Free Republic

Globalisation and increased movement between countries and continents means movement of agricultural pests is becoming more common. Global trade means global pests. Credit: CSIRO __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ CSIRO scientists have confirmed the hybridisation of two of the world's major pest species, into a new and improved mega-pest. One of the pests, the cotton bollworm, is widespread in Africa, Asia and Europe and causes damage to over 100 crops, including corn, cotton, tomato and soybean. The damage and controlling the pest costs billions of dollars a year. It is extremely mobile and has developed resistance to all pesticides used against it. The other...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...

Spring just arrived, some of the Mexican poppies are starting to bloom and the alyssum that had self-seeded itself under the chairs in my outdoor seating area has been blooming for some time and so have the violets. Now I see the yellow blossoms of the Angelita daisies, so pretty. Many years ago at one of our High on the Desert Gardening and Landscaping Conferences, happening this month, I bought one of these little beauties and planted it in the front of my house. My front yard is kept very natural and wild, mostly planted with native plants or desert...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...

A newly developed tool will allow experts to map and determine whether items located on properties are inert chemical munitions. (Courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) WASHINGTON — Almost 100 of D.C.’s most expensive homes will soon be screened for remnants of chemical weapons which were test-fired during World War I, WTOP has learned. Letters have been sent to 91 homeowners in the Spring Valley neighborhood, providing details of how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will inspect their properties, as part of the decades-long cleanup of the World War I chemical weapons testing site on the grounds of American...

The US Customs and Border Patrol says it has intercepted one of the world’s most destructive pests of stored grains, cereals and seeds at two Washington-area airports this year. An agency release Thursday said agriculture specialists at Washington Dulles International Airport and Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport recently encountered the Khapra beetle....

So far, these are some of the things posted today on Free Republic that we should all worry about: 1. Global warming drowning San Francisco. 2. A big volcano erupting somewhere. 3. The poles flipping. 4. Global warming starving fish. 5. Giant canaries swooping down and grabbing people. OK, I made the canary one up. What other earth-ending problems did I miss?

They walk like chickens, they cluck like chickens, and they cost $350 a bird. Last week, a viral Washington Post story chronicled the life and times of the Bay Area's well-heeled pet chickens and their luxe digs, calling the birds "the Silicon Valley elite's latest status symbol." "Egg-laying chickens are now a trendy, eco-conscious humblebrag on par with driving a Tesla," the Post reported. The catalogue of surreal luxuries that followed would not be out of place on a reality television show: The Real Chickens of Silicon Valley. One woman, whom the Post dubbed the "chicken whisperer," offers her consultation...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...

Police arrested a tomato grower in Aichi Prefecture on Thursday on suspicion of stealing about 160 Chinese cabbages from a nearby field, as the price of the leafy vegetable has remained high in the country since late last year. Ikuo Shiono, 40, is suspected of taking Chinese cabbages worth ¥80,000 ($750) on Jan. 29 and 30 from a field in the city of Toyohashi. According to the police Shiono has admitted to the allegation, saying he thought he could sell the produce at a high price. He also said he was involved in three other Chinese cabbage thefts in the...

I’ve been missing the vast amount of information on prepping, survival, camping, simple cooking, the old ways of doing just about everything – all the things nw_arizona_granny knew so much about and shared with us, along with numerous other posters with a vast array of skills and knowledge. We have our various related-threads here, a recipe thread, a gardening thread, and even a prepper thread. They are all great and I don’t mean to take anything away from those and the hard work their owners put in. But I was missing a place to talk about ALL those things, to...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...

Have you heard of “bird feeder fight club”? If not, that’s probably because I just made it up. But it totally could be a real thing, according to scientists using Cornell’s vast Project FeederWatch data set. Feeder Watch is one of several bird related citizen science projects managed by Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, which also include eBird and Nest Watch. More on those projects another time, but I will say that if you are not using eBird yet, you should be. The brilliance of these projects is that they harness the collective observational power of hundreds of thousands of...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...

he Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...

You think your job is a grind? Try working at Whole Foods, which is apparently a pretty tough place to clock in every day. “I wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares,” an anonymous staffer told Business Insider, which spoke to 27 current and former workers. “The stress has created such a tense working environment. Seeing someone cry at work is becoming normal.” Crying? There’s no crying in supermarkets! Seriously: What’s the problem? Seems the Austin, Texas-based chain, which was bought by Amazon last summer, has initiated a new inventory system called order to shelf (OTS) that...

The Cretaceous arachnid Chimerarachne yingi was found trapped in amber after 100 million years. Credit: University of Kansas ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ An extraordinary new species of arachnid, resembling a spider with a tail, has been discovered in amber from Myanmar (formerly Burma), of mid-Cretaceous age, around 100 million years ago. The finding is described in a paper appearing Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution by an international team including Paul Selden of the Paleontological Institute and Department of Geology at the University of Kansas and colleagues from China, Germany, Virginia and the United Kingdom. "There's been a lot of amber being produced...

he Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...