proper pesticide application

In this photo Lt. John Pike of the police force of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis demon­strates the proper way to apply pes­ti­cides and fungi­cides in your gar­den. The lieutenant’s top tips:

  • Wear gloves! The stuff is gross. Keep it off your hands.
  • Wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts. You don’t want the nasty stuff on you!
  • Pick a day with lit­tle or no wind. You want to con­trol exactly where the poi­son goes.
  • Apply from the dis­tance rec­om­mended by the man­u­fac­turer. The prod­uct label should tell you. Too close, you waste mate­r­ial. Too far, you risk inef­fec­tive cov­er­age and your treat­ment won’t have the desired effect.
  • Wear eye pro­tec­tion. I know, I know. I don’t have the visor down in the photo. Silly me. Don’t do as I do, just do as I say!

The riot-gear hel­met is entirely optional, but a respirator–or at least a mask–is a really good idea. Happy spraying!

For other par­o­dies of last Friday’s UC Davis pep­per spray inci­dent check out:
[ tum­blr ]
[ Huff­in­g­ton Post ]
[ The New York Times ]

And why stop there? Invite Lt. Pike over to tomorrow’s Thanks­giv­ing pic­tures! Entice him into your vaca­tion pic­tures with your ex! And what bet­ter way to improve those musty fam­ily pic­tures with the sib­lings you’re not sure you’re really related to?

November 23 2011 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: • • • • • • | 8 Comments »

lettuce make art

head-of-lettuce

A woman in my office brought in a cou­ple flats of let­tuces that her father had grown. Every few months the father’s gar­den gets to that exu­ber­ant point where there’s no way you can begin to eat every­thing it pro­duces. What bet­ter thing to do with it than share?

lettuce-closeup

I brought home a cou­ple heads that are mak­ing their way into sal­ads. Peo­ple rave about the dif­fer­ence between home-grown and store-bought toma­toes, but let­tuce can show sim­i­lar dif­fer­ences. The thick outer stems in the sal­ads had a del­i­cate crunch with­out the bit­ter­ness that you often encounter.

Talk­ing to my coworker she was say­ing how her father was get­ting dis­tressed with the new water­ing restric­tions. Appar­ently he was used to water­ing his veg­eta­bles every day. She was try­ing to assure him that cut­ting back to every other day prob­a­bly wouldn’t make much dif­fer­ence, even in midsummer.

morphed-lettuce

In addi­tion to salad I made this abstrac­tion using another closeup of the let­tuce as a source. This employs the much-overused Find Edges fil­ter in Pho­to­shop, in com­bi­na­tion with a cou­ple of other con­trols. I tried to keep just a hint of the let­tuce to credit the bio­log­i­cal source of the image. It’s a desk­top doo­dle at this point, and I’m not sure I’ll do any­thing with it.

So, is this what they call play­ing with your food?

July 19 2009 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: • | 1 Comment »