Archive Nut, Prune and Olive Programs

There's an old saying applicable to child-rearing: "First you give them roots, and then you give them wings." Roots. Wings. Roots to ground them, to love them unconditionally. And wings for them to lift off and launch new beginnings.

Large Livestock Super-Duper Field Day! Know Your Bees?

When UC Regents scholar Heather Wilson, a junior specialist in the Frank Zalom lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, entered the 2011 Entomological Society of America's video contest, she drew a lot of fans--and a couple of marriage proposals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, called a weed a plant whose virtues that have not yet been discovered. I disagree, and yet generally speaking he is correct, what we call a weed is in the eye of the beholder, a plant that it is not helpful, useful or wanted.

Automated lettuce thinners that use a spray mechanism to remove unwanted lettuce plants and weeds have been widely adopted in the Salinas Valley and desert production districts.

Grow Rice? Help Birds! Rice provides livelihoods and food for people and places to rest and feed for many birds, too. Small changes to field management can increase the value of rice fields for the birds that use it.

This is only somewhat weed-related... just an excuse to post some photos of fossil tomatillos, from the days when Africa and South America formed the single continent Gondwanaland.

There's been a lot of avocado and citrus planting going on and this is a good time for a reminder about how to dig a hole. This is by our colleague Jim Downer in Ventura County, Horticulture Advisor and also past president of the International Society of Arboriculture, Western Chapter.

Two icons, the American flag and the monarch butterfly, are flying high today. The American flag, or "Old Glory," symbolizes our democracy. The 13 stripes represent the 13 colonies that declared--and won--independence from Great Britain. The 50 stars in the field of blue denote our 50 states.

What a delight to see. We strolled through milkweed patches in the UC Davis Arboretum Thursday noon and saw them. Monarchs! The monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) are returning from their coastal California overwintering sites. And we're getting new generations.