Pets Blog

Want some fun and inexpensive things to do in the North Georgia Mountains? Head up to the Blue Ridge Mountains and enjoy your fall break in the vibrant colors, crisp air, and peaceful scenery of North Georgia. Only a little over an hour from Atlanta, Ellijay and Blue Ridge feature so many festive options, you can make a long weekend or a full vacation out of the trip!

The perfect place to stay during your fall fun is at The Villas at Coosawattee River Resort, which offers very affordable accommodations within close proximity of the apple farms, pumpkin patches, hayrides, and corn maze. The Villa’s cabins, villas, A-frames, and multi-unit are one, two, and three bedroom, some of which feature hot tubs, lofts, river views, and mountain scenes. The Villas is located inside the Coosawattee River Resort off of GA Highway 382 and features 300+ miles of rambling roads to enjoy all the kaleidoscope patterns of fall foliage.

Now off to the local flavor: the top apple farm that makes our list is Hillcrest Orchards. Hillcrest Orchards is located along ‘apple farm alley’ and offers pick-your-fun. During the annual “Apple Pickin’ Jubilee”, visitors can pick their own apples, milk a cow, watch live pig races, visit the petting farm, take a wagon ride through the orchard, visit the Moonshine Museum and watch live bands & cloggers on the Hillcrest Stage. A giant slide and jumping pillow add extra fun for the kids! And before leaving, make sure to gather a bag of crisp apples to take with you! Hillcrest Orchards is located off of Highway 52 E.  Read more...

Have you ever played FarmVille and plant farms?

The famous social networking website Facebook has introduced one of the amazing application games developed by Zynga named ‘FarmVille’. FarmVille Farms is a fun time game for all those who appreciate a kind of excitement and refreshing attitude during work and boredom. It is played online of course and hence, it is just easy to play during or after work hours. The only thing that is vital is membership with Facebook as it is only applicable to those who are existing members of this popular networking site.

Though this application is recently launched in 2009, its popularity has gained heights of success and fun. Facebook users have given tremendous support and feedback to this game by playing it regularly. This game is seriously a fun time game that cans even fresh your minds during work or after boring day. Here are few things related to this game “FarmVille”.

All about FarmVille Farms:

This game is all about building a farm by planting and harvesting virtual crops and trees. The more the players harvest the crops and tress, the more they earn and succeed further. Earning is possible here in the form of money that helps in buying further equipments of farming and harvesting. With the help of money earned during the game, players can buy decorations like fences, picnic accessories and tables including the benches and hay bales. Apart from it, players can even get an opportunity to introduce tractors, seeder or harvester, buildings and sheds inside the farm.  Read more...

earthworm farms,home composting,worm farm,building earthworm farms,compost bin,earthworm farms stinkOne of my favorite things to do is building earthworm farms. It is a pretty easy activity that can be a great weekend project. Maintaining your earthworm farms is a completely different story though. They can be fickle at best, so it is sometimes very hard to figure out what to do. Thankfully, they sometimes drop us a few hints to tell us what they need us to do. Here are a few basic problems that I encounter with my earthworm farms and what I do to troubleshoot them.

The most desperate problem I encounter, which happens every so often to everyone, is when some of my worms try to escape or even die. Naturally this is the most serious problem for any earthworm farmer to encounter. Worms don’t think like humans. If their environment isn’t perfectly suitable, they move on to greener pastures as quickly as they can crawl. If your worms are dying or trying to get out, the first thing you need to check is the environment in the earthworm farms and re-examine if it is suitable for your worms.

-If the compost bin is too wet, that is if there is standing water in the bottom, you should verify that your drainage holes are not clogged and add more bedding to help disperse the moisture.

-If the compost is very dry inside, simply get a glass of water or a hose and spray down the bedding. Your bedding should be moist enough that when you wring it out, you notice a few drops fall.

-If the bedding has been completely decomposed, your worms will have nothing to live in but their own compost. This is a common reason worms try to escape. Simply harvest your compost and add new bedding to your earthworm farms.  Read more...

In a view for educating farmers to be aware of the pests that prevail in farms this content has been developed:

Insects:

A few harmful insects are:

Cabbage Butterfly – This butterfly in the larva stage feeds on Cabbage leaves and causes heavy loss in the cabbage gardens.

Colorado potato beetle – Initially this type of beetle is fed on the buffalo bur plant, and then it migrates to the potato field and damages the crops.

Tomato Horn worms – These types of worms feed only on solanaceous plants (Night shading plants) like Tomato.

Corn borers – Corn fields and belts are facing a menace of this kind of pest.

Sugarcane borers – Sugarcane stem is dented by drilling holes on the stalk of the plant.

Measures: Regular spraying of Bio-pesticides like Neem oil in the farms can control the above mentioned insects up to an extent. Neem oil in the form cakes or pellets is preferred for the field soils to avoid the growth of such insects.

Mollusks:

Snail and slugs which belong to the mollusks family are considered to be the vital field spoiler in cabbage belts and lettuce farms.

Measures: Tea seed powder can be mixed in the soil to avoid the migration of snail and slugs into the farms thereby controlling their part of damage.

Mammals:

Mammals are frustrating kind of field pests for the farmers because they completely destroy the farms by making burrows and pits between the crops which make the insufficiency for the plants in taking the essential nutrients. Mammal pests include rats, armadillos, rabbits, raccoons, voles, squirrels, moles, mice, etc. Herbivore mammals like deer, elephants, bison, etc. are also considered as a menace in farms depending upon their behavior. They cause heavy damages in farms when in comparison to insects and other tiny pests.  Read more...

Keeping ants is back, not that it ever went away, but just recently due to the modern ant farm epidemic ant farms are becoming ever more popular. With an assortment of types, styles, shapes and sizes ant farming has no boundaries and to keep ants is not only highly entertaining, but also a great way to learn about these amazingly social creatures as they live and form a colony right in front of your eyes.

Why People are Keeping Ants

There is quite literally no end to the interest that you will gain from watching your ant colony grow on a daily basis right before your eyes, you could be working at your desk with the ant farm right in front of you watching the ants progress every time you pause and look up. How cool is that.

Or perhaps have it in the children’s bedroom providing them with a great learning observatory that will provide factual firsthand knowledge. They would probably spend hours watching their little friends as they go about their business.

Even in the classroom pupils can discover just how close an ants life follows suite with our own. The daily changes within the ant farm would provide them with an amazing insight as to just how floorless and dedicated an active ant colony actual is.

How to Care for an Ant Farm

Ants are susceptible to the environment just the same as any creature living outside, but when in a household environment great care should be taken not to keep the ant farm in any extremes as this will rapidly reduce the life expectancy of your ants. An ideal ambient temperature is between 60 and 70 degrees.  Read more...