Current News You Can Use

          Few things make one's skin crawl like ants running all over the kitchen counters and bathroom.   But we can do something about ants in the house.   Fill a spray bottle with Listerine.  Spray them; watch them squirm and die; and wipe them up.  Do so wherever you see them; keep a small spray bottle in each room they tend to appear.  Walmart has cute little spray bottles that are perfect for the job. Listerine kills ants with the same aromatic oils and alcohol that kill the germs in your mouth.  Natural pest control companies use much the same kind of oils to kill insects in and around your house, in much greater concentration for longer effect, I’m sure.  The oils soften their exoskeletons, clogging their breathing holes.  On small ants, it works immediately; larger ones take a little longer to die. Listerine kills ants only as long as it is wet; once it evaporates, they will return.  Persistence wins t...

The EPA just approved another systemic pesticide, saying that it is needed because the pests have become immune to previous poisons.  This is a losing game, as plant-eating pests can easily outbreed the poisons, while their predators and bees cannot.  Systemic pesticides, which are distributed into every part of the plant through its roots and stems, are particularly dangerous to bees, hummingbirds, and predatory insects, which rely on nectar for fuel. The smallest pests are inherently the hardest to control in a conventional yard or farm, yet they can be easily managed in a naturally managed landscape that makes their predators comfortable and lets them breed.  Such pests are not pestilential all the time; it is only when they infest and become a plague that they become a real problem.  If most plants that sprout in natural conditions were able to grow to maturity, they would be too small and crowded for the good of the rest of us.  Herbivorous “pests...

A tool every resident should have is a web duster, a broom on a pole with a puff head, to take out cobwebs inside and outside the house.  The “Webster” head can be found at Diamond, with a variety of poles, extendable and otherwise.  Mine has three sections and extends to 16 feet to get the eaves on the second story. The cobweb spider is the homeless vagrant of the spider world.  Rather than build and repair a strong, long-term dwelling in a good location as does the classic orb weaver, it builds and camps in a small, quick, weak web anywhere it can find a surface to sling it, preferably out of the rain, but anywhere in dry weather, like now.  As soon as its web gets dirty, visible, and therefore useless, it moves on and builds another nearby.  The dirty webs actually steer its prey into the invisible new web.  And they can make even a pretty shrub or house look neglected in short order. I saw this effect on one of my most beautiful properties...

Kids love misters on a hot day; you can see it in the wet heads coming out of the Growers Market.  So do you, if you think about it; in the dry heat, a fine mist makes it easier to breath.             The same goes for your plants, particularly those that are hard to grow in our very dry, hot summers, like blueberries.  A mister nearby can make a blueberry explode with growth.  Every other plant in the vicinity also breathes easier; nearly every plant loves higher humidity than we have.  On the other hand, spider mites love dryness, and a mister prevents and gets rid of the mites.  A mister also shows up cobweb spider webs, making them temporarily useless to the spider and showing them so you can clean them up when they would otherwise be nearly invisible. A mister also cools its immediate area, outdoor air conditioning that can make your indoor cooler work better, and cool the hot west side of yo...

          Earwigs are a creepy nuisance at times, like when they crawl out of freshly picked flowers or lettuce heads, but they are not a pest.  They actually clean up fungal infections on plants. A typical earwig.  Credit: animal.discovery.com            For several years in this town, I found that one could not grow a hollyhock to bloom without it becoming covered with an ugly rust by the time it bloomed.  I would cut them down when they got ugly and let them re-grow to bloom later in the summer, when the rust is not so prevalent.           But one year, I didn’t see any rust on my hollyhocks, and so didn’t cut them down.  As they were blooming, I was lying on the lawn one day, looking up at them, and noticed that the leaves were full of tiny holes in the same pattern as the rust would make, and so was a butte...