Archive for the ‘blight’ Category

And may the sun shine on you, in your work week, So often in the old days, the life of the crop meant the life of the man and his family, these days, our farmers, are quietly facing a huge problem and none of the media outlets are even covering it.

As the old saying goes life for your crop, many say this was a greeting in the old days of gardening, you have to wonder just how they managed to deal with all the problems, that we as gentle gardeners face.

Imagine for a moment that you lived back in the old days, where a bad crop might mean you did not eat the next winter…

Of course they had the almanac, and you do too, many farmers depended on the almanac, in many different ways.

Prediction of rain, sunshine, even when to fish…

The Farmers Almanac, is a source of much used information, from weather, to gardening, to even the best time to get married? Why sure and why not, it is after all based, on a form of science, if not somewhat superstitious, as some claim, back in the day, it might have even been viewed as using the craft…

Regardless, of its accuracy, it is still in use today all across america.

Farmers, gardeners, and even just the curious read and use the almanac…

So even if you take it all with a grain of salt or even throw some over you shoulder, the almanac has been around for a long time and it looks like it is not going to be phased out of existence anytime soon…

Perhaps you have thought about getting a few canned goods, in case of emergency, well turns out that might not be such a bad idea.

This is a disturbing story, and if you think that it is not going to happen, dont, because it is coming, watch this video.

it is disturbing, but there is still time.

Blight is really tough to fight, you can spray, and spray and weed and prune…

Blight is not really a great word, for the inner city it means, some kind of bad thing that few really understand but every one can see it, in gardening it is much the same way, there is not much you can do to combat it, except to prune, your plants, and take precautions, to try and keep it down, you can use fungicide, and other remedies, but for the most part it is really only keeping it down to a minimum.

If that is what it takes to get fruit to bear on your plants, then good, however, it really is frustrating if you are attempting to grow a really good crop and you just cannot seem to get past the pestilence of blight.

Just so you know here is one version of the blight, but there are many many others.

Example of Blight

Last year if you were following you saw our photos showing blossom end rot, calcium issues, also fungus problems, that literally killed all our tomatoes, naturally you can see how this can be a real problem. This year we started spraying with lime and sulfur as well as several other protectant, sprays, we remain hopeful for a great growing season, however, this year there is a real serious problem with a culprit that is so far not responding to any treatment.

Fire blight, which causes, a black death of fruit trees, effecting the end of the branches, it spreads, quickly and is very hard to control.

We will be posting pictures soon, so far we have tried a number of preparations, but nothing seems to help, looks like we will be loosing our pears this year, and if we cant stop it it will spread to all our fruit trees, a nasty bacteria.

stay tuned, and if you know of an effective treatment please do post and let us know…

update we have a picture of how it looks as you can see it really looks like fire has killed the leaves, but in reality it is a bacteria.

You should definitely make sure that you take action early, so far and this is not effective, but so far the recommended treatment is pruning.

Well it is that time of year again and it comes all too fast, more so if you live in any of the southerly states, this last season, there was a lot more rain than usual, in fact it caused quite a few farmers to loose the entire fruit crop, to fungus, because it rained almost twice as many inches which is very unusual.

So in order to fight fungus you need to spray while the tree is still in its dormant stage, which is about right now.

There are many different fungicide sprays you can use but more importantly is the use of a good sprayer that can change depending on the application, Rittenhouse is one company that does provide a great product.

You should follow the directions on the product you choose, which can vary but usually is around 14 days between applications, then you want to spray again at first bloom then again just prior to pedal drop.

The important thing is that you take care of the problem before it gets a chance to set in too badly.

Last year, was an experiment, we learned quite a few things, that I do not intend to repeat this year, such as the pitfalls that present themselves as a normal part of gardening, in fact it is something that most people do not know and are not told, mostly because we are in a different type of weather pattern than normal, what they call elnino, I am not sure I buy all this weather change, but just in case, I am going to be preparing ahead of time this year.

Yesterday I started on fertilizing the garden, actually I started that a couple of months ago but if your following along, anytime over the next few weeks will be fine, a little later on I will start tilling up the garden but not today.

If you have not yet, pruned your fruit trees, like apple, peach, pears, and plums, then you need to get on that pretty quick.

Also it will not be long before it will be time to treat for fungus which was a huge problem last year, in fact we lost our entire peach crop due to an unusual amount of rain.

So this year we are going with a commercial fungicide and hoping for the best of a late frost, so happy gardening…

More to come soon…

Unless you have been hiding under a rock you have heard all the hype about the iphone and how great it is and how neat it is and how you can make a millions bucks with just a few moments of effort selling applications for the smart device in the app store.

After hearing all of these stories and actually taking a good look at the iphone at a local walmart, I found that the phone and the legend are two different things. If you are dead set on having one of these units and just cant help yourself, then you should get ready for a Hefty price tag and a 24 month service agreement with what many users say are allegedly sub standard services compared with other service providers of the same quality.

The first drawback is the mandatory data plan, I actually called ATT and went through a polite presentation of the sales information, when I asked about the price of the service, I found that the price was affordable except that they seemed to prefer this nickel and dime approach to selling services as opposed to the usual marketing trend these days where most every single company including ATT, sells a flat rate service plan.

What? Your kidding right, why would the makers of the famous iphone allow its product to be allegedly marketed at such a disadvantage to its competitors products, it all started out as a great technological experiment, Apple was going to get into the cell phone business but there was a problem, Apple did not have any hardware and the cost of acquisition, was way too high so Apple decided to go with ATT, this in retrospect may have been a really bad idea.

How the launch of the iphone and ATT competing products left the iphone at a disadvantage.

This is a question that only a handful of executives know the answer to how this happened, but for the rest of us, it became evident almost from the start that something was terribly wrong in this friendly corporate relationship, within 30 days of the launch of the iphone, ATT introduced a competing smart device that was in direct competition with the iphone, but at a lower price.

The price offered for the services of the iphone service plans, are allegedly much higher than other service providers offering plans for smart devices with the same or similar data services.

This begs the question, why?

Could it be that Apple is depending on the advertising and hype of the product to overcome the higher price of the service? However, why don’t we take a look at the service offering of this vaunted smart device?

The plan starts with 450 anytime minutes, and 5000 nights and weekend minutes, as well you have to agree to a mandatory data plan, which is really the same price you would pay for a broadband internet service connection.

So really, is this a deal or is this a steal…

Then if you want to have the ability to text which is all the rage these days, you have to pay even more money at a separate rate, yet just about every single service provider including ATT, offers these services as a flat rate included in a very competitive rate, however if you want to use the iphone you will have to pay more.

On top of all these disadvantages, ATT restricts the way you can use your data plan with your allegedly smart device, which is dumb when you think of it, so we have to ask what is going on with this relationship between these two giants, did this start out as a great idea then degrade into something less than friendly?

We have to ask these questions, because it appears that ATT is allegedly marketing its own products over the back of the iphone and it appears again allegedly that this is being done on purpose.

So in the end after careful consideration, we decided to stay with our current service provider and stick with the very competitive plan that we currently have as we would have to pay more than twice the going rate just to have the iphone.

Hopefully in the future either ATT or Apple will find a way to get along and create a better service plan that is more attractive to the average user, which from a marketing standpoint, is not terribly brilliant.

Find out more about how to make the right choices for your portable communication needs at our information website.

http://www.books4smarts.com

There is always going to be a demand for food, however many economists feel that in the event of a natural or manmade disaster the demand may be much higher than what is actually available. the end result is that if you do not have on hand a supply of food you may end up hungry.

Keep a supply of non perishable food on hand, one method is to calculate the number of people by one pound per day, now that is obviously not going to work out correct every time, but it will give you an idea of what would be required if you ended up in a situation where you could not go to the local A and P grocery store and buy what you wanted.

In many estimates, people these days only keep about three days of food on hand.

It is just so easy to go to the store and buy what you want, that for most people they just do not look that far ahead at what they might need in the event of an emergency and that is something that you will have to change if you want to be prepared.

As the demand for food goes up and the price goes up, you could very well end up in a situation such as you see dramatized on these Television shows where some event has occurred such as an earth quake and there is no water available. Will it happen in the morning, probably not.

So you have time, to plan and that is one of the most important things to have in place, you must have a plan on what you will do, how you will react, steps that you will take, having a plan is the most important part of surviving in a world where inflation is going to soon be a big part of life.

So how much is enough? well that is a good question, food can be modified and stretched, but will you do that? Most people do not have the will power to make that decision, and so either you need to have a good supply of food on hand or you need to be able to make the hard decisions in the event that the supply of food becomes smaller than what you are used to.

The most over looked aspect of surviving is one thing you may not have thought about.

Water, if something happened today and they said do not drink the water, or worse if they shut the water off.

How much water do you have on hand?

If you are like most people the answer is about 2 gallons or less.

The truth is that you should have 20 gallons of water on hand at all times and that may not be enough, but it will help to have at least that much on hand, because if you have ever been in a situation where there was no water, you know how important it can be to have water, here is an example, one afternoon, some genius living at the apartments where I used to live, decided that they needed to do some work on the washer connections, well you guessed, they broke the water line.

So with no warning at all, the water was turned off and we were without water for the entire day, no showers, no drinking water, no cooking…

It was then I realized that if there were a long term issue that effected the water supply that I and most of the people in that same situation would be in a real bit of trouble.

So consider these things, you do not have to go crazy with it, you can do it little by little, if you buy milk, you have a water container you can use to store water, so really over time you can keep a few gallons of water on hand in case of emergency.