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| Finished Product |
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| I used coffee filters and screwed the metal band over it to hold it in place |
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| Before straining out the lemon zest |
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| The zest looked so pretty I froze it to use later for another recipe |
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Liquors ~ project finished
Friday, May 18, 2012
Garden Stuff
Antique Bed ~ Finished!
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
The Beauty of Pollination
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xHkq1edcbk4?rel=0
The Beauty of Pollination ~ Check this out, it is stunning....
The Beauty of Pollination ~ Check this out, it is stunning....
Antique Bed ~ Project Update
Pictures of the antique iron bed being sandblasted by Giles Signs. www.wetpaintfactory.com . Joe was nice enough to take pics with his phone and email them to me. Sorry about the size. If I make them any bigger they are blurry. The sandblasting ended up being $112; add that to the $115 I paid for the bed and the cost is up to $227. Add to that the cost of power coating which was $125 and you get a grand total of $352. I picked up the bed from the painters and I'll be posting pics of the finished project tomorrow. I turned out great! The rails have the initials, G.P. embossed on them, which I'm sure is the foundry where the bed or at least the rails were made. I've been trying to research it but haven't been able to find it. Any Ideas? I can't wait to do another one......
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Garden Treasures
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| Virginia Dare Rose |
I bought this little rose plant 2 years ago while on our yearly vacation to the outer banks at the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island. It was tiny then and I waited so long to plant it that I really didn't expect it to survive. But, it hunkered down under the heaving boughs of my Rosemary plant in one of the herb beds and was evidently cozy enough with the mild winter to thrive and quadruple it's size. It's an indigenous species which is probably why it survived. FYI: Virginia Dare was the first English child born on American shores. Check out the website: it's quite beautiful and will just make you feel good.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Good For a sore throat
Honey Ginger Lemon Tea
Makes 12 ounces, about 2 servings2 inches fresh ginger, sliced into thin coins
12 ounces boiling water
2 tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 tablespoon honey
1. Put the fresh ginger in a glass jar or pitcher. Pour the boiling water over it and let it steep for 5 minutes.
2. While the ginger is steeping, divide the lemon juice and honey between two mugs.
3. Strain the ginger tea into the mugs and stir to dissolve the honey. Taste and add more honey if desired.http://www.lafujimama.com/
A Nice Little Suprise
It Was The Best Of Weekends, It Was The Worst Of Weekends
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| Poor Baby! |
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| All fixed up, happily eating hay |
Friday, May 11, 2012
This is a picture my daughter Ivy took of me in the garden. It had been so hot that I bought a simple pull over dress and that's what I've been wearing a lot, even to work outside in. I remember how everyone's grandmothers wore a light dress in the summer to do everything in and we thought is was so old fashioned. Well......they were smart. It's so much cooler. Just don't bend over too far when anyone's around. I remember seeing the tops of many a rolled down stocking.........
Horse'n Around
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| The Horses |
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Project updates
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Beekeepers Win Ban on Monsanto's GMOs in Poland
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Monsanto's
Mon810 corn, genetically engineered to produce a mutant version of the
insecticide Bt, has been banned in Poland following protests by
beekeepers who showed the corn was killing honeybees.
Scary Stuff
GE corn & sick honey bees - what's the link?
Thu, 2012-04-19 15:36
No
farmer in his or her right mind wants to poison pollinators. When I
spoke with one Iowa corn farmer in January and told him about the
upcoming release of a Purdue study
confirming corn as a major neonicotinoid exposure route for bees, his
face dropped with worn exasperation. He looked down for a moment, sighed
and said, “You know, I held out for years on buying them GE seeds, but
now I can’t get conventional seeds anymore. They just don’t carry ‘em."This leaves us with two questions: 1) What do GE seeds have to do with neonicotinoids and bees? and 2) How can an Iowa corn farmer find himself feeling unable to farm without poisoning pollinators? In other words, where did U.S. corn cultivation go wrong?
The short answer to both questions starts with a slow motion train wreck that began in the mid-1990s: corn integrated pest management (IPM) fell apart at the seams. Rather, it was intentionally unraveled by Bayer and Monsanto.
Honey bees caught in the cross-fire
Corn is far from the only crop treated by neonicotinoids, but it is the largest use of arable land in North America, and honey bees rely on corn as a major protein source. At least 94% of the 92 million acres of corn planted across the U.S. this year will have been treated with either clothianidin or thiamethoxam (another neonicotinoid).As we head into peak corn planting season throughout the U.S. Midwest, bees will once again “get it from all sides” as they:
- fly through clothianidin-contaminated planter dust;
- gather clothianidin-laced corn pollen, which will then be fed to emerging larva;
- gather water from acutely toxic, pesticide-laced guttation droplets; and/or
- gather pollen and nectar from nearby fields where forage sources such as dandelions have taken up these persistent chemicals from soil that’s been contaminated year on year since clothianidin’s widespread introduction into corn cultivation in 2003.
Over the last 15 years, U.S. corn cultivation has gone from a crop requiring little-to-no insecticides and negligible amounts of fungicides, to a crop where the average acre is grown from seeds treated or genetically engineered to express three different insecticides (as well as a fungicide or two) before being sprayed prophylactically with RoundUp (an herbicide) and a new class of fungicides that farmers didn’t know they “needed” before the mid-2000s.
A series of marketing ploys by the pesticide industry undergird this story. It’s about time to start telling it, if for no other reason than to give lie to the oft-repeated notion that there is no alternative to farming corn in a way that poisons pollinators. We were once — not so long ago — on a very different path.
How corn farming went off the rails
In
the early 1990s, we were really good at growing corn using
bio-intensive integrated pest management (bio-IPM). In practice, that
meant crop rotations, supporting natural predators, using biocontrol
agents like ladybugs and as a last resort, using chemical controls only
after pests had been scouted for and found. During this time of peak
bio-IPM adoption, today’s common practice of blanketing corn acreage with “insurance” applications
of various pesticides without having established the need to do so
would have been unthinkable. It’s expensive to use inputs you don’t
need, and was once the mark of bad farming.Then, in the mid-to-late 1990s, GE corn and neonicotinoid (imidacloprid) seed treatments both entered the market — the two go hand-in-hand, partly by design and partly by accident. Conditions for the marketing of both products were ripe due to a combination of factors:
- regulatory pressures and insect resistance had pushed previous insecticide classes off the market, creating an opening for neonicotinoids to rapidly take over global marketshare;
- patented seeds became legally defensible, and the pesticide industry gobbled up the global seed market; and
- a variant of the corn rootworm outsmarted soy-corn rotations, driving an uptick in insecticide use around 1995-96.
... and in the space of a decade, U.S. corn acreage undergoes a ten-fold increase in average insecticide use. By 2007, the average acre of corn has more than three systemic insecticides — both Bt traits and a neonicotinoid. Compare this to the early 1990s, when only an estimated 30-35% of all corn acreage were treated with insecticides at all.
Adding fuel to the fire, in 2008 USDA’s Federal Crop Insurance Board of Directors approved reductions in crop insurance premiums for producers who plant certain Bt corn hybrids. By 2009, 40% of corn farmers interviewed said they did not have access to elite (high-yielding) non-Bt corn seed. It is by now common knowledge that conventional corn farmers have a very hard time finding seed that is not genetically engineered and treated with neonicotinoids.
Enter fungicides
In 2007, what’s left of corn IPM was further unraveled with the mass marketing of a new class of fungicides (strobilurins) for use on corn as yield “boosters.” Before this, fungicide use on corn was so uncommon that it didn’t appear in Crop Life’s 2002 National Pesticide Use Database. But in the last five years, the pesticide industry has aggressively and successfully marketed prophylactic applications of fungicides on corn as yield and growth enhancers, and use has grown dramatically as a result. This despite the fact that these fungicides work as marketed less than half the time. According to this meta-analysis of efficacy studies, only “48% of treatments resulted in a yield response greater than the economic break-even value of 6 bu/acre.”At least 94% of the 92 million U.S. acres planted in corn is treated with pesticides known to harm bees.
Back to the bees. Neonicotinoids are known to synergize with certain fungicides to increase the toxicity of the former to honey bees up to 1,000-fold, and fungicides may be key culprits in undermining beneficial bee microbiota that do things like make beebread nutritious and support immune response against gut pathogens like Nosema. Fungicide use in corn is likewise destroying beneficial fungi in many cropping systems, and driving the emergence of resistant strains.
As with insecticides and herbicides, so too with fungicide use on corn: corn farmers are stuck on a pesticide treadmill on high gear, with a pre-emptively pressed turbo charge button (as “insurance”). Among the many casualties are our honey bees who rely on corn’s abundant pollen supply.
Keeping us all tethered to the pesticide treadmill is expected behavior from the likes of Monsanto. But what boggles the mind is that all of this is being aided and abetted by a USDA that ties cheap crop insurance to planting patented Bt corn, and a Congress that refuses to tie subsidized crop insurance in the Farm Bill to common-sense conservation practices like bio-intensive IPM. Try explaining that with a waggle dance.
- Heather Pilatic's blog
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Sunday, May 6, 2012
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