A few years back, I opened an account with BlueHost.com and registered www.thekitchengardener.com I deluded myself into thinking that I could earn some ad revenue by posting gardening related content and showing ads through Google AdSense. I posted a series of long articles and had plans to host a discussion forum and even make my own movies. I maintained the site for almost a year, but never got enough hits to earn more than a few measly bucks from Google. It finally dawned on me one day that the basic problem is that the Web is up to its eyeballs in content. Youtube was just taking off at the time, piling massive amounts of video on top of all the other content already available. In order to stand out, you've got to do something really unique, or work like heck to develop your own mountain of content. All's well that ends well though. I registered another domain with BlueHost to start selling custom kitchen knife blocks (woodworking is my OTHER favorite hobby besides gardening!), which so far has been far more lucrative than selling ads on a gardening site. A few months ago I accidentally uploaded my knife block pages to thekitchengardener.com - woops! I haven't even bothered to fix it. :-) Anyway, I'm not trying to discourage you, just sharing my personal experience. If you're looking for a hosting company, I would have no problem recommending BlueHost. They are reasonably priced ($90/year if I remember correctly), offer a lot of extra tools to run scripts, monitor usage, etc. etc. Their tech support department has been helpful on the few times I've needed to contact them. The other nice thing about going with a hosting company is that you get your own email addresses - lots of them! I think I can create like 1,000 email accounts or something crazy like that. I only use 2. :-) For software, I use FrontPage. It took some time to get used to, but I quite like it now. I try to keep my websites simple anyway, so I only use a fraction of what FrontPage can do, but I don't like tedious tasks so using an editor is much more convenient for me than coding HTML by hand. FrontPage has recently been replaced by SharePoint Designer, which I have used once or twice. From what I can see it looks pretty similar to FrontPage. Also note that if you want all the flexibility of a hosted solution but don't want to pay a hosting company, you can host it yourself. Recipe: 1) Download a VMWare virtual appliance containing Apache web server. Also download VMWare Server to run it on. Both are free. 2) Configure your cable modem/DSL router to pass port 80 traffic to your virtual webserver. 3) Register a subdomain with a dynamic DNS provider. Most of them will work with dynamic IP addresses (DHCP), and are usually free. You can alternatively see if you can get a fixed IP address from your ISP (they will probably charge extra for this) and then point your domain to that address. This is all free, but there will be a pretty steep learning curve if you're not technical. -Diggity

Karyn, just sprinkle a like Comet on top of the soil in your iris bed and those little borers will go away! We go throught 7 large cans in the spring as we have a lot of the poor man's orchids!!

I just want to tell you THANKS! for the awesome job you did on my page! It looks so cool, I love it!! I won't forget you in the spring =) Thanks a lot! I recommend you to anyone!

This year I found my first borer in 6 years. Back then I sprayed with Cygon. Since then I have done a super fall and spring cleanup. Removing all dead leaves and weeds. If I would try Merit used for lawn grub control. Put it on in late Febuary or early March plus the cleanup. It needs to be applied before the iris start spring growth. Mike G