Trap crop

A trap crop is a plant that attracts agricultural creatures usually insects, away from nearby crops. This form of companion planting can save the main crop from decimation by pests without the use of pesticides. Trap crops can be planted around the circumference of the field to be protected, or interspersed among them, for example being planted every ninth row.

Usage

Trap crops, when used on an industrial scale, are generally planted at a key time in the pest's lifecycle, and then destroyed before that lifecycle finishes and the pest might have transferred from the trap plants to the main crop.

Examples of trap crops include:

Trap (novel)

Trap is a Miles Franklin Award winning novel by Australian author Peter Mathers.

Slow play

Slow playing (also called sandbagging or trapping) is deceptive play in poker that is roughly the opposite of bluffing: betting weakly or passively with a strong holding rather than betting aggressively with a weak one. The flat call is one such play. The objective of the passive slow play is to lure opponents into a pot who might fold to a raise, or to cause them to bet more strongly than they would if the player had played aggressively (bet or raised). Slow playing sacrifices protection against hands that may improve and risks losing the pot-building value of a bet if the opponent also checks.

David Sklansky defines the following conditions for profitable slow plays:

Trap (carriage)

A trap, pony trap (sometimes pony and trap) or horse trap is a light, often sporty, two-wheeled or sometimes four-wheeled horse- or pony-drawn carriage, usually accommodating two to four persons in various seating arrangements, such as face-to-face or back-to-back.

"Pony and trap" is also used as Cockney rhyming slang for "crap" meaning nonsense or rubbish.

References

External links

Media related to pony traps at Wikimedia Commons

Crop (anatomy)

A crop (sometimes also called a croup or a craw, or ingluvies) is a thin-walled expanded portion of the alimentary tract used for the storage of food prior to digestion. This anatomical structure is found in a wide variety of animals. It has been found in birds, some non-avian dinosaurs, and in invertebrate animals including gastropods (snails and slugs), earthworms,leeches, and insects.

Bees

Cropping is used by bees to temporarily store nectar of flowers. When bees "suck" nectar, it is stored in their crops.

Birds

In a bird's digestive system, the crop is an expanded, muscular pouch near the gullet or throat. It is a part of the digestive tract, essentially an enlarged part of the esophagus. As with most other organisms that have a crop, the crop is used to temporarily store food. Not all birds have a crop. In adult doves and pigeons, the crop can produce crop milk to feed newly hatched birds.

Scavenging birds, such as vultures, will gorge themselves when prey is abundant, causing their crop to bulge. They subsequently sit, sleepy or half torpid, to digest their food.

Cropping (image)

Cropping refers to the removal of the outer parts of an image to improve framing, accentuate subject matter or change aspect ratio. Depending on the application, this may be performed on a physical photograph, artwork or film footage, or achieved digitally using image editing software. The term is common to the film, broadcasting, photographic, graphic design and printing industries.

Cropping in photography, print & design

In the printing, graphic design and photography industries, cropping refers to removing unwanted areas from a photographic or illustrated image. One of the most basic photo manipulation processes, it is performed in order to remove an unwanted subject or irrelevant detail from a photo, change its aspect ratio, or to improve the overall composition. In telephoto photography, most commonly in bird photography, an image is cropped to magnify the primary subject and further reduce the angle of view when a lens of sufficient focal length to achieve the desired magnification directly is not available. It is considered one of the few editing actions permissible in modern photojournalism along with tonal balance, colour correction and sharpening. A crop made from the top and bottom of a photograph may produce an aspect which mimics the panoramic format (in photography) and the widescreen format in cinematography and broadcasting. Both of these formats are not cropped as such, rather the product of highly specialised optical configuration and camera design.

Crop (implement)

A crop, sometimes called a riding crop or hunting crop, is a short type of whip without a lash, used in horse riding, part of the family of tools known as horse whips.

Types and uses

A modern crop usually consists of a long shaft of fiberglass or cane or which is covered in leather, fabric, or similar material. The rod of a crop thickens at one end to form a handle, and terminates in a thin, flexible tress such as wound cord or a leather tongue, known as a keeper. The thin end is intended to make contact with the horse, whilst the keeper prevents the horse's skin from being marked. The handle may have a loop of leather to help secure the grip or a 'mushroom' on the end to prevent it from slipping through the rider's hand.

The length of a crop is designed to allow enough leverage for it to be accelerated rapidly with a controlled flick of the wrist without causing the rider balancing problems. Thus, a true crop is relatively short.

The term "whip" is a more common term that includes both riding crops as well as longer types of horse whips used for both riding and ground work. A whip is a little slower than a crop, mostly due to having slightly greater length and flexibility.