Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.
Agricultural technique combats passion.
n Brazil, the predominant crops are passion flowers that yield yellow passion fruit and sweet passion fruit. The most common disease infecting both types of passion fruit is passion fruit woodiness. According to a recent study, researchers in Brazil have determined that a simple technique may prevent the disease from spreading among Brazil’s passion flower crops.
Passion fruit woodiness is a difficult-to-control disease spread by aphids that carry the cowpea aphid-borne mosaic virus. Farmers in Brazil had previously tried a variety of methods—including pesticides and plant vaccination—to control the disease but with little or no success. The study’s authors suggested that employing a simple crop technique might be effective: roguing. Roguing is finding and eradicating plants with problematic characteristics such as diseases or pests from an agricultural field.
The study involved growing a number of passion-flower test plots and roguing the crops in some test plots but not in others. In the test plots where roguing did not occur, the crops were almost completely infected by cowpea aphid-borne mosaic virus within 120 days. In the test plots were roguing was performed, up to 16% or less of the plants became infected. The study’s authors therefore concluded that roguing would likely be an effective method to control passion fruit woodiness in passion-flower crops, but studies on larger test plots are needed.
Introduce Yourself (Example Post)
This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.
You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.
Why do this?
- Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
- Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.
The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.
To help you get started, here are a few questions:
- Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
- What topics do you think you’ll write about?
- Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
- If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?
You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.
Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.
When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.
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