Your advice assumes his comments will be a deal-breaker for his candidacy. I think that's optimistic.
Zone 5a
It's an unseasonably warm spring. These are our spring perennials.
We were able to get some garlic after we took preventative measures and cut back the scapes. Only a few of the garlic had apparent damage on them (shown below), but the total harvest was less than we recall planting.
We will dig a new bed in another part of the garden and hope for better next year. Luckily we still have a lot of last year's garlic powder to get us though and can use use cloves for some fresh eating and to plant next year's crop.
Why would they care about your opinion though? You can keep it to yourself.
We went yesterday and had a good time. It was very hot and there wasn't a lot of shade at the main stage, but we enjoyed walking around before the bands started and sitting in the shade closer to the smaller stages at the war museum.
There were food trucks and I think I paid $12 for a cider. There were plenty of portapotties. We were able to go to them between the last opener and the headliner (45 mins) with time to spare. I didn't get bit by mosquitoes all night!
We were happy to have brought water and chairs. We sat during some of the earlier performers (and watched screens) and stood for the headliner. In general people didn't really stand in front of the seated area, but there were a few. People were taking though the headliner in the standing only section which we thought was weird and annoying. Probably not that unusual at a festival where most people may not be as into a particular band.
Moving around the main stage to access the rest of the festival could be annoying and there was some crowding and pushing but overall people were chill and just having a good time. We left immediately after the encore and while it was crowded, getting onto the LRT was straight forward and there were lots of signs and staff to show the way.
Will this be the year we finally keep up with the tomatoes? Who knows!
There was some clear insect damage at the bottom of the plants so I took off most of the branches below the first set of string trellises. Hopefully removing the excess leaves will improve air flow and minimize the number of slugs/snails that make their way to the fruit.
The next step if we continue to see damage is to add copper netting around the bottom.
Our garlic patch was looking a little iffy and it turns out it's garlic moths. Bummer. These little dudes lay their eggs in the garlic leaves and stems and they eat their way into the bulbs.
Our plan is to remove the scapes and hope for the best. We have planted in the same bed two years in a row which was a mistake. We got over confident because we thought garlic is a pest-free crop that needs very little attention. Unfortunately, in our part of the world they do have pests.
We will be making a new in-ground bed in the fall to plant next year's garlic. We will likely need to buy new bulbs to plant. We may also try floating row covers to exclude the moths. I thought I bought insect netting last year, but turns out it was frost cover 🤦♀️.
We are not going to spray BK like some suggest. We did try spraying vinegar, but I think cutting away the scapes will be best. Neither of us are huge fans of scapes and we were planning on giving them away, so no major loss there. Hopefully some of the garlic will pull through! We had over 100 bulbs planted.
Here are some links I found useful. Please note I am not endorsing any of the pest control methods listed, just sharing what I found:
https://www.ontario.ca/page/leek-moth-pest-allium-crops
https://seeds.ca/d/?t=cd226e0400004203-a694088
https://onvegetables.com/2023/05/17/leek-moth/
https://www.mofga.org/resources/pest-control/leek-moth/
Here is a photo of the bed:
And photos of the damage they cause/the eggs:
Pollinators that naturally exist in the environment will do their thing. They are gathering food from the blooms and the transfer of pollen is a happy co-incidence. They are not being bred or compelled to do this, in contrast to animals who are being subjected to animal agriculture.
Exploitation exists when pollinators are bred and artificially introduced for the purpose of pollination. They are often non-native species that compete with native pollinators.
But yes, I hand pollinate a lot of things to keep help the pollination rates, most notably squashes which have a pretty short window. Many other crops I grow (tomatoes, corn) are wind pollinated or don't need pollination at all (greens, potatoes).
To answer one part of your question, the limit is on queries per minute, not the number of users. That would be harder to control. I don't think I would use an app that stopped working because it ran out of queries.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/
Lucky for me this little dude seemed to be interested in the hay today.
A principle we are trying to follow is to grow 3x what we 'need' so that when local inhabitants enjoy what we planted we don't become bitter or disappointed. We are also learning what they favor and realizing that maybe I don't get to have that many annual flowers after all 🤷🏻♀️ Next year I'll sink less effort into them.
We are also not having luck with corn this year so we will try and start them indoors and hope the seedlings are less tempting than the kernels.
Vegan gardening means adapting!
But they can't afford better wages because they need the record profits for the shareholders. The company has a fiduciary duty to the share holders, not to the employees.
You can never trust a company to do what's right for the employees, they exists to exploit their labour.
We have decent luck with tomatoes, appart from the slugs and groundhogs eating some of the fruit. Our main challenges thus far have been keeping up with pruning and trellising to help minimize the slugs and powdery mildew.
We are growing both determinate and indeterminate tomatoes this year and we will try the Florida weave with t-posts for the indeterminate, and regular basket cages for the determinates.
We feed the tomatoes with kelp or alphalfa meal and keep them mulched with straw which really helps with keeping them lush and hydrated, respectively. This year we hope to add more of our own compost as our compost pile grows. We also started some fermented greens to water with.
I'd be interested in hearing from others about what works for them! It the secret to just suck it up and be really ruthless with pruning?
I started my peas directly into raised beds in May, and they are finally beginning to show flowers. The weather was very weird this spring (cold and the very hot) and I am worried the peas will not have enough time to grow before the heat starts killing them. Fingers crossed!
Sounds like a really good plan!
We also have soil that isn't very conducive to growing. We used the same method about two years ago and are starting to see results. We still ammend the soil a bit when we plant directly, but there sure is a lot more going on in the soil now. It's super satisfying to see mushrooms popup in the wood chips!