Nature Notes...Some Good News...Some Awful News

This post is for the meme hosted by Rambling Woods. Her blog is beautiful and she has loads of information and really a blog dedicated to nature. My this post is nothing compared to her. But since it involves nature, so I thought of linking it with her.

. This post is going to be almost wordless; just some photos and some news. Some bees -- bumbles and some native ones are back; tons of flowers are blooming, along with fruits and vegetables. So, here are the photos:


Squashes and cabbage


Nasturtium plant and its flower; they are edible. I forgot the name of this flower, need to look up my diary but too lazy to get up from the desk and hunt it down :-P


Whoever ate this portion of the leaf must be very romantic; otherwise how could it create such a nice heart? Or is it showering love to me for letting use my garden and not using any chemical? Awww...I would like to think it's loving me :-). Melon flowers and onion flower


Is this my lover who created that heart-shape? Not sure. Few bees are back; a bumblebee feeding on my onion flowers (I am not calling them allium flowers because these are edible onion plants and I will be soon harvesting onion from them)

Now here is the good news first: Seattle to build nation's first food forest. You can read the details here. Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.

Here is the sad news, and this news might provide conclusive evidence for the causes of colony collapse disorder in bees and vanishing of our pollinators. You can read the article here. Target shoppers in Wilsonville, Oregon found a tragedy in the parking lot as tens of thousands of of bumble bees were found dead and dying on the pavement, along with honey bees and ladybugs. As the estimate of dead bees rose to 50,000, the Oregon Department of Agriculture confirmed the insecticide Safari caused the deaths in a Wilsonville earlier this week.

Here is the most worrisome news. Those of us who grow our own food or can afford organic or farmers' market food might not feel concerned about this news though we should. Close to 100 billion dollar (a very conservative approximation as latest research are showing that even auto-immune diseases, parkinson and alzheimer and cancer could be related to diet; so, if these are also considered, then it will be more than 100B) is spent, every year, by the US economy for diseases related to food. The country can get broke if all these spending continues to rise. You can read it here, If you like things like Mtn Dew, Chex Mix, Hungry Man frozen dinners, or roughly 80 percent of all the packaged foods sold in your average, American grocery store, you may want to sit down - several of the chemicals found in some of America's most common foods are considered to be so unhealthy that they're actually ILLEGAL in certain other countries.