Dave - I use bay leaves all the time. I tend not to cook by recipe and I just put in whatever I think of at the time. In the winter I put bay leaves in any casserole or stew. It's kind of automatic like always starting with garlic and onions. Also in pasta sauces - meat, tomato matriciana - everything practically. They go well with sweet dishes too - anything with egg or milk such as custards and rice pudding. Also with stewed fruit or in an apple pie. I stick them inside chicken, duck etc when roasting and in the stock pot when I boil up bones. Suffused in the milk for bread sauce. Likewise for white sauces like bechamel or cheese sauce. Place a couple on chops under the grill (broiler??)Chuck branches on the barbecue. There's no end to their uses. I think my family's taste buds are so shot to pieces by my cavalier attitude to recipes we can barely taste any thing which doesn't have at least 6 cloves of garlic and 4 or 5 bayleaves in it. Often with a branch of rosemary in there too. As for winter hardiness - bay in the ground can survive temps below freezing for a while - it gets them where I live. In a pot it might need a bit more protection. (I'm like Daisy - I can't work out what 15 degrees might feel like.) Last winter my potted bay took minus 5 C a few times with a bit of leaf browning but the ones in the ground didn't bat an eyelid. I would suggets leaving it outside but keeping an eye on the forecast and putting it under cover if a big freeze is coming.

Wasps would have two reasons to be around lettuce. One reason is water (for mud/paper nest building), but wasps would normally gather water/mud from the ground, not the plants. The second reason is that many wasps eat caterpillars; If your leaves have any holes in them, caterpillars are around. Wasps can "smell" damaged/chewed leaves from a great distance and it is possible the watering makes tiny fractures in the delicate lettuce leaves. The wasps would be fooled into checking it out. Wasps spend the entire summer bobbing up and down at our vinyl roof gutters. They do this by the hour, to no apparent benefit. So your lettuce-leaf wasps may be barking up the wrong tree also.

Melissa, Have you read Square Foot Gardening? I can't remember the author's last name for sure right now, but I think he's Mel Bartholomew or something like that. Very nice way to look at space and spacing issues. I'm thinking on my cuke wall I'm going to have two rows, staggered, with a foot spacing in between each plant. On a fifteen foot "row" that'll be 30 plants! MIGHT be too much weight for the netting, but I'm going to give it a shot. Worst case scenario, I can pull plants if needed. That netting has got me thinking of other spots I can go vertically too... for pole beans. My breaded okra is still a work in progress... LOL! When I first did it, I just breaded it like regular and froze it on a sheet of wax paper in the freezer. Worked, but the okra was fairly hard when cooked. Last summer I blanched the okra, THEN breaded it and froze it. This turned out better, but still not what I'm looking for. (I figured out it's better to thaw the okra a little bit before frying it on both ways.) NEXT YEAR, I'm going to pre-fry it in a tempura type batter, cool completely THEN freeze. I like cooking projects... LOL! NOW, on the loofah/loufa/dishcloth/vining okra gourd thing... LOL! Honestly, I have no idea what the "real" name is for these dang things I've been growing. A friend gave me the seed and I just love growing them. When they're young, you cook them like regular ol' okra. Mid size to a bit bigger, I took a steak knife and cut it straight down the length of it and pulled the outer "husk" from the inner fibers. Then I de-seeded it and laid the fiborous part out to dry, and LOW AND BEHOLD, a loofah! This is what I'm calling "dishcloth". I did try to use half as a body scrubber, but it's way too scratchy for me. Works great on dishes tho! It becomes soft when wet, but still scratchy to a point... then dries out nicely and rebounds to it's shape! I loved it, next year I will have many more. I also let a couple get as large as possible and dry out on the vine, with seeds still in them. My little boy uses them as musical "shakers"! I'll try to take a pic of them here today and post it so you can see what I mean. All that from just one plant, I LOVE it. I had them planted along the edge of my carport in a "wall", and the beautiful yellow flowers were a joy to see everyday! The vines were so healthy, they grew all up on the top of the carport. I had a few dried gourds on the top of the carport at the end of the season. THIS will be a regular plant for me, it's just easy and fun to grow! Dawn, I honestly do not think I've run into a cucumber beetle... YET. Watch this year be the year for them... LOL! My wall of cukes might just be too inviting for them not to show up. Yes, I hear of most people around here having either hybrid or wild blackberries growing, so I thought that'd be the way to go for me. Of course, strawberries are also very big around here too, but I don't have the space to devote to a huge bed of just ONE thing (in my mind). If I did, I'd do asparagus first, then strawberries. MIGHT try one of those hanging strawberry bags, but that's another project. :) The trees around my area are pecan and cedar... LOL! I've never heard of ANYONE having luck with apple trees around here. Well, we're having a rainy day here. The St. Francis river is up and we're under flash flood warnings too. I live in a higher part of town, so I'm not too worried about us. The farmers that farm along the river might have problems tho. Just been a wet, sloggy year for Northeastern Arkansas! Planting was late due to the wet spring, and harvesting was hard due to a wet fall! I really need to see what our rainfall averages are for the year, I'm betting we've set a record. But, of course, snow would be nice... but rain is better than ice! LOL! We're off to spend the rest of the day at my parent's house... ya'll stay safe, warm and dry! :) Beth p.s. My DARLING husband gave me an early Christmas present! It's a Veggie Tales t-shirt! On the front, it's got Bob the Tomato and it says "If you like to talk to tomatoes..."! LOL! I laughed so hard! I love that show... the theme song goes like this. If you like to talk to tomatoes... If a squash can make you smile... If you like to waltz with potatoes, up and down the produce aisle... have we got a show for you! Too cute, huh?

Squash Vine Borers are very hard to control and you have to take a multifaceted approach in order to achieve good control. Most people don't give Squash Vine Borers a second thought until they see their plants wilting and dying. To outwit the SVBs, you have to engage in year-round practices that harm them. With squash vine borers, it is always preferable to be proactive and to do everything in your power to prevent them from getting to your plants. Once they are inside the plant, there is little you can do except slit open the stem and remove them. Some research has indicated that infested plants can have up to 100 SVBs inside them, but I usually only have a couple in any given plant, so slitting the vine open and removing them is pretty easy for a home gardener, but imposssible for someone growing acres of cucurbits. At the broadest level, you want to use garden system practices to combat SVBs. This can include timing plants very early to try to get a harvest before SVBs arrive and kill the plants, and using succession plantings to give you a harvest after Oklahoma's two separate generations of SVBs are through doing their dirty work. You also can use cultivar selection. Squash Vine Borers prefer Hubbard Squash above all others. You can use this knowledge to your advantage in a couple of different ways. 1) If you want to raise Hubbard Squash, give it extra attention using Level 2 and 3 practices mentioned below; OR 2) Plant Hubbard Squash outside your regular veggie garden and use it as a trap crop. Hopefully, the SVBs will be drawn to it and you can find them/destroy them on these plants before they move on to the other types of cucurbits in your regular veggie plot. If you are using Hubbard Squash as a trap plot, you shouldn't expect to harvest any Hubbards since they are the 'sacrificial' plants that may give your other plants a better chance of survival. Another systemic practice that can reduce SVB populations is to manage your garden plot well. This includes prompt removal/destruction of all infested plants, late fall rototilling of soil where cucurbits grew in order to expose overwintering pupae/larvae to predators and weather, and deep incorporation digging or plowing or tilling in spring just before planting. Deep incorporation helps by burying any surviving larvae/pupae very deep in the soil which may prevent them from emerging. Another systemic practice is to rotate your cucurbit plantings to a new bed or area of the garden each year. This may help some because the newly emerged SVB moths will have to 'travel' to find plants to attack instead of emerging from the soil right there in the squash patch. However, research shows newly emerged SVBs can travel up to 1/2 mile to find squash plants, so rotation may help reduce their numbers or slow them down, but it isn't a 'cure'. During the SVB season, as soon as you realize a cucurbit plant is dying and cannot be saved, remove it promptly from the garden and destroy it. You can destroy it by burning the plant debris if you are in an area where open burning of brush is not prohibited by burn ban laws or local ordinances, or you can bag up the plant debris and dispose of it with household trash. You also can destroy the SVBs inside the plants by hot composting of the debris. All of the above systemic practices can help limit the SVB population's ability to survive in your soil and emerge, but those practices won't prevent them. To do that, you need to use another level of good gardening practices: physical and mechanical prevention practices. At this level, you're trying to keep SVBs that appear in your garden (whether locally hatched or migrating ones) from getting to your plants. For this, you can use any/all of the following: A barrier product on the ground to keep emerging SVBs from traveling to the plants. You can use newspaper or cardboard on top of the soil surface, or you can use landscape fabric. On top of this type of barrier, place a thick layer of hay or straw mulch or whatever else you have handy. The layer of cardboard/paper/landscape fabric beneath the mulch just makes it harder for the SVBS to emerge easily. To prevent flying SVBs from landing on your plants and laying eggs, you can use a lightweight (sort of gauzey-looking) floating row cover like Agribon or Reemay but it MUST BE tightly secured to keep the SVBs from getting underneath it. Also, it must be used over beds where cucurbits were not grown during the previous year. Otherwise, you're likely to have SVBs emerge from the soil under the floating row cover. When you use floating row covers, you either have to remove them when it is time for pollination since they will exclude bees and other pollinators, or you'll have to lift the floating row cover and hand-pollinate. If you hand-pollinate, watch very closely for the SVB moths while doing so because they are likely to get on the plants during that few minutes that you are conducting hand-pollination. One way to protect your cucurbit plants from SVBs is to raise seedlings in containers and transplant the into the ground. At the time you are transplanting, wrap the stems to protect them and be sure your wrapped portion of the stem extends an inch or two underground. Continue wrapping as the plant grows so that you have 6" to 8" of stem above the ground that is protected. You can use aluminum foil to wrap stems if you want, or you can use the legs of panty hose (and they are great because they stretch and expand) or you can use strips of floating row cover. While you want to wrap the entire stem, leave the wrapping loose enough that the stem can grow and expand so it will not become girdled. Stems wrapped in this manner generally exclude small larvae from penetrating and getting into the stem. Another good practice is to heap dirt over a section of vine every 3 to 4 feet as the vines grow. This will encourage the plants to root into the soil at those spots and that will help the overall plant survive even if you lose a portion of it to SVBs. Other practices you can employ at this level is the use of moth traps (available at online companies that special in organic gardening solutions), barrier products like Surround (kaolin clay) and the planting of insectary plants to attarct beneficial insects. Finally, your third level involves the use of certain materials and practicers to directly 'attack' SVBs that are already present in/around your garden. This includes the use of botanical insecticides like BT 'Kurstaki', spinosad, pyrethrum and DE. However, for the most part, these are only effective if you use them before the larvae penetrate the stems. Once they are inside the stems, you have to slit the stems and remove them and destroy them. Then you bury the slit portion of the stem and water well the next few days so the stem can heal and re-root and hopefully survive. You can apply beneficial nematodes too. You can mix them with water and apply them to the ground following package directions (they are most effective if applied in early to mid-Spring) and they should attack and kill any pupae/larvae they find in the soil. You also can inject them into infested plant stems. You can inject Bt 'kurstaki' in the same way. You can spray your plants with Bt 'kurstaki' weekly, and you can spray weekly with insecticidal soap to smother eggs before they hatch. You also can rub a damp cloth up and down the plant stems once or twice a week (I wear disposable latex gloves when doing this) to remove eggs before they can hatch. You can spray the plants weekly with a botanically-derived pesticide like spinosad, pyrethrum or neem but if you use these, be careful with your timing so you don't hurt the bees and other pollinators. You can use rotenone but its use is strongly discouraged because of research that links it to health problems. You should watch your plants carefully, checking them every couple of days for SVB eggs. Be sure to check the leaf stems because often they are laid there. Remove any destroy/dispose of any eggs your find. To a certain extent you can control squash vine borers by selecting plants that are less susceptible to them. In order of preference from highest to lowest preference, the SVBs prefer C. maxima, C. pepo, C. moschata and C. agrgyrosperma (formerly known as mixta). The C. maxima group includes the following kinds of squashes: hubbard, buttercup, Australian blue, turban, banana, zapalito, mammoth (giant) exhibition squashes and a few miscellanous ones that don't fall into any of those groups. Some common maximas include Jarrahdale, Queensland Blue, Triamble, Guatemalan Blue Sibley, Pink Banana and Blue Banana, any variety of Buttercup, Golden Hubbard, Green Hubabard, Red Warty Thing (aka Victor), Dill's Atlantic Giant, Jaune Gros de Paris, Cindarella (aka Rogue Vif d'Etampes) Turk's Turban, Marina di Chioggia, Lumina, Valencia, Fortna White, Georgia Candy Roaster and Galeuse d'Eysines. C. pepo includes virtually all summer squash (crookneck, straightneck, scallop), acorn squash, Halloween-type pumpkins, nonedible ornamental gourds, zucchini and vegetable marrows like spaghetti squash. The C. pepo group includes Howden, Lady Godiva, Jack-B-Little, Connecticut Field Pumpkin and all other orange pumpkins, Winter Luxury Pie, Table Queen and all similar acorn squash, all Delicata squash, all scalloped/pattypan squash like White Bush Scallop and Benning's Green Tint, Early Prolific Straightneck and all other straightneck and crookneck types, Spaghetti Squash, Golden Zucchini, Costa Romanesco, Cocozelle, etc. C. moschata includes all the tropical pumpkins, cheese pumpkins, neck pumpkins and japonica pumpkins. Some of the more well-known moschatas are Seminole, Long Island Cheese, Musquee' de Provence, Lunga di Napoli, Golden Cushaw, Japanese Black Futtsu, and Yokohama. Here in Oklahoma, none of the moschata I've grown have been bothered by SVBs. C. Argyrosperma (formerly known as C. mixta) includes squashes grown primarly for their seeds and includes most neck pumpkins. These include Green-Striped Cushaw, Jonathan, Japanese Pie Pumpkin (which isn't actually used for pies, by the way), and Tennessee Sweet Potato (which, despite its name is a squash and not a sweet potato). There is a class of wild squash (C. foetidissima) that SVBs generally ignore. I've never had SVBs attack my melons or cucumbers although some people say they do. I would assume the same practices used to control them on squashes and pumpkins could be used on other cucurbits. In my garden, the SVBs always seem to go for the yellow straightneck or crookneck squash and don't bother the zucchini types nearly as much. In the C. pepo group I usually grow Golden Zucchini, Costata Romanesco and Cocozelle and rarely have SVB issues with them. Dawn