Bug Patrol

There are any number of ways to get rid of garden pests. There are many predators that munch on garden eaters but there is another way to get rid of pests: turn them into eggs. Yes. Chickens love almost anything that crawls, creeps or flies around. They are true omnivores.

And while they're munching the bugs they can also replace your garbage disposer. Chickens will eat, in my experience, almost any kitchen food waste you can name except citrus peels. Broccoli stems pose a challenge so I  chop those for the birds. Corn cobs, melon rinds, vegetable trimmings and meat scraps will vanish almost as if by magic.

Once again I have chickens on my place. They are a little young to allow them to roam at will but they are learning that grasshoppers are, shudder, quite tasty. 

If you can put a carbon-rich litter in your chicken pen, and especially under the roosting area, you'll get some amazing compost as chicken droppings are high in nitrogen. The presence of a high-carbon litter will reduce odor and fly problems. Fly larvae don't stand a chance if the birds can get under the roose to scratch; they'll do the mixing and digging for you.

It's a winning situation for you and your garden and these funny birds are better entertainment than television! 

Free

Some things are free and some things are free. That is not exactly a redundant statement because there are two complementary meanings of “free.”

Both meanings of free are relevant to gardening and computing. Free as in “free of cost” is one meaning; the other is free as in liberty. Open pollinated heirloom seeds are free as in liberty; there is no ownership of the genetics. You can grow these seeds and save your seed from year to year. Try that with “licensed” seed from a big ag company and you may be paying legal bills forever. Open source software is also “liberated” because you can use and modify it to meet your needs. Try that with software from Some Big Company and you will, potentially, have big legal bills.

We hear, frequently, “There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.” That may be true about lunch but high-quality software can be, and often is, free as in “free lunch.” Most open source software is free of cost, and because it is open source, it is, by definition, free in the liberated sense – often referred to as “free as in speech.”

There are still a few seed companies that have not been gobbled up by big ag and these companies still sell open pollinated seed. Free as in “free lunch” seeds are available from some seed savers; trading of seed is encouraged.

These ideas and some links will be in a future post.

Good Plants for Good Bugs

In order to support your collection of beneficial insects in your garden you have to provide them with habitat and, for the adults that need nectar and pollen, a food source. Since many of the wasps and flies are small you want plants whose flowers are small but abundant.

The Apiaceae, a large family that includes carrots, dill, fennel, Queen Anne's lace, parsnips and many others, has large flower heads composed of many very small flowers. Most of the predatory wasps and flies will be attracted to these plants as they are rich sources of nectar with nice places to land. It is a large family of plants with over 3000 species. 

The Asteracea (formerly the Compositae) is the largest family of flowering plants. It includes sunflowers, thistles, lettuce, chamomile, tarragon and many others. These plants provide pollen and nectar for beneficial insects. The yellow flower in the picture below is very common here in the Rio Grande Valley; it is frequented by many small insects.

 

The Allium family, including edible garlic and onions, provides a lot of goodness for the good insects. The large purplish flower in the picture is elephant garlic. It is usually covered with butterflies, little wasps and flies but there was too much wind today. Honey bees also like these flowers if here is nothing else blooming. The while allium is an onion. 


The mint family, Lamiaceae or Labiatae, includes many of our culinary herbs and beneficial insects love these plants; the flowers are small and very rich in nectar. You will encourage syrphid flies, tachinid flies and big-eyed bugs. Our sage is still blooming, its purple flowers attract many bees when it is not windy. 


This is a start on insectary plants. I will cover more good plants for good bugs in another post. The pictures in this post were taken in our garden.

Open Source Graphics Programs

Graphics programs come in two general kinds: bitmap and vector. A bitmap image is made of a series of dots – much like the color images in magazines. A grid, like graph paper, is filled pixel by pixel with colors to render the image.

Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygons, which are all based upon mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics. Programs such as Corel DRAW, Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape are vector drawing programs.

The GIMP is a powerful bitmap editor: it can do almost everything that the very expensive commercial programs can do and your checkbook will not be left in shock. The GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is free to use and free to alter. If you are editing images from your digital camera The GIMP will give you the option to preserve the EXIF data from your camera. It has extensive help files available in a separate download and is available for all major platforms and in several languages. Verious plugins are available to extend this already powerful program. 

Inkscape is a vector drawing program that uses the Scalable Vector Graphics (SGV) file format. It can do many of the same things that the big commercial programs can do. It is open source and free to use. Open source clip art is available for use with Inkscape or any other program that uses the SGV file format.

Open Office, discussed in my previous open source post, has a good vector graphics program. It is not quite as versatile as Inkscape but it is improving all the time. 

This is only a start as there are many great programs available. In my next open source post I'll take a look at Linux, the free operating system

Beneficial Insects Part 2

This is the second post of several on the benefits that insects can bring to your garden. 

There are many varieties of ground beetles. Adults and larvae are predators feeding on other insects. A full discussion of these interesting critters is beyond the scope of this post. More information is available at the Ohio State University Extension, at the University of Kentucky Entomology Department  and at BugGuide.Net. Garden litter and debris are necessary for these beetles.

Robber flies are large flies that prey on a variety of garden pests and, unfortunately, occasionaly on bees. Use caution in handling them as the larger varieties can give you a nasty and painful bite. The larvae live in the soil and are probably carniverous. 

Flower flies, also known as hover flies, are pollinators as adults, they feed on nectar and pollen. The larvae eat aphids, mealybugs, scale and leafhoppers. Buckwheat, candytuft, chicory and many other plants support these useful flies.

Lacewings, adults and larvae, feast on aphids, larvae and eggs of other insects. They like to hang out with carrots, oleander, tree of heaven and wild lettuce. 

The preying mantis is a well-known predator of the garden. They will eat almost anything including each other. If they can catch them large adukts will take small toads, salamanders or shrews. If given the opportunity they will also bite fingers. Cosmos and blackberry or raspberry brambles are favored by these insects but they are not fussy.

Tachnid flies are pollinators as adults; they like to feed on buckwheat, coriander, fennel and white clover. The larvae feed on, or rather in, the bodies of beetles. bugs, sawflies and caterpillars. 

There are more bugs to come as well as discussion of the plants they'll look for.

Open Source Office Applications

There are a lot of very useful open source software products available for the Windows platform. You do not need to spend hundreds of dollars to get your work accomplished. These programs are free to use and free to alter.

Open Office has just about everything an office might need in the way of software. It contains a word processor (this post is being typed in Open Office), a spreadsheet, presentation maker, vector drawing program, and a database. It is provided under the LGPL (Lesser General Public License). You can download it free or order CD-ROMs. Open Office support the file formats of the big office suite. It feels a different from the big office product but it will do, except email, all that the competition can do and it will not leave a gaping hole in your budget. 

Open Office does not have an email client but there are some good ones available. If you need a calendar and all the bells and whistles of the big one you might want to try Evolution Email from the Gnome Project. It has spam filters, a good search feature, calendar and multiple account support. It is highly resistant to viruses. 

Another great email client is Thunderbird from Mozilla. It is safe, secure and fast. If you need a feature that does not come in the install package there are many plugins that extend the program. You can tag messages and save searches.

If you do not need a full office suite but just want a light-weight word processor you should look at AbiWord. It is also free to use, free to alter and is released under the GNU General Public License. Plugins and tools are available for importing and exporting various file types.

If you need a good spreadsheet Gnumeric is definitely worth a look. It is free, fast and accurate; it is released under the GNU General Public License. Files from other spreadsheet programs can be imported. It is available for all major operating systems.   

A lot of the fun of open source software is looking at all the programs that are available. In my next post on open source I'll look at some photo editing software. Until then, you can browse Sourceforge, Freshmeat and The Open Disc.

Beneficial Insects Part 1

When pests are eating your garden you may be tempted to fire up the sprayer and lay waste to the invading hordes. Please don't. There are many good insects that will be quite happy to help you by eating the pests. Birds, lizards, toads, salamanders, frogs and shrews will also help if they have habitat -- but that is another post.

Ladybugs (or ladybeetles) may be the best known of our predators. These little orange and black eating machines are big trouble for aphids, mealy bugs and scale insects. The larvae look a little like gray dragons and are voracious feeders. Ladybugs like alfalfa, angelica, marigolds and ragweed, among other plants.

Assassin bugs eat Mexican bean beetles, caterpillars, Colorado potato beetle, leaf hoppers and occasionally a honeybee. They will bite fingers! Alfalfa, Mexican tea, ragweed and carrots are their favored plants.

The big-eyed bug is a small (1/4 inch long) critter with an appetite for leafhoppers, blister beetles, aphids and spider mites. Adults and nymphs are carnivorous. They overwinter in garden litter. Alfalfa, carrots and oleander plants will attract them.

Adult Braconid wasps feed on nectar from Apiaceae (carrot family), and the Asteraceae (daisy family). The adult wasp lays her eggs in the bodies of host insects. The larvae feed on the body of that insect and pupate on the outside. Host insects include aphids, beetles and caterpillars. 

Ichneumon wasps lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars or in places where their grubs can attack a suitable host. The larvae eat the host which usually dies after the wasp pupates and eats its way out of the host. Alfalfa, tree of heaven, rue, fennel and oleander are among their preferred plants. 

These are just a few of the insects that can help you keep more of your garden's goodness for yourself. Invest in some of their favorite plants and they'll be around to eat the pests for you.  If you go after the pests with that sprayer you will be killing the good along with the pests. 

Open Source - the Basics

Open source (also known as free software) is a quickly growing force in computing. Open source, once the only way in which programs were written and distributed, became less well known as the PC market grew into a multibillion dollar industry. Open source software is developed by those that actually use the software, every new user potentially becomes a developer, distributor and advertiser.

How does this work? Computer programs start with the creation of source code using a programming language. These special languages are different from human languages; they make it easier for humans to communicate with the computer hardware. If not for programming languages, programmers would have to individually manipulate the switches using a series of on and off signals, which very quickly becomes impractical when dealing with tens of millions of switches in a modern desktop computer. Once the programmer has implemented all the features the program needs, it's compiled, becoming a string of ones and zeroes for the computer to read. The compiling process converts the human readable programming language source implemented all the features the program needs, it's compiled.

The compiling process converts the human readable programming language source code into a binary file that computers can read. Once the program has been converted to binary, changing it is no longer practical. If there are features you'd like to add (or remove), or errors (bugs) you'd like to fix, you need to modify the original source code and recompile the program to a binary. Access to the source code allows you complete freedom over the computer program. You can reuse it in other projects, you can share it with others. Compare this with open pollinated (OP) seed: you can save OP seed from year to year, you can share them with others. You truly own both open pollinated seed and open source software. Once obtained and properly maintained, they are yours as long as you don't destroy them.

Open source computer programs have another important benefit, the open nature allows rapid improvement and development by interested parties. Users of the software can easily become stakeholders providing or suggesting improvements to the program, or adapting the code to their specific requirements. This creates a dynamic culture that quickly and more fully responds to any computing environment. Since most open source code can be easily shared, this results in intellectual cross-pollination, speeding development and adaptation. As profits are not necessarily a driving consideration, small niches can be filled, providing benefits to a limited number of users. Open source allows the code to be adapted to unusual computing environments such as unusual or "obsolete" computer hardware or system configurations.

Closed source, proprietary code is any code which doesn't allow you access to the source code. This is similar to hybrid seeds, or patented varieties with restrictive licenses which limit your rights to save or share seeds. Neither are sustainable in the long term, both are methods used by abusive corporations with near monopoly control.

Organic Gardening -- The Basics

So what is organic gardening anyway? At its simplest, it is gardening without using any synthetic fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides. The soil is improved by the addition of organic material. Weeds and bugs are controlled without harsh synthetic chemicals. 

The gardener strives to make the garden a compete and balanced ecosystem where no one pest, diesase or weed can take over. Healthy soil is the base of the garden. If you feed the soil the soil will feed the plants.

Organic material used to enrich the soil can be any sort of decaying plant matter: leaves, grass clippings, tree and shrub trimmings, kitchen waste. Animal manure is a great addidion to compost; it provides a wealth of nutrients for the soil. Compost can be worked into the soil or used as a mulch on top of the soil. 

Many insects are beneficial to the garden; some pollinate the flowers so you will have fruits, some are predators on insects that eat your plants. Poisonous sprays kill not only the pests but the beneficial insects also.

Frogs, toads, lizards and birds are some of nature's de-bugging squad. Avoiding the use of poisons helps these animals to thrive and eat the bugs that are bugging you.

Our Purpose

It seems natural to use organic and sustainable gardening if you want to have a long-term source of healthy food.  Heirloom plant varieties give more flavor and probably more nutrition than the mass-market hybrids. Corn should taste like corn not like sugar.

Open source software is a logical companion to organic gardening using open pollinated varieties.  Both free us from dependence on large, impersonal and greedy corporations who are more interested in extracting money from us than in providing quality products.