Spring’s optimistic orderly plantings
Zinnias border
Bedded Petunias
Great show!
Bloomed, and blooming still
Summer colors
Among the disorderly volunteers
Rangy and purple
Summer heat hammered the garden
Grasses seethe like a wave
Breaking across the space
Drowning the petunias
Fading, chaos
Autumn’s optimistic seeds
In the late Summer shadows
Of the evergreens
Our neighborhood is home to plenty of mosquitos, including a wide variety of types. So this year we’ve set up some buckets outside, which we keep about a third full with water along with a handful of grass clippings. Nice and stagnant, funky and swampy. Of course this is a perfect place for mosquitos to lay their eggs, and for the larvae to grow into adults! Madness, you must be thinking.
The trick is that we also add “Mosquito Dunks” that contain a variety of BT; the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. This particular strain of BT attacks the mosquito larvae, and very little else. So the buckets become a dead end for mosquitos.
Our house also features a foundation drainage system that has a sump that usually has standing water, so we toss a bit of a dunk in there too.
A mosquito breeding pit.
As experiments go, this one is rather poor, for having no control to compare against. But it does seem like the mosquitos are less than they could be, and we are able to sit outside and not be immediately carried off by a cloud of the tiny monsters. The buckets definitely attract the interest of egg laying adults, and one can spot their eggs on the surface of the water. But there is no sign of active larvae. So we’ll call it a win.
This approach does require a bit of a commitment, since the dunks call for renewal about every month, and more often if we get a lot of rain. So this is not a set-it-and-forget-it system; if we neglect to keep up with the buckets then we will indeed have a mosquito festival.
Next year we’ll probably do this again, though we may also look into the new adult mosquito traps that promise to remove the insects that out and actively looking for a blood meal.
So these are words, and when we get to the period, these words form a sentence. Zap! Just like that. A peroid? Really? Words? Plural? Well…
OK Pete, don’t get distracted by content quite yet, you’ve still got some setup to do on this site.
Now we have a paragraph, similar to the one before, except this one has different words, thus different sentences.
Can I interest you in a pepperoni rollup?
