Pretty gutted, had just started to harvest this year's crop. Just the cherry on top of an already shit day. Even managed to snap the half inch metal stake I put there when I first planted it in February 2021.
[Image description: view of a row of five young fruit trees planted in half wine barrels in a home garden.]
I really do, Halloween is a close second for my favorite holiday. I like to diy-ish the decorations, especially using stuff I've grown (the straw here was actually dried garlic stalks), and I'm slowly adding stuff year to year with the eventual goal of being that house.
Hah! I love how different the reactions are. Some kids seem to have no sense of fear, while I've had others straight nope out. This year I had a mom grab her kid under the arms to drag him screaming towards me (but don't worry, heard him giggling back down the driveway with a "that was scary!"), and another one shouted "now you die!" (using his flashlight as pistol) after I startled him. 😆
If you see my set up from a previous year in my other comment, one of my favorite reactions was a trio of teenage girls where one saw me approach and let out a "FUCK THAT!" and ran, with her friends on her heels. Left me standing there holding the bowl with a faint "wait come back, I've got candy..."
I go through spurts where I'm posting and commenting a bunch, then I get weary of being online and disconnect. When I am posting, it's usually to places with stuff I like to take pictures of, like !beebutts@lemmy.world.
Harder to stand up, but SO much easier to carve!
Oooh, you can try what I've done before. Leave the front door open with the interior dimly lit and her hiding in a dark room beyond. When the kids come, she steps from the darkness into the dim light, and it's a pretty good effect with a masked costume.
[Image description: a dimly lit red room, with a dark masked figure with horns standing in the doorway beside a table draped in black with a vase of dead flowers. An illusion of hands pressing through the wall is projected onto the wall beside the figure.]
This was something my dad used to do when I was a kid. Next year when the kids will remember the person in the scarecrow, it will actually be stuffed, and I'll be hiding somewhere else!
View from a little further away, my husband was hiding behind the screen door controlling a spider that dropped from above 😈
[Image description: nighttime view of the front door of a house decorated for Halloween. A scarecrow sits on the porch with a large spider hanging above. In the foreground is a dark hooded mannequin, with swirling fog.]
Was out with a bunch of fellow geologists, who all got a kick out of looking at Saturn and the moon. Was only taking pictures with my phone, and so didn't get a good shot of Saturn, but thought this one of the moon was nice.
First time ever growing radicchio, but I'm 100% keeping it in my garden from here on out, not for eating (actually was not a fan of the flavor), but because it seems to want to bloom eternally. I swear this one plant has been blooming every morning for months now, and I've never seen sweat bees in such numbers, they seem to especially love these blossoms.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17825263
[Image description: a bright green bee with pollen covered legs on a lilac flower with jagged edged petals.]
Yeah... the thought has crossed my mind, even though tomatoes are my absolute favorite thing to grow. If I knew for sure it'd really reduce the population, I could probably convince myself, but how sad would it be to have a tomatoless year just to have the mites back in full force the next. 😕
Hard to judge, as not one of my next door neighbors is interested in gardening, despite my efforts at offering seeds/seedlings/help.
I haven't gotten to really connect with any gardening groups in my area, but the handful of folks I have talked to also have problems with spider mites, though not sure if to quite such a severe degree.
That's a fair point, didn't consider that my generalists would probably also be happy snacking on my good guys. I released them along with the G. occidentalis back in May when it was much cooler, in the hopes of preempting the spider mite spread.
The N. californicus I released in mid June, and though I didn't happen to grow any corn in the garden this year, hopefully the volume of spider mites is enough to keep them well fed.
Yep, I've tried various soaps and all kinds of oils, tried regularly spraying down the leaves to keep them dust free and the humidity up, tried removing plants at the first sign of infestation, all of it seemingly futile under the literal avalanche of mites I get every summer. If I miss a few days of these preventative measures, my poor tomatoes will have leaves gone from a slight sign of damage to a fully webbed death. And it's not like my plants are water starved either, I use drip irrigation under thick mulch, so the soil stays moist even on the hottest days.
It's been really constraining on my growing season. I'm often able to get plants in the ground around mid-February and get a good harvest in May, but June/July is spent just watching all my plants die a lingering infested death. I'm in 10a, so I should easily be able to get a second summer crop in, but new seedlings planted at the end of spring seem to fare even worse than their established brethren. Hence why I've finally decided to spend the $$$ on predators, really hoping that their population establishes and tames the micro menace.
Yeah, would be nice if I were in a closed environment and could keep them from running away!
I've tried neoseiulus californicus and galendromus occidentalis, and also zelus renardii as a generalist predator. I've considered stethorus punctillum, might have to give them a shot too.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17588319
[Image description: a thicc green hornworm hanging onto the stem of a tomato plant. The hornworm is speckled with little white dots, has eyespots and angular white stripes down his side, and the namesake sharp little spike of a horn on its butt.]
[Image description: a curly-leaf kale plant in a raised bed, with voluminous radiating leaves that kinda look like the afro of said Simpson's character.]
They look pretty grown but just before I snapped this pic, one of them was begging an adult at my bird feeder, very cute to watch them flitting around.
[Image description: two small brown and white speckled finches perched on a mature sunflower that is drooping with the weight of its seed head. One of the finches is sitting upright on the neck of the sunflower, while the other is flipped upside down to get at the seeds. The whole image has grid pattern imposed on it, due to being taken through a window with a mesh screen.]
[Image description: a split photo, with the top picture showing cloves/bulbs of Elephant, Vietnamese Purple, and Nootka Rose garlic varieties about to be planted in a raised bed mulched with straw, and the bottom picture showing a few green sprouts peeking up through the straw.]
Which were delicious roasted and added to a chile verde.
[Image description: a hand holding five poblano peppers, two green and three red, in front of a pepper plant.]
I've had a few people ask me about it, and I usually get as far as "So in Star Trek, there's this alien race called the Ferengi where the women aren't allowed..." before their eyes glaze over and I see them dismissing it as some nerd thing.
[Image description: a sticker depicting Ishka from DS9 rolling up her sleeve in the classic Rosie the Riveter pose, with a speech bubble saying "The Future is Fe-male."]
I second Lorn! Dark ambient electronic sprinkled liberally with glitch elements is chef's kiss.
Also would recommended Amon Tobin. ISAM is one of my favorite albums, and Lost and Found is often the song I'll put on to introduce folks to his style.