78 bar falls 29.68 2mpn NW dew-point 65 sunrise5:57 sunset8:40 Summer
New Moon (Corn Moon or State Fair Moon)
NOAA awakened me with its trademark ululation, alerting me to the thunder storm watch declared for Anoka County. Such notices are rare in the morning, mostly coming in the late afternoon as the heat of the day punches up cumulus clouds into congestus, then into the anvil shape of the thunderhead, sometimes 5 or 6 miles high.
This allowed plenty of time for Kate and me to conduct our family business meeting. This included Kate’s announcement of the fourth large quarterly adjustment in a row. She works hard and gets compensated accordingly. She’s off right now having lunch with Penny Bond at the Istanbul Bistro.
Last night while checking the crops I found an infestation of aphids in one corn stalk’s tassel. After checking others and only finding the one, I ripped that one of the ground and moved it far away. This morning I found another tassel with a few aphids, this one I squeezed between fingers and thumb instead of discarding. I’ll check it again, but I imagine that fixed it.
Watching for disease and pests is an important part of gardening. Another important part is not overreacting. I used to overreact, head straight for the pesticide or fungicide. Since then, I’ve learned that plants can sustain damage with no harm to their overall purpose. The trick is to know when the balance shifts from the plant’s natural defenses to the invaders. Even when I react, I almost never resort to pesticides (I use cygon on Iris Borers in the spring.). Instead I look for hand removal, plant elimination or measures such as squirting with high pressure water. That approach has served me well for the last four to five years.
Integrated pest management (IPM) encourages this kind of response. Good cleanup in the fall, creating a soil and growing condition favorable to healthy plants and either starting or purchasing strong plants also goes a long ways toward a manageable pest and disease environment. These are also part of an IPM strategy.
How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth……
There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth – we have named only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest species – already over 50% of these thousand pests are already resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS. We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals every year due to “man’s footprint”. But, after poisoning the entire world and contaminating every living thing for over 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide POISONS we have not even controlled much less eliminated even one pest species and every year we use/misuse more and more pesticide POISONS to try to “keep up”! Even with all of this expensive and unnecessary pollution – we lose more and more crops and lives to these thousand pests every year.
We are losing the war against these thousand pests mainly because we insist on using only synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers There has been a severe “knowledge drought” – a worldwide decline in agricultural R&D, especially in production research and safe, more effective pest control since the advent of synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers. Today we are like lemmings running to the sea insisting that is the “right way”. The greatest challenge facing humanity this century is the necessity for us to double our global food production with less land, less water, less nutrients, less science, frequent droughts, more and more contamination and ever-increasing pest damage.
National Poison Prevention Week, March 18-24,2007 was created to highlight the dangers of poisoning and how to prevent it. One study shows that about 70,000 children in the USA were involved in common household pesticide-related (acute) poisonings or exposures in 2004. At least two peer-reviewed studies have described associations between autism rates and pesticides (D’Amelio et al 2005; Roberts EM et al 2007 in EHP). It is estimated that 300,000 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year just in the United States – No one is checking chronic contamination.
In order to try to help “stem the tide”, I have just finished re-writing my IPM encyclopedia entitled: THE BEST CONTROL II, that contains over 2,800 safe and far more effective alternatives to pesticide POISONS. This latest copyrighted work is about 1,800 pages in length and is now being updated at my new website at http://www.thebestcontrol2.com .
This new website at http://www.thebestcontrol2.com has been basically updated; all we have left to update is Chapter 39 and to renumber the pages. All of these copyrighted items are free for you to read and/or download. There is simply no need to POISON yourself or your family or to have any pest problems.
Stephen L. Tvedten
2530 Hayes Street
Marne, Michigan 49435
1-616-677-1261
http://www.theidealpesticide.com
When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest.