Well, that does make me feel a little better, mad@mickey. I was contemplating doing exactly that with the persimmons, and may still. In my experience with our patio nectarine, they will chew through netting to get to fruit if it's close to the netting. But if you net a whole tree it should protect some of the fruit. But, like the asian pear, nothing's bothered the persimmon til now, so i'm going to hope hope hope. And, like you, i can't figure out how much of anything got the higher fruit in the pear. It was up pretty high- it takes a ladder for me to get to it. So far, small coons is the only thing that makes sense, but i guess squirrels maybe could, too. They usually have left messes and haven't stripped stuff when they've stolen before, though. Jay, yes that occurred to me. It also occurred to get one of the motion sensor hose sprayers. We'll see what happens, but if it continues to happen with the other fruit it may be time to do something along those lines. John, i totally agree. Ed landscaping is a great idea in theory but you have to be really careful in siting or it becomes difficult to harvest or protect. And you're also right in that some of the fruit bearing stuff looks nasty once it's done (my apples for example). In the backyard i'm not going to try to do as much mixing- it'll be more room and easier access. 'course it's a bit harder to protect too. Wonder how much one of those batting cage screens cost? :) In all seriousness, we were at siglinda scarpa's place this past weekend and she had her whole garden netted over. I've also seen it done with large blueberry patches- you build a frame & attach the netting and have a door you go in. I really do wonder if that would be smart for a concentrated area? Hosta, i'll keep my eyes peeled. I hope it is critters and not people. A little here & there i wouldn't mind for people, esp if they asked, but wholesale stealing is just ugly. Why do folks feel so entitled?

Paula, Yikes! That's a lot of squash. You know you can make zucchini-chocolate cookies and cake don't you? Of course, 18 zukes would make a lot of cookies, cake, cupcakes, zuke bread, zuke muffins, etc. A whole lot! I am on the downhill slide of plum madness now. We have harvested every last plum and I've been making jelly and other stuff like an insane plum maniac. The good news? I have less than 100 pounds of plums left, in various stages of ripeness, waiting to meet their fate. The bad news? I need to go outside and pick zucchini today. I have 10 plants so it will be quite a haul. I am so exhausted from plum madness I may 'cheat' and feed most of this week's zuke harvest to the compost pile. I'll do a plum/canning update later today, and maybe remember to report back on the zuke harvest, but I am now in the vicinity of 200 jars canned in the last 10 or 12 days, but that isn't just plums--it includes peaches, blueberries, blackberries, apples and strawberries. After today, it likely will include some sort of salsa and candied jalapenos. I'm relieved you can't can squash, except as pickles, and I have plenty of pickles so I'm not going to can squash. Oh, and I think I'll can some blueberry honey or blueberry syrup today, or maybe both. Why can't our gardens produce a nice, steady flow of produce? I hate the cycle of overabundance/underabundance. Mspriggs, Often when you have that rot near the base it is precisely because the SVBs are tunneling through the stem. That's how they kill the plant. To get rid of them, use a razor blade or box cutter blade or sharp paring knife to gently make an incision in one side of the stalk...don't cut it all the way through...just one side as if you were slitting open a soda straw to remove a BB or something stuck inside of it. You should see the SVB or SVBs inside. Remove them. If this sounds too icky and you don't want to touch the darn thing, wear gloves or take a bamboo skewer out and use gloved hands to remove it, or stick the skewer (or a piece of wire) into it and pull it out. Squish it between your food and the ground, or destroy it in some other way. Push the stem back together, place it on the ground. Pile up dirt around/over it. Pat the dirt down firmly because it is serving as your 'bandaid'. Water well, but not so heavily the dirt washes away. Keep moist. If the plant is going to survive, you'll see new foliage in less than a week. This year I put nylon stockings around my squash vine's stems when I planted them....some of the stocking went below ground, some above, and I haven't lost a single plant to an SVB yet. I don't know it the lack of plant mortality is related to the stocking excluding the borers or if it is just the luck of the draw. The squash bugs, though, got both plants from Maddie's Peter Rabbit Garden. I planted a total of 12 squash plants, figuring I'd get enough squash for us to eat and freeze before the SVBs started taking them out. So, with 10 surviving plants, we've had plenty of squash. You can't have too much squash though, since it is easy to shred and freeze if you have freezer space. If I have more than I want to freeze, I give it away. If I'm too busy processing plums to run around town giving dumping unwanted/unloved squash on unsuspecting friends, I feed it to the compost pile. Every night the deer, raccoons, possums, skunks, rabbits, etc. visit my compost pile and eat whatever I tossed out that day. Lately the deer are having a plum bonanza. I'm not sure how much compost I'm making, but I'm feeding the wild things. Last night I went outside around 7 p.m. to toss a bowl of plum pulp (this is whats's left of the plums after you extract the juice for jellymaking) on the compost pile, and a deer was looking for dinner at the big compost pile out back and a raccoon was looking for dinner at the medium-sized compost pile by the veggie garden. Dawn

Yeah the fall colors have not been as great in our area this year either. I assume it has something to do with the odd weather this summer. First too wet, then too dry, then an early cold snap followed by a lengthy warm period. I was just glad that our crab apple turned out as nice as it did.

No pinholes ... nothing was eating it at all. I do have one very small muncher now that wasn't there before: I'm assuming it is the same little one that created both spots. This is the first I've seen of any effect of any kind on any of the leaves except for a slight curl on one leaf which on further inspection had no insect involvement. I just left everyone on the plant last year (yeah, even the aphids ... they won't get to stay if they move in again; there were just so many so fast last time), and they didn't seem to have any issues. Maybe I'm just impatient ... everything seems slow this year, so maybe the monarchs are too. Back to the pale bug, this is it:I guess it's a bit thinner than I remembered it being, but that's the bug. It also has a friend that's similar but more brown, which I guess could be a different stage of the same bug, I think there were two green ones previously. Additionally, today there was this visitor:I shooed this one off the leaf. Both bugs scurry around the leaf/stem when I was trying to take pictures of them. Are they friend or foe?