Lisa. . . Oh, the wrens are territorial all right. .I just put up a bunch of houses and let them decide who housed where. It seems to me that their territory gets smaller with the increase of wren population. I have tons of wrens existing together. The males who choose to have a couple "wives" keep them close together. In a hosta garden there is always plenty for the dinner table so they are happy. I do place several water baths around though. Now the bluebirds are a different story. . I have one in the northeast side of the house, one behind the barn, and one in my main hosta garden. . the males will kill each other if they push a territory. I haven't seen a bluebird feed a slug. . but it is possible they do. I have seen the wrens do it and with fervor and frequency. . .lol Just make sure you do not bother the wren houses while they are nesting. They will think another bird did it and will go out and poke holes in the eggs of other birds. I learned that the hard way. Janice, I can do one better. . here are some links I used making my toad houses. . you can go simple or really have fun getting involved. They have some great pictures, too. My grandkids loved it. I had four of my grandkids and my brother bought over three of his for me to watch (that cost him a couple hostas. . lol) I put their energy to work making toad houses. .what fun we had that day. They not only gave me valued toad houses but kept me laughing with lines like, I "toad" you so Robby! It was great fun! Check these links out. . they are short reading and lots of fun and info. We did not make a house big enough for Don's monster though. . lol http://www.projectwildlife.org/gardens_toadhouse.htm http://dnr.wi.gov/org/caer/ce/eek/cool/ameliatoadhouse.htm http://www.craftygardener.ca/garden15.html http://hobbies.suite101.com/article.cfm/easy_to_make_toad_houses http://www.learn2grow.com/projects/forchildren/outdoors/ToadAbode.aspx http://www.ehow.com/how_2074150_make-toad-house.html

Melissa, I cannot speak for Jay and am sure he'll come back and answer your question himself, but the Garlic spray I use (and I think he has used this same one in the past) is called Garlic Barrier. I usually find it at either a nursery that carries a full-line of organic gardening supplies (in my case, I have to go to the D-FW metro area to find a nursery like that) or sometimes at a feed and seed store like Tractor Supply Company. Sometimes I find it at some TSCs in spring, but not in other years, so either they carry it only sporadically or it sells out regularly. luvabasil, I am not a real huge fan of internet recipes and here is why: (1) they can give highly variable results and can be a waste of time and effort as they often are not strong enough OR (2) they are too strong and the soap or oil in them burns tender plant foliage in our heat and intense sunlight. With a commercial product, you get consistent results as long as you follow the dilution rates precisely and spray as directed, taking care not to over-spray. If these commercial products should not be used after high temperatures reach a certain label because foliage burn can result, it usually so states on the label. Sometimes when using a water-based recipe, I'll add either some commercial sticker-spray to make the recipe adhere to the leaves better, or maybe a little superfine summerweight horticultural oil, but it depends on how hot the temperatures are and also on what type of plant I'm spraying. Some plants have much more delicate foliage than others. Someone as experienced as Jay can go on the strong side by using slightly more product than the label recommends when mixing it up, but I wouldn't do that the very first time I tried a new product. There are times when your gut instinct tells you that more is better, but if you're using a product you've never used before, it can be easy to use too much and burn plant foliage. If you are using a garlic spray with a water base, that may be the issue. I think they work better when oil or soap based, but precision mixing is needed to avoid burning tender foliage. Melissia, There are not many organic methods of controlling squash bugs and the only ones that I have found really work involve hand picking and crushing or drowning them, or vacuuming them off the leaves with a shop vac or cordless hand vac with strong suction. If you use a wet-dry shop vac, put a couple of inches of water in the bottom of the cannister before you turn it on. That way the squash bugs fall into the soapy water, the soap coats their bodies and they can't get out. Without the soapy water, when you open the cannister they may be crawling up the sides of it to escape. I like to lay a 2' x 4' piece of lumber or some other wood scrap on the ground near the squash plants. The bugs congregate under it at night and, in the morning, I pick up the board and step on and smash as many of them as I can before they run away. I also get a fair number of army worms and climbing cutworms this way. I'd rather stomp on them than have to hand-pick them off of plants. I usually don't see much PM here on anything except sugar snap peas, but when I do have it on summer garden plants, I sometimes spray them with Green Cure, which is a potassium bicarbonate spray. For me, it seems stronger and more effective than the usual baking soda spray recipes often recommended for organic gardeners. If I want what I consider to be reliable recipes for home-made organic remedies that are formulated with our hot climate in mind, I go to Howard Garrett's website at dirtdoctor.com. I have found that remedies formulated for milder climates can sometimes burn foliage in our more intense heat and sunlight, but the Dirt Doctor is based in D-FW where the weather is like ours, so I always trust his recipes. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Garlic Barrier

Hi Connie, You can dispose of the eggs any way you choose. There's really no wrong way as long as you get rid of them. You can squish them right there on the leaf, although I wouldn't do this if I weren't wearing disposable latex gloves. You can carry a bowl of soapy water out to the garden with you and scrape the eggs off the leaf and into the bowl using your fingernail, a dull butter knife, the edge of a trowel, etc. Even after they've been dumped into the soapy water, I'd pour them down the drain or flush them down just to ensure they don't hatch somewhere and make their way to the garden. You can remove the whole leaf if you want, put it into a tightly sealed bag and put it into the trash. You can tear off just the portion of the leaf that has the eggs on it, put it into a bag, seal it and throw it away. The main thing is to get rid of them and to get rid of them in such a way that they can't hatch somewhere....like in a trash can or whatever....and make their way to your garden. Dawn

I have grown Tatume here a couple of times. While it outcompetes squash bugs, the squash vine borers still can kill it in a year when they are really bad. I don't grow it any more because we liked the flavor/texture of Seminole harvested young (baseball to softball-sized) better than Tatume. It is a huge space hog too, and because I already grow 6-10 kinds of C. moschatas most years, the last thing I need is a space hog that isn't as tasty as they are. Bon, I couldn't help noticing how many of my favorite Texas horticulturalists (Sam Cotner, Malcom Beck, Howard Garrett) were in Howard Garrett's story about Malcom's pumpkin. (Mr. Garrett and Mr. Beck write extensively on organic gardening and all their books are excellent, and Mr. Cotner wrote THE book on growing Vegetables in Texas. I've worn out 3 copies of it and am on my 4th.) Jay White, by the way, writes regularly for Texas Gardener magazine (as does Greg Grant) and their articles and columns are the first ones I read when a new magazine arrives. It is a well-known and well-understood phenomenon that healthy plants grown in healthy soil are more disease tolerant and more pest tolerant than less healthy plants. When pests relentlessly attack plants, I try to figure out what it is about those specific plants that make them less healthy and, therefore, more alluring to pests and to diseases. Sometimes it is obvious to me because the plants under attack are growing in less healthy soil. Sometimes it is something much more subtle---like cool-season plants that are beginning to be subjected to hotter temperatures than they like. Howard Garrett makes a convincing argument for us to grow our brassicas in the fall only in this part of the country because they have less pests since they are less stressed in cooler conditions---and I believe he is right about that. And, there are some pests, like grasshoppers, that relentlessly attack everything still green in the hot summer months, whether the plants are healthy and happy are not. So, for every "rule" that we observe, their is an exception, and I find grasshoppers to be one of the exceptions to the rule that healthy plants in healthy soil are not attacked by pests and diseases. I grew up eating yellow summer squash for as far back as I can remember and nothing I've ever grown as a more pest-tolerant substitute for it is 100% acceptable. When I want yellow squash, I simply want yellow squash---nothing else will do. So, in order to have it, I just grow it in low tunnel rows under row cover and hand-pollinate it. I feel like I don't have to settle for less in my own garden, and growing Tatume instead of the yellow squash I really want is, indeed, settling for less. You'll never know how you feel about Tatume until you grow it yourself. I just wasn't crazy about the flavor and didn't find it to be a really heavy producer either. To be fair to Tatume, it never will look like a heavy producer when it is grown adjacent to Seminole because Seminole outproduces it (and everything else) every single time. There is a reason Seminole is a perennial fave in our garden----it is beaten everything else for about 15 years now, and that track record is hard to break. It has been around forever....I can remember it being on seed racks in Texas when I was a child, although I think then it likely was sold as Calabacita, because that is the name that pops into my head every time I see a packet of the seeds. For squash vine borer tolerance or resistance, as George noted, C. moschatas will win every time and, for me, the C. agyrospermas like White Cushaw, Green-Striped Cushaw and Orange-Striped Cushaw are in second place. Tatume might come in third, or actually, a distant fourth behind every kind of yellow summer squash that exists when grown under row cover. YMMV. You can grow any squash or pumpkin you want if only you'll grow them under summerweight row cover, tulle netting, mosquito netting, etc. and hand-pollinate. Does it take longer and a bit more effort? Sure it does, but it is worth it to avoid the heartbreak of losing plants to the dastardly SVBs. Dawn