NW Native Plants After the Freeze

After three days of below freezing, and several nights in the teens (unusual for us), the natives in the planters and in one area are doing ok. Surviving, some green left, only real sign of the freeze is the fading leaves on the salmonberry.

Here we have the highbush cranberry started last March showing leaves turning gold. Below is the fringe cup, leaves still green, beach strawberry, leaves still dark green, blue-eyed grass, oak fern & salal, barely visible but there.

Will try to take another similar shot of this one every month till May.

Here's another natives planter, with deer fern, evergreen huckleberry, a bit of sedum spathulifolium, more salal, and a cedar seedling.

Finally, here's a patch of natives, with early blue violet, salmonberry, sword fern, blue-eyed grass, sedum oreganum, bunchberry , maidenhair fern, and others.

No More Buying Cheap Salmon

Economical shopper that I am, I rarely buy salmon if its over 6.00 a lb, and I haven't asked recently where it comes from, but odds are its raised in a crowded pen on the edge of a body of salt water, mixing with the oceans. My daughter tells me what's wrong with farmed salmon. Not only does it lack much of the nutritional value of wild salmon, the farmed salmon & their diseases are moving from the farms to the open waters, directly threatening the wild species. Read more about it at Save Our Wild Salmon and Why Wild Salmon , a very informative site from Trout Unlimited. So far, I've learned: -- Its good to eat wild salmon if its caught responsibly, encouraging that fishing industry -- Not good to eat farmed salmon of any kind, shouldn't support that industry --There is no more salmon farming in Puget Sound, or anywhere in the US. It was outlawed due to disease in the fish and other factors. --Salmon is farmed on Vancouver Island, and in northern European...

Apples in September 2010

One of my three apple trees, the Libery, has been producing well this season. No spraying this year, no traps for the flying pests, and until mid-summer there were still weeds and groundcovers growing under them. Cleaned up under, put down woods chips, picking up all the dead leaves now on all three. The Johnagold apples are all still full of bugs, Spartan's were very small, some scab, a few ok eating. But the Liberty's are ok, medium size, few bad spots, and taste great. Here's the Liberty tree and one of the apples.

Convergence of Plastic Bigger than Texas

This is text from places cited - how many of the plastic bags I throw away end up here? How can there be any more debate about paper or plastic or recyclable? Great Pacific Garbage Patch In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals. The area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean. The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas. Th...

The Convergence Zone

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