As far as ants go...I was able to purchase the last bag of diazanon granuals at a local nursery the year that it was put on the banned list. I sprinkle a little on the ant hill as if I was salt and peppering it and the next day when I come back to see, there is no sign of any ants. All dead. With our acreage being on the top of the valley I find that there are a lot of ants that think that living in the valley just isn't good enough anymore and need to find a new home on my acreage somewhere. Each year in the middle of July I will find a migration of ants happening. Two nights ago I saw one batch of red ants going east to west across the yard and the night before that one group of 1/2 red, 1/2 black ants going from the northwest to the southeast. The ants will carry eggs with them and seem to know exactly where they are going. If I step in their way they go around me and keep on going, even if I step in the way of the leaders. There are thousands and thousands of them, making a foot wide path and they seem to be on a mission because they are going as fast as their little legs can carry them. It is very interesting to watch. The other night I followed the last ant across the yard and into the bush on the other side. Boy, do they go a long ways...and who knows where they started from. Here I have all sizes of ants from the iddy biddy to the large carpenter (I think) ants, and colors from red to black. The large ones have put occasional holes into the wooden tree stepping stones that my DH cut for me to use as a pathway. Diazanon works for them too. Brenda

There was some kind of mint growing in the backyard of one of my previous homes and it definitely grew like a weed. Last year I got a free Orange Mint plant with an online plant order. Because I was afraid to put it in the flower bed for fear it would take over, I put it in a pot in a sunny windowsill. Forgot to water it for a few days and it fried to a crisp. This year I received some Spearmint seeds with an herb seed order I made, and I wintersowed them in a container. I still don't think I want it in my flower beds, but maybe I'll just leave it in a container outside. I'm not really sure what to use it for though, any suggestions?

Interesting. And possible. The mint plants due have a strong smell on their own and it might be something that the knats don't like. Makes me wish I still had my mint plant out in the herb bed. I'd be willing to try it as long as it's not going to bother the worms. They seems to not like pungent smells though. I wonder if anyone else has tried feeding anything else that's rather fragrant. I've hesitated in putting my fresh herb cuttings in there thinking they might not go over so well.

Hazel, Hmmm, I have rarely seen aphid molt. I guess the ladybugs eat them before they live long enough to molt. Honestly, we have almost too many ladybugs--they try to come into the house to overwinter. I let them stay in the mudroom but they cannot come any further into the house or I vacuum them up and dump them back outdoors, so instead they overinter in the insulated barn-style garage and in the greenhouse, which is great since I have some plants overwintering in the greenhouse every year. I feel like once you get a good ladybug population established (and it has begun...because you have ladybugs in the garden), the aphids are a very brief problem and then the ladybugs gobble them up and that is that. If the damage to the foliage is not too extensive, the tomato plants will put out new foliage within the next couple of weeks and should survive. If the the damage is too severe, they won't. It really is a case of just waiting and watching and seeing what happens. I'm sorry the homemade soap spray damaged your tomato plants. I see that all the time here in southern OK, even as early as March if we are having high temperatures in the 90s, which happens occasionally (we even hit the 90s on a day or two in February this year). Our sunlight and heat are just too intense for homemade soap sprays to be successfully used without a high risk of damage, especially on tomato foliage which is very tender and easily damaged by many things. If I have to use insecticidal soap at all, I use a commercially prepared one. They are made in a way that their droplets of soap are smaller and less likely to damage anything. Still, because soaps can cause damage, I rarely use a soap spray when we are hitting highs any higher than 80 degrees, and I rarely use one in the sunshine. If I have to use soap sprays, I use them in the evening after the garden is shaded by adjacent trees, and I don't use them often. I can, in fact, go years without using a soap spray. Really, with most insects, if I cannot handpick and drown them, snip them in half with scissors, or kill them with an organic bait (like SlugGo Plus for snails, slugs, pillbugs, sowbugs and cutworms or Semaspore for grasshopper nymphs), I just leave them alone and let them be about 99.9% of the time. If I am patient, the beneficial insects, toads, frogs, birds, lizards, turtles, etc. will eat a majority of the pest insects for me. Some things, like stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are hard to catch and kill and I don't like to spray broad-spectrum insecticides (not even organic ones), so I just do the best I can with those. Sometimes I can snip a stink bug or leaf-footed bug in half with my garden scissors, but a lot of the time they get away from me. With the similar squash bugs, I keep a lint roller in my garden tool bucket and roll it over them, picking them up with it. Then I quickly peel that part of the lint roller paper off the roller and wrap it around them, firmly entrapping them, and I put them in a trash can with a lid so they cannot escape if they somehow manage to get free of the lint roller paper. Rainy years are always more challenging. I haven't used Miracle Grow on any plants yet, but I wouldn't hesitate to use it if the constant rainfall starts keeping the plants from taking up nutrients with their roots. Sometimes a good foliar feeding will help struggling plants, whether you use MG, Liquid Kelp, Fish Emulsion, Compost Tea, Garrett Juice (more as a plant tonic than a fertilizer) or whatever. Once your soil is more well-established and has the right level of biological activity in the soil, your organic fertilizers will be adequate to support great plant health, growth and productivity most years. There's a terrific book by Jeff Gilman about what truly works in organic gardening. It is called "The Truth About Organic Gardning: Benefits, Drawbacks and The Bottom Line". I really like this book. It was published in 2008 but I didn't read it until a couple of years ago. I had gardened 99.9% organically since 1999 (and even before that I didn't use synthetic pesticides more than maybe once a year and didn't like them either) so felt I understood organic gardening pretty well already, but really enjoyed the book anyway as it helped me understand some of the science behind some common organic practices. I like his scientific approach to studying organic practices to see what actually does work and what doesn't work and I like his explanations about why some things work and others don't seem to. Before I got the book, I was concerned that maybe he was sort of anti-organic, as many other university horticulture professors seem to be, but he isn't. His explanations on every topic in the book just blow me away in their thoroughness and in the way he looks at all sides of an issue. I really love this book, and have been meaning to get his other book and read it too. One section early in this book really gave me a lot of food for thought. It was subtitled "How organic is organic enough?" and made me rethink some long-held beliefs. From the first day we broke ground here (and, lol, we broke ground for our first garden here a year before the builder broke ground to build the house), my primary focus always has been on building healthy soil. If you focus on building healthy soil that is rich in organic matter, all your other garden problems become minor issues. However, building healthy soil takes time, especially if you are doing it in drought years when there is very little moisture. It took me a good ten years to get our soil to the point that I really was happy with its improvement, and at least half those years were horrendous drought years when nothing I did seemed to keep the garden as happy and as productive as I wanted it to be. (Rain does make a huge difference, as does the absense of rain.) Conversely, without healthy soil teeming with microbes, it is hard to have a healthy organic garden. I have focused so long on feeding the soil and letting the soil feed the plants that it is hard for me to suggest to someone that maybe there are times when a synthetic fertilizer would be beneficial, but there are times when it is....and your situation is likely to be one of them. I used Miracle Grow liquid fertilizer without hesitation in our early years here when the soil wasn't yet in good shape and didn't feel bad about it. I still use the Miracle Grow Moisture Control soil-less mix for growing on seedlings (after starting them in a sterile, soil-less mix) and I use it in all my containers at times, though I still add all the rotted wood and leaf mold and compost that I can to the containers as well. (Growing in containers is an entirely different process from growing in the ground, so you have to adapt your practices accordingly,and I learned that slowly and the hard way over many years of growing in containers.) In 2007 we had so much rain that my plant roots stayed waterlogged, and it was foliar feeding with Miracle Grow that saved the tomato and pepper plants and gave us a harvest that summer. Otherwise, I think we would have gotten almost nothing from the constantly-waterlogged garden. At that point, our soil was not in the fine condition that the soil in the raised beds now is in. Last year, we had more than twice as much rain as we had in 2007 (78" versus 2007's 37" or 38"), and the soil is so much better now that I didn't have the same issues with plant roots being too clogged with water to function properly and I didn't have to foliar feed with anything. It is amazing what a difference a few more years of soil improvement has made. Oh, and I should clarify---it wasn't that the rainfall was so heavy overall in 2007 as our rainfall barely was average for the year overall, it is just that so much of it fell in late spring and early summer all at once that the heavy moisture overwhelmed the plant roots). If I learned anything at all from last year's flooding and constant moisture, it was that we finally, maybe, had the soil I'd been working so hard to achieve, in all ut the newest raised beds (and they still have a long way to go). Every year has its own challenges. In a drought year, as long as I water with soaker hoses or drip irrigation lines, I never have to use a fungicide at all---not a synthetic one and not an organic one. The challenge in that sort of year isn't foliar disease like it is in a very wet year, it is simply the lack of moisture, the often insane heat, and the traveling hordes of grasshoppers that fly in from adjacent fields and can strip a garden bare in just a day or two. You just deal with whatever happens in any given year, learn from that year, and use what you learned the next time we have a year with similar weather. One of the challenges of growing here is that one year we'll have hot weather and almost no rain and the next year it will be much milder and wetter and we almost forget what heat and drought can do to a garden. It seems we rarely have the same weather two years in a row, so often we're scrambling to deal with whatever Mother Nature throws at us. It keeps us on our toes. Dawn