Test PB Collection: FTE

Remember the news published several years ago about a scientist who discovered a two-inch-long bat with a tongue longer than its body, so long that it had to tuck it into its rib cage?

You're sitting in your back yard or at a park and a mosquito bites you. You're the host whether you like it or not. You just hope that this isn't an infected mosquito that can transmit West Nile virus (WNV).

Sometimes you get lucky. While watching floral visitors foraging last week in our rock purslane (Calandrinia grandiflora), we noticed a tiny black bee, something we'd never seen before.

Introduction Weed seed are the means by which annual weeds reproduce and disperse. The seed buried in the soil is referred to as the seedbank. Most seed in the soil seedbank were produced in the same field or greenhouse.

My late father, who called me "Katydid," loved poetry. Decades after he passed, a cousin gave me a set of his books from his childhood home. One was "The Early Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes," published in 1899 by T. Y. Crowell and Company. In it is a poem, "To an Insect," and it's about katydids.

Conservation Agriculture Systems Innovation (CASI) is pleased to sponsor interactive conferences on conservation agriculture and controlled traffic farming at four locations in the Central Valley on Aug. 28, 29 and 30.

A brief update here on recent progress and implementation activities related to our 2012 overhead / drip cotton and tomato fields. 2012 Tomatoes The processing tomato variety N6397 was transplanted on April 30. Virtually daily crop growth and development. Sampling is now being done.

It was a pomegranate kind of day. Red, bright and wonderful. The papery-thin reddish blossoms in our yard draw both beneficial and pestiferous insects. Honey bees are there for the pollen and nectar; ladybugs are there for the pesky aphids.

The honor is so well deserved.

Dry root rot has been a problem in citrus orchards for many years. Although generally a problem in coastal and northern California counties it has been reported in other citrus producing areas of the state.