Test PB Collection: FTE

A short video summarizing some of the information that was provided at the June 24th farm visit to Sano Farms in Firebaugh, CA is now available at You Tube (https://youtu.be/Qa5vVvmQjXU) or at our CASI website (http://casi.ucanr.edu/Video_updates/).

It's possible to grown many other tree crops along the coast other than avocado and citrus. When speaking of other perennial evergreens like avocado, trees that don't lose their leaves but retain a canopy year round, we want trees that can handle the occasional cold periods that happen in winter.

Do you think you have a good looking field of rice? Do you wonder how it might stack up against other fields? Well then join the 2016 UCCE Rice Yield Contest. This year we are expanding Yield Contest from Butte County to the whole Sacramento Valley.

So after five years of drought a grower told me he finally gets it. Farming avocados in Goleta with limited well water and poor quality and expensive, rationed delivery, he has finally cut out trees that were not performing well. These were wind sept trees, areas with root and crown rot.

Here's a little information on our NEW Vegetable Crops Farm Advisor Amber Vinchesi (pronounced Vincasey).

Do they ever slow down? Not much. The male European wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum), a yellow and black bee about the size of a honey bee, spends most of the day defending its "property" (food) from other visitors.

So here's this tiny praying mantis hovering over a spider's web in the bluebeard (Caryopteris clandonensis) in our pollinator garden. In the web are freshly caught prey, including a honey bee.

A bumble bee news story released today by Andy Fell of UC Davis News and Media Relations is a great example of scientific collaboration between entomologists and engineers.

The Center for Natural Lands Management (CNLM) will be acquiring 25,000 acres of mitigation land in San Benito County's Panoche Valley and will be hiring 2 full-time preserve managers.

Dear Crab Spider, Please don't eat the pollinators. You may help yourself to a mosquito, a crane fly, a lygus bug, an aphid, and a katydid, not necessarily in that order. And more than one if you like.