Not gardening related i know, i'll have to be forgiven but....

I just finished this amigurumi ballerina hello kitty and she's just too adorable not to post. Followed some online directions and she came out fantastic.

I have to find some cute little deserving little girl to give it to. :)

 tomatoes have been ripening like crazy. Those 3 bushes have been producing way faster than we can consume them all.

Which wouldn't be a problem because i can just give them to people all day long. who wouldn't like fresh, free, organic tomatoes right?

 Well, that would be a good plan except that the tomatoes have these small yellow spots all over the face of them.

The small yellow spots on the tomatoes are caused by brown stinkbugs that i've seen around the yard. The term more commonly used is "cloudy spot". Its annoying b/c they seem to have hit every single tomato, leaving none sans spots.

They're pretty much harmless and can be eaten but the aesthetic damage leaves them a bit less appealing... :(

And this is the reason they call it cloudy spot right here. When the thin skin is pulled back a white "cloudy" spot is left behind where the stinkbug was feeding. Highly annoying and hard to control.

Thinking of using sevin dust but it's banned in the UK among other places so i am very apprehensive about using it. Literature says that it does not penetrate plant tissue, but they had to have banned it in the UK for some reason. I know that it (carbaryl, AKA sevin) can be used to make MIC that was the main cause of the plant disaster in Bhopal (killing thousands), so maybe that was a big factor in banning it...? not sure but i'll have to look further into it before i use it.

NPIC pesticide fact sheet here

Found out why my little balsam seeds were producing cotyledons inside the pod. Turns out most frequently that sprouting while still inside the pod is a result of too much rainfall or moist conditions.

Now, with the rainfall we HAVEN'T been getting here in houston, one would sit and scratch their head about how that could be the cause... but, as i previously thought, that bed is not draining as well as it should and as a result i think that aided in not only killing the rose bushes that were planted there but  caused the too-moist conditions that confused the seeds into thinking it was time to germinate.

Also read that keeping seed in plastic bags or plastic containers where moisture cannot escape will also cause them to germinate prematurely. Seems seed must be absolutely dry before putting it in any moisture barricaded vessel of any kind.

a nice pdf file of a research study conducted my Mississippi State can be found here for a bit more info, and other sites seem to confirm the heavy rainfall (moisture) theory as well.