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We love growing dry peas!  Dry peas are such a great staple food for the winter months, they're relatively easy to grow and clean, and many varieties- such a 'Wild Pea of Umbria' - don't require much in the way of fertilizer.  Eat them split or whole, cooked in soups or stews.   One of the few difficulties with growing a successful dry pea crop is pea weevils.  Adult pea weevils feed on pollen in the pea flowers. They mate and lay their eggs on the developing pea pod.  Larva emerge from the eggs and bore into the pod and feed on the...

Mice and voles eat seeds and newly germinated seedlings.  The especially love those meaty seeds like peas, beans, corn, and squash.  If you've planted seeds that just aren't coming up in the timeframe you expect, dig around where you planted them to see if they're even still there.  If they're not there, or if new seedlings have been nipped off as if cut by scissors, the culprit could be mice or voles. Rodents are so tricky!  Farms across the country have been reporting larger mice and vole populations than usual.  We've had a lot more vole damage at our farm too,...

Its the time of year that queen bumblebees are emerging from their over-wintering hiding places to find a spot to hatch the season's colony in.  Bumblebees are magical and important garden visitors.  We want to encourage them as much as we can to show up in our garden.  Providing nesting sites is one excellent way to do this.  For nesting sites they look for warm, dry, shoebox-sized cavities in the ground.  Old rodent nests or tunnels, tree hollows near the ground, or areas of grass that have grown dense and fallen over all make excellent natural sites for the bumblebee's nest.  If you...

Native wildflowers like Bee Balm, Showy Milkweed, Blue Flax, Blanketflower, and Yarrow benefit from a period of cold stratification prior to planting.  Cold stratification is basically giving your seeds exposure to a false winter.  Most plants evolved away from accidentally germinating in the middle of the winter by requiring a certain number of days exposed to low temperatures before they will sprout.  Our vegetable crops don't require this period of cold simply because thousands of years of gardeners have bred this trait out of them!  But our native plants still like to know they've been through the worst of it...

Earwigs, Dermaptera, are perhaps more well-known for their freakiness than for their capacity to be destructive in the garden- but trust me, they are both.  These lovers of water in the desert are common in dry climates where water is present- i.e. irrigated gardens and farms.  In fact, they look like miniature aquatic crawdads.  They are nocturnal so you may not even know you have them until you go out with your headlamp and see them feeding on tender corn silks, the leaves of young fruit trees, or zinnia leaves and petals.  Luckily the tell-tale signs of earwig damage are easy...