TOMATO TIPS

If you are starting your first tomato garden, or are an old pro at it, there are always tips that can make your enterprise easier, and more successful. Following are 5 tomato growing tips that I found make the greatest difference in the health of your plants. When buying tomato plants always look for plants that have not begun to flower or fruit, that have straight sturdy stems and dark leaves. Also, give them time to harden off before you plant them. This will avoid any shock transplanting will have on them. Wait until the threat of frost has past.

It is important to always plant tomatoes as deep as possible. Because tomatoes can grow roots all along their stem, you can either bury them up to the top leaves, or plant them horizontally. The extra roots that will grow will make your tomato stronger. Staking your tomato plants is very important. Since tomatoes are a vine they will not grow upright on their own. Having the vines lay on the ground will make them more prone to insect attacks and disease problems. Do not skimp on the stakes, as your plants will get tall and heavy. You should stake the tomatoes when you plant in order that you don’t damage their roots. Maintenance of your tomato plants is critical. Watering your plants regularly will avoid splitting of the tomatoes, as well as blossom drop. As your tomato fruit begins to ripen you can reduce the amount you are watering. By reducing your watering at the fruiting stage your tomatoes will concentrate sugars in the fruit. Don’t hold back to much on the water though because the plant will stress and wilt. If the plant becomes stressed it can cause it to drop blossoms and possibly it’s fruit.

Always prune off any suckers that are growing between the branches. These only use energy that could be going into growing bigger plants. Removing some of the leaves will help the fruit ripen by allowing the sun to reach it. Just make sure that you don’t remove to many leaves. The leaves are what provide sugars for the roots and fruit, if you remove to many your tomatoes will suffer. If you love tomatoes, caring and nurturing your plants will give you higher yields of fruit and make your tomato garden the envy of the neighborhood! These are just a few tomato growing tips I hope will help you have your best tomato crop ever.

Reasons to Save Tree

• Trees are Effective Sound Barriers: Trees are as effective as stonewalls in stopping sound. They muffle urban noise almost as effectively as stonewalls. Trees, planted at strategic points in a neighbourhood or around your house, can mitigate major noises from crowded roads, railway stations and airports.
• Trees Produce Oxygen: A mature leafy tree, in a few months, produces as much oxygen as that required by 10 people for one year.
• Trees become dustbins for harmful gases: a tree absorbs and locks away carbon dioxide, and other harmful gases which warm the environment. An urban forest is a carbon storage area that can lock up as much carbon.
• Trees Shade and Cool: Shade from trees reduces the need for fan, coolers and air conditioning in summer. Studies have shown that parts of cities without cooling shade from trees can literally be "heated islands," with temperatures as much as 4-6 degrees Celsius higher than surrounding areas. In winter, trees break the force of winter winds.
• Trees Act as Windbreaks: trees break the force of the wind. This protects houses, farmland and vegetation.
• Trees Fight Soil Erosion: Trees fight soil erosion, conserve rainwater, and reduce water runoff and sediment deposit after storms.
• Trees help in lowering the dust levels and pollution levels in the cities.
• Trees decrease respiratory problems: Children staying in areas and localities with trees have much less breathing problems that children staying in localities which have no trees.

Nature Conservation

Nature conservation issues, the welfare of the natural world and the wildlife, plants, and animals that we share this planet with are connected to our everyday lives in many different ways. Yet modern society is set up in such a way that we are often not aware of this reality.

For the most part in the Western world, our technologically advanced lifestyles alienate and disconnect us from our natural environment. We often do not know where the food we eat comes from or how it is grown. We are not aware of how the earth’s weather patterns, forests, and oceans have an impact on things we take for granted, such as the water we drink, and the air we breathe. We are so plugged into the latest technologies that we have forgotten that we are a part of the earth and its living ecosystem, not outside of it or separate from it.
The truth is that the state of our planet has an impact on human survival, global and local economies, community life, and human health and well-being. Yet many of our natural resources are at risk more than ever before.
Most of us are already aware that pandas and tigers and polar bears are threatened. We know that forests and natural habitat areas are vanishing due to human encroachment, development, and urban sprawl. We know about the threat of global warming. Yet, amazingly, the situation is a lot deeper and more serious than most of us probably realize. The good news is that with awareness and nature conservation efforts, we can reverse the situation if we get involved.

This section gives an overview of nature conservation issues and the status of the planet in the main areas which are threatened: wildlife, forests, oceans, and wetlands. You will also find a list of different conservation organizations to support in each category and ways in which we can all help...and be a part of the solution.

Through the jungle

The 5km walk through the semi-virgin forest reserve proved to be a lot more challenging than any one of us had expected.
The three-hour hike was no piece of cake as we had to continuously trudge up steep hills and down slippery slopes, manoeuvre around thick, snake-like buttress roots of the gigantic Dipterocarp trees, cross rivers by walking on shaky fallen tree trunks and be constantly vigilant of where we plant our feet on for muddy ground.
The air smelled of a potent mixture of insect repellents, lotions and other chemicals at the start of the journey, but still, all of that was no match for the little inhabitants of the jungle. Shrieks and squeals were heard as the blood-sucking creatures were discovered in the most unexpected of places on the bodies of the BRATs.
So, it isn’t a surprise to hear the sigh of relief on everyone’s face when the specks of red tiles of the roof from the building we were headed towards were sighted among the green of the forest.
Yet, the journey ended with a note of triumph and left a sense of achievement in everyone as 31 young mostly-urban teenagers had successfully undertaken the challenges and the trials posed by the jungle and its inhabitants ... and survived!
There is more than what meets the eye with the journey through the forest, though. Personally, I feel that it was a great way for us to learn new things about ourselves.
In the course of our trek, we passed many big trees which tops seem to be out of sight no matter how hard we craned our necks and squinted to try to see it. Even though most of the time my eyes were fixed on the ground trying to avoid the hungry clutches of the leeches, I couldn’t help but look in awe when I stood between the roots of a huge tree. The roots itself was as tall as me.
Together with the luminous mossy-green glow of the tree as the rays of sunshine shone on it through the layers of the canopies, they made me see the wonders of the rainforest.
The journey also forced us to push ourselves and it was a trying test of our strength, both physically and mentally. The temptations to just give up on the journey was great, when we were drenched in sweat and our muscles felt as if they weighed heavier than our backpacks.

Characteristics of a bottomland hardwood forest under greentree reservoir management in East Central Arkansas

Greentree réservoirs sont une option viable pour la création de l'habitat et la chasse des possibilités de migration de la sauvagine. Malheureusement, l'inondation annuelle prolongés souvent associés à la gestion des réservoirs de Greentree peut être très préjudiciable à la plupart des espèces d'arbres souhaitable dans ces stands. Au cours de l'été 2004, un total de 327 plot centers ont été créés dans un réservoir de Greentree en vertu d'un régime annuel des inondations. À chaque parcelle center, une parcelle de conception imbriqué a été utilisé pour établir une 1/5-acre overstory parcelle, une parcelle 1/40-acre midstory, 1/100-acre et une sous-intrigue. Notre objectif était de caractériser la composition de multiplication végétative et l'abondance des bas-fonds dans un stand de bois qui avait été dans le cadre d'un régime d'inondation annuelle de plus de 50 ans. Les résultats indiquent que overcup chêne est dominant dans les trois couches verticales tandis que le plus souhaitable saule chêne commun est que dans le overstory.

Tips to Keep Your Attic Cool

Don't Let Your Roof Take the Heat

By Marc Richmond-Powers, City of Austin Green Building Program
It's a hot and humid Austin summer day. You head for the indoors and some relief from your trusty air conditioning (A/C) system. Three hours later, you're slightly cooler, but you're wondering why your A/C unit hasn't shut off yet. Here's why: all day long, solar radiation has been heating up your home through the windows, walls, doors and especially the roof. Your attic temperature can easily reach over 140 degrees. That heat up there is working its way through your meager attic insulation into your home and through the A/C ductwork, located in your attic, into your cooling system. Your A/C system has to fight that added heat to change all that hot air in your home into cool air.

You can install solar screens for the windows, porches around the house for shade, and plant trees around the home, but what do you do about the roof which accounts for a third of all the heat build-up of your house?

Here are a few options:
Ventilate your attic with ridge and soffit vents. Vents are louvers, grills, or screen materials which allow passage or air through them. They are typically installed along the top peak (ridge) of your roof, at the top of the side wall (gable), and on the underside of your roof overhang (soffit). Ventilation moves air through your attic by force of wind or by heat rising through natural convection. This leaves cooler air sitting on top of the insulation on the attic floor. Ventilation also has the ability to remove humidity which has built up in your attic and which reduces the effectiveness of your insulation. It is often best to hire a contractor to install these.

Insulate your attic floor to R-30. R-30 is roughly a10 inch thick layer of insulation material above your ceiling. This is a job for any handy homeowner or it could be handed over to a contractor. When installing the insulation, be careful not to block your vents.

Install a radiant barrier between your roof and your attic insulation. A radiant barrier is an aluminum foil material which prevents 95 percent of the heat that radiates from your roof from reaching the insulation on your attic floor. It comes in a roll and is stapled to the underside of your roof rafters. Radiant barriers are sold in most building material supply centers and can be easily installed by a homeowner. This system can save you up to eight percent on your summer cooling bills.

Two Timber Firms Pretending To Be 'Green,' Groups Allege

Two of the nation's largest timber companies, Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek Timber, have polished their public images for years by participating in a program that certifies that their logging is environmentally friendly.
But in separate challenges this month from the far corners of the United States, environmental groups in Washington state and in Maine are accusing Weyerhaeuser Co. and Plum Creek Timber Co. of using the forest industry's green-labeling program as a cover while they log in ways that harm endangered spotted owls in Washington and violate forestry laws in Maine.

The Seattle Audubon Society and the Natural Resources Council of Maine have demanded in documents sent to the Sustainable Forestry Board that it revoke certification for the companies until they comply with standards they have pledged to uphold.
Both companies say the demands are unjustified and show ignorance of relevant facts.
The requests mark the first time that mainstream environmental groups have publicly attempted to turn the forest industry's green certification process against big timber companies by insisting that they be suspended from the program, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, said William H. Banzhaf, president of the forestry board, which oversees certification.
Green labeling is a major marketing tool in the timber industry. It allows companies to reach a bigger marketplace while assuring increasingly sophisticated consumers that their purchases are not harming the environment.
As worry about global warming increases, green building codes are becoming politically fashionable. They have recently been adopted for private construction in the District, Montgomery County and Pasadena, Calif. Eighteen states and 11 federal agencies use such codes for their own buildings. And green codes often give credit to builders who use timber certified to have been logged in a sustainable way.
The timber industry's main lobby, the American Forest & Paper Association, developed the Sustainable Forest Initiative in 1994. That was a year after the Forest Stewardship Council, a group of environmentalists, forestry experts, sociologists and indigenous groups, created another certification system that is often described as far less friendly to the interests of big timber companies.
The competing certification regimes are usually referred to by initialisms -- SFI and FSC -- that can be easily confused. Some environmentalists say this is an intentional industry effort to muddy the green-labeling waters and confuse the public. Timber companies dispute that assertion.
Unlike the industry-created SFI program, FSC rules allow virtually no cutting of old-growth forests, nor do they allow operators to log off a diverse stand of trees and replace it with a plantation forest dominated by a single species, which is often done to enhance the commercial value of forestland.
Home Depot, Ikea and Williams-Sonoma are among the major retailers that have announced their preference for FSC-certified lumber or paper. The U.S. Green Building Council, which oversees green standards for construction in the District and Montgomery County, among other places, credits only builders that use FSC lumber. But other retailers, such as OfficeMax, have preferences that do not distinguish between certification systems.
The Seattle Audubon Society and the Natural Resources Council of Maine argue that the Sustainable Forest Initiative could lose all credibility if its board does not suspend Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek until they clean up their forestry practices.