Believe it or not, I’d never been butt-dialed before, although my wife has so I knew what it was. Still, I was unprepared. When I answered my cell phone “This is Bob,” I heard a light, muffled almost-nothing in response. “Hello?” I asked, listening harder. It was faint, but unmistakable: I heard the gentle cluck-clucking [...]
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Fort Bend County, in which I live, is on the edge between the Houston Suburban Infestation and the Texas Outback. Thus you wouldn’t think it would be so difficult to find someone in the Outback portion selling fresh eggs from yard chickens. But you’d be wrong. It’s been two years since I had a good [...]
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Back in April I started noticing some sort of webbing covering a portion of a large branch on our big turkey fig tree. Over the weeks I became somewhat alarmed as the webbing spread, covering the branch back to its juncture with a main trunk, and out toward the leaves at the other end. Then [...]
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Nothing focuses the mind quite so vividly as the odor of a spoiled dead rat obviously only a few feet away yet completely hidden from view with you there in the crawl space beneath the petrified beams of a 96-year-old house. The smell hits you in the face, and you’re certain that you’ve just accidentally [...]
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One of the worst pests I encounter on a regular basis is Helicoverpa zea, the tomato fruitworm, who also damages other crops under the name corn earworm and cotton bollworm. It all starts when a rather plain brown moth uses the cover of night to lay tiny eggs on the leaves of a tomato plant. [...]
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As sure as the mockingbirds and cardinals will make mincemeat of my tomatoes if I don’t drape them in bird netting, the snakes will come entangle themselves inextricably if I do. Yesterday morning I hung netting on some more of the tomato plants in the back garden, as the fruit had begun to color. This [...]
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I hate bird netting, with good reason, but until I am able to frame my gardens inside hoop houses, the nets must come out. I wrapped several tomato plants in the nets yesterday, after finding three pecked fruits – one barely even yellow let alone ripe red. In the past, I’ve attempted to wrap the [...]
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| Today | Thursday |
|---|---|
 Mostly Cloudy 79°/63° |  Chance of a Thunderstorm 82°/57° |
Bad Food Recalls: