I can hear that you're very frustrated, but I don't understand why you want to take such drastic measures, lol. Though, I have thought about scrapping the whole thing from time to time. I'm a first time gardener. I have to tell you that we had snow on May first, lol, so it sounds like we have similar areas. If your squash are otherwise healthy, you shouldn't get flowers until now anyway. Spray the evil bugs off with your garden hose and then give em a real good spray with soapy water. I was a little freaked out over a few different kinds of good bugs in my garden (ex: pill bugs eat compost). Are your cucumbers small because they've just formed? Or do they need to be pollinated? If they're healthy, they'll just keep producing more cukes until a few get pollinated correctly and one grows to full ripeness. If you planted in mid-May, most tomato varieties won't be ready to produce yet, lol. I have two romas that are two feet tall. Every other plant is four feet tall or taller, but those romas I started a bit later (mid-May, btw) and haven't started their real growth yet. One of them has decided to keep up with the Joneses and is trying to produce, and that has it's own set of issues. Overall, if your leaves are green, you're doing just fine. Toss a bit of compost on those squash and get rid of those bugs. One word of caution is, if those little bugs you found are squash bugs, I understand they'll saw right through your stems, so you should take immediate, decisive action. It doesn't sound like them from your description. IMHO: you're doing just fine, you're entering the home stretch, don't give up just yet. Grace, Carolyn P.

The skunks are looking for food and you probably have a source they like, grubs. What the store tried to sell you was a poison that would kill the grubs, and if they told you it would disolve the grubs I would tend to not go there again because of that misinformation. You could use the sprinkler, but the skunk may not like getting wet and might leave a calling card that is not pleasant. Check your garden for grub population by digging a hole 1 foot square and about 4 inches deep and count the number of grubs you find. 5 or less is not much of a problem that really would need control while 10 will indicate the need to use some means of control. Bacillus popilliae, Milky Spore Disease, is one means of control specific to those grubs. Parasitic nematodes are another means of control. Both should be applied in mid July to early August so the are inplace when the eggs that Ma Beetle lays hatch out.

I just finished planting tomatoes in my new-as-of-last-year garden 'humps', or raised beds on the cheap. Three weeks ago, we emptied the compost bin and put a heaping shovel full of compost in a pile along the humps where we wanted to plant the tomatoes. Today was a pretty good objective lesson on what worms can do for you. Under every shovel full of compost, the worms had gone to work, and the soil was amazingly soft and easy to scoop out for the tomato roots. Every scoop had numerous happy worms. Just beside these compost mounds, the exposed soil was considerably denser and more difficult to work. And when I brush off the dried grass clipping mulch, you can see dozens of little worm heads disappearing back under ground.

It's been ages since I've dropped by but I can't believe this old thread has been resurrected! Five years on and the carpet has worked well enough to allow the shrubs and trees to grow and start generating their own weed-suppressing mulch by shedding leaves. However, in the early days the weeds would sometimes germinate on top of the carpet, and I swear the onion weed would sometimes germinate through it! You have to kill that onion weed by whatever means possible: I selected a section and kept weeding it every week. A bit obsessive perhaps, but if you choose to use weed killer you'll have to apply it several times: once will not kill those monsters! Carpet was well worth using though, so long as you mulch heavily with newspapers underneath it to suppress most of the weeds from growing through it. Hi Alison, *very* long time no see :-) Years ago you sent me some brugmansia cuttings but you would not believe the brug seedlings I have growing now--two double-pinks among them. I'll post a fews pics over in the Oz Garden Gallery if I can remember how ;-)