Mulch or Compost?

Big crashing noises at 3:45 a.m. seldom bode well.  Ours is the house to the right, which you can just see if you squint real hard through the branches. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and only very minimal damage was done to the house.  It did bring down the power...

Hairy Bittercress

I visited my sister last week and she invited me to look over a bare garden bed in her backyard in which she had sown several kinds of seeds.  Being a normal sort of person who doesn’t research seedling identification, she didn’t know if what was sprouting...

Leafhoppers

The other day I was hanging out in my potato patch, just watching lady beetle larvae crawl all over the place.  I turned over a leaf and saw this: The photo isn’t very good, and it’s hard to describe what’s going on in it, but it seemed like there...

Transformation

Our yard and garden has been crawling with these tiny, alligator-y, black and orange critters. Do you know what they are? How about this? How about now? The first photo is the larval stage of the lady beetle. The second pic shows the pupa of the same. Of course, in...