Saturday, April 7, 2012

Week Seventeen.....What and Where is this!


This post is called "weeds in my garden" due to my HOA's classification of all green things as weeds. Unfortunately, here in Arizona, it is considered normal or even "correct" to poison all the green plants that pop up on your xeriscape.  It is nuts.  You see people spraying herbicides everywhere....it makes easterners concern about dandelions in the lawn like child's play.  These guys are serious about their weeds so they spray herbicides constantly on maintenance programs.  It is incredibly scary since herbicides are poisons and many are carcinogenic!  Meanwhile I have beautiful butterflies which I will feature in the next post and my neighbors are lucky to have anything other than fire ants in their yard!



While the fleabanes are often dismissed as 'weeds' because of their ubiquitousness during the summer, they are actually rather cheerful plants that are beneficial to many small insects that play an important role in the functioning of the ecological system.  The big news yesterday is that pesticides are causing the colony collapse disorder:  
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/06/common-pesticide-implicated-bee-colony-collapse-disorder/
Americans are crazier than coots!  I can say that as I am about to return to a more sane country--Canada.

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