ForbesOnTech

Tobacco plants-- an Organic Pesticide Solution to White Flys in My Tomato Patch and why I plink gophers and voles.

One of the things I enjoy most about my gardening hobby is propagation.

While I’ve been known to drop $5 to $9 bucks at the El Plantio Nursery here in Escondido for obscure, but extremely alluring exotic heirloom tomatoes, I get most of my nursery stock the old fashioned way—by using seeds from plants I’ve grown the year before for the current year’s garden.

when it comes to plant propagation, I practice ruthless Darwinism: the only thing I want in my garden are seeds or cuttings from plants that quickly produce great tasting produce in the seriously amended slay-based soil of my garden plots. In the eight years I’ve maintained gardens I’ve been able to produce 10-12 ounce beefsteaks within 100 days of planting and Zucchini in about 62 days.

But the most interesting propagation lessons I’ve learned have come from my small yearly tobacco patch. I grow Havana and Virginia long leaf tobacco. My goal has been to produce tobacco plants that mature in September and which reach a uniform height of about five feet. Tobacco cultivation

Growing tobacco isn’t a matter of just setting, feeding and watering. Once the plants flower, they need to be topped (which increases vegetative growth, the plant’s harvest height and final yield. I top my plants about twice a season, but pay close attention to make sure seed pods are in place and fully formed. I set tops from the second cutting aside and let them dry before harvesting seeds, which are very small.

One of the advantages of growing tobacco is that it’s a natural insect barrier, Although  it shouldn’t be grown adjacent to unvaccinated  tomatoes, it can be grown at opposite ends of gardens. Since I started growing tobacco, my tomato and potato patches have been completely free of white fly infestations and Jerusalem crickets. The hated horn worm, however, will feast on tobacco as well as tomato plants, but my solution for that is also organic: a large actively feeding herd of alligator lizards.

Because I have vagrant long tailed weasels here at Rancho Bizarro, I try very hard to  avoid using Type 1 poisons to eradicate marauding gophers and most of all voles that savage my garden and avocado trees. My solution isn’t technically organic but it is effective—directed rifle fire from either my a scoped Beeman .177 pellet rifle, or my single shot .22 loaded with .22 short CB ammo.  It’s been my experience that the best time to plink voles and gophers—both of which are diurnal—is early in the morning after sunrise.

Ok so my solution to burrowing rodents may seem particularly blood thirsty to some, but I’m the king of my gardens and orchard and I have a firm policy of death to burrowing rodents and if the local weasels are derelict in their jobs, I step up to the task.

Now all I need to do is find an organic solution to my peach leaf curl problem down in the  orchard. Oh and find a way I can get up to the Sierra shortly after the trout opener next weekend while I’m still recuperating from surgery early this week.—Jim Forbes on 05/23/2010.

Web 2.0? Gimme a Break!

Forbes' Fables Returns

(with apologies to Aesop, Alsop, the Brothers Grimm, Samuel Clemens, and the late Ruth Trumble, my Eighth Grade Teacher)

It must be official, Silicon Valley PR agencies are announcing that some of their clients are at the forefront of Web 2.0. I mean, my God, if you can't think of anything more creative, go ahead and position your client as the leader of something that doesn't really exist, yet

All the noise around Web 2.0 makes me instinctively distrustful of any company that thinks it's a real category. I can almost picture the scene. Parker J. Buttondown, laid off from his big time account executive job on the Squidward.com account with Avonzou, Fettuccine and Liebowitz PR back in 2002 when the Internet economy tanked, has gone on to start his own agency with a conference room view of the Ikea megastore in East Palo Alto.  He gets a call from one of Squidward's founders whose new company, Cephlapod.com needs some "Strategic marketing" help.

Over a protein Cheeseburger from InNOut, our man Parker Buttondown tells the Cephlapod exec, obviously a Stanford Jr. College Business School grad, "Strategic marketing?  We lead the industry in that at AFL PR." Parker carefully wipes the thousand island dressing from his lips and asks the question: "what exactly is it that Cephlapod.com will do?"

Our young entrepreneur can barely stop himself from leaping to the tabletop and dancing on the brimming fry boats. "We're going to set new records for first-round funding and almost have Kleiner in for $45 million." But he stops himself when he realizes that at the mere mention of a first-tier VC firm, the agency's billing rate is going to jump from $250 a hour to $500 a call.

The entrepreneur pulls out his non-disclosure form and his expensive, but really obscure branded fountain pen," Sign it and I'll tell you."

Looking at the pen, Parke inks the NDA and pulls out his notepad.

The entrepreneur pulls out his cell phone to check the time and begins. "We're going to lead the field in query content aggregation and information publishing. It's totally Web 2.0, and we don't really have any competition.  Guy's seen the plan and demo and says it's a classic extension of the Macintosh idea"

Parker dutifully writes the basic concept down and begins doodling dollar signs where the potential client can't see it in the margins. He thinks "Maybe this guy will be able to cough up the retainer, then I can make the minimum payment on my Visa card, the lease payment and not have to eat Bitsy's cat while she's away with her client in Aruba."

The beginning of the marketing plan is right there on the pad: "Web 2.0, first tier VC firm, record first round funding shows confidence, Can't fail because of number of searches, Web 2.0, hints at alliance with Google or Yahoo." The bullet points just pour down the page.

Before long, the light bulb goes on over Parker J. Buttondown's head. He puts his pen away, looks at the young entrepreneur, thinks a minute about the balance on his credit card, and says to his potential new client, "Let's do some Chinese for lunch."  Off they go to the Dragon Lady's Lucky Chinese" on University in Palo Alto, where they order the "holiday four-course special", which seems to feature  stringy mystery meat in sweet and sour sauce. Buoyed by the prospect of signing a new client with a decent retainer, Parker muses aloud to the entrepreneur. "I've got a good idea of how to present you as a potetntial Web 2.0 leader.  Let me rough out a release this afternoon, send it to you, then I'll call Om and Matt to get you on their screens or in their blogs. And as soon as you're ready, will get you an appointment with Chris in San Francisco."

Buttondown heads home to Belmont to write the draft and email it to the client. The cat, Adopted by Bitsy while in film school at San Francisco State, sniffs Parker's breath, braces itself, then has an IMAX-sized foreshadowing moment, based on what it thinks its kitty sitter had for lunch.

When Parker lays down for a Tsing Tao two-bottle nap, the cat gnaws out its subdural ID chip and runs away to San Carlos, where it's adopted by a retired PG&E lineman who thinks Web 2.0 is something built by an aged garden spider.

For a better take on Web 2.0 i suggest you go to Peter Rip's blog http://earlystagevc.typepad.com.