cotton uses more insecticides than any other crop. That is why it is so important to support organic cotton farmers.
- 26% of all commercial pesticides are used on cotton.
- Red Spider Mites - For larger infestations, use a gallon size container to mix two (2) tablespoons of vegetable dish soap, two (2) tablespoons of vegetable oil and 1 gallon of water together. Pour into a quart size spray/mist bottle to cover the front and back of the leaves of your plant. For smaller infestations, you only need a pint of the mixture. The oil and soap mixture adheres and clogs their pores, sufficating them.
- For really stubborn infestations, ratchet up from the dish soap mixture to flea and tick shampoo for pets. It has pyrethrins in it, a natural pesticide derived from chrysanthemums.
- For the nastiest infestations, use neem oil, another plant oil. Toxic to insects.
Bamboo
Bamboos are very useful. From acupuncture needles to whisks for teamaking, they have been used in a thousand ways for centuries. However, their primary interest for botanists lies elsewhere, for the diversity of these remarkable plants has a profound significance for our understanding of the grass family in general. the deceptive simplicity of grasses actually represents a kind of botanical "shorthand". Behind this degree of "economy" in modern grasses, there is, to extend the analogy, a "longhand" represented by the bamboos.
The origins of the grass family lie remote in time and, due to a frustrating dearth of fossils, are largely inaccessible to us, hence the interest of bambnoos. They are a large and diverse group, spanning both the Old and New Worlds. Most are woody yet some are herbaceous. They combine both primative and advanced features.
It is interesting to examine the place of bamboo in stable forest situations. Flowering behavior is linked to the relationship for the diet and survival of the Great Panda.
One can not study grasses without considering the study of bamboo.
Organic
Pest Control
