Consider yourself blessed Michael. Probably has something to do with the low rainfall you get. Here's a short rundown of some of the garden pests I deal with: Corn- earworn is pretty intense. I have to religiously spray every three days. Also some kind of black bird tears open the ears and eats the top half. Green bean- Mexican bean beetle scars the beans up something terrible. I have to balance how much I spray, else the mites take over. Beets- nothing much but rabbits. They'll eat the tops down until the beets get big enough. Same with the green beans. Broccoli - Cabbage looper and diamond back moth are bad. If you want worm free broccoli, you pretty much have to stand over the plants with a sprayer. Tomato - easy care. We used to have a problem with hornworm when we lived in MO. We had to be real careful to pick them off, or they'd skeletonize the plants. Haven't seen many hornworms in KS. We do have a problem with early blight, so if we want tomatoes all season, we have to spray with chlorothalinil, or Ziram. Cucumber - no pests Squash and Pumkin - I've given up on them for now. The squash bugs and vine borers are thick, even with spraying. May try them next year after giving them a rest this year. Watermelon and Cantelope - we've never been able to produce a consistent good tasting melon. The storebought ones are always better. I had attributed it to our clay soil, but I'm wondering if the black plastic Don mentions might help the flavor. May give them another try in the future. We get most the usual pests for pome and stone fruit. Stink bugs are also a problem. Blackberries are easy for a lot of folks, but we have significant problems with red-necked cane borer and rasp. crown borer. Green June bugs also ate about 1/2 the ripe blackberries last summer. Strawberries get weevils. Maybe I need to buy a bunch of foggers and just fog the orchard continuously, there has to be some way to deliver more pesticides. I'm joking of course. We have rain in the forcast about every day next week. And me already behind on my spraying.

Yes. PT = Poncirus Trifoliata. I mixed some in with other dishes and some I ate by itself. It does have seeds, and it's a powerful taste. If you like bland fruit, I wouldn't recommend it. Part of it is that some friends have recommended PT as a rootstock, so PT is a "beach head" in the citrus area that may or may not develop by grafting on, say, yuzu, or Thomasville Citrangequat. We have had new record heat here each year for the last 3 years. I'm 52 and I've never seen something like this here, so it could develop that way too. John S PDX OR

Hi and congratulations on your new home. I would recommend starting with native trees and shrubs to start out with and fill in around those with native wildflower seeds and grasses. I personally love dogwood, red buds, and hawthorn trees planted around my house. I also love fringe trees too. Im not sure on what advice to give you on some nice large trees so i hope someone else can chime in on that. Some fast growing evergreen trees would be wonderful too for year round interest. Great shrubs would be red and black chokeberries, spicebush, american beautyberry (which looks wonderful with blackeyed susans and ironweed planted with it), there are alot of wonderful viburnums too. I love prunifolium as a small tree. All of these shrubs will produce berries for wildlife and birds. Also winterberry and native hollies are wonderful too. There are so many wonderful native plants for you to enjoy and good luck with your new land and have lots of fun, im so excited for you :-) Bonnie

Sharon, We have squirrels that do the exact same thing that you and Scott have noticed. There is one squirrel in particular who is a creature of habit and I will see him in the same spot in the yard at the same time about 6 days out of 7. I'd never realized they were such creatures of habit until I started watching him the last couple of years. We used to have a dog that chased the squirrels endlessly and she kept them completely out of the yard and away from the garden. Since her death a few years back, the squirrels have returned in full force, and our other dogs are too old and lazy to chase them out of the yard. 8maryann, I had a neighbor in Fort Worth who fought the squirrels hard like you do, and he even wrapped flashing on 8' of the trunk (he started with 2' and when that didn't work, he just kept adding it higher up the trunk) and the squirrels still got all his pecans most years. I think he finally decided they were sitting on the roof of his house and jumping to the trees. Based on the distance, you wouldn't think they could have made that far of a jump but they did. Blue jays are not as much of a problem for my pecan trees in the yard as they are for you, but we have about 10 acres of woodland to the north and west of the yard and there's a lot of native pecan trees in that woodland, so maybe the blue jays are eating those nuts. Pecans used to be a major crop in our county and some of the orchards had those canons that set off a blast of noise every so often to keep the birds and varmints out of the trees. I'm not sure if the noise from the cannons annoyed the squirrels and birds enough to keep them out of the trees, but the sound certainly annoyed some of us humans who had to listen to it all day long. I haven't heard one of those in years now, and I'm not complaining! I think the squirrels must just prefer the pecans to acorns because I won't see them gathering acorns in the fall until they've run out of pecans to find, eat and bury. With our fruit trees, the squirrels won't touch a plum at all until the peaches all have been harvested (by either us or the squirrels). Once the peaches are gone, it is open season on the plums. For whatever reason, squirrels seldom bother the figs, although various birds will eat the figs if they get a chance to do so. I put out cracked corn for the doves, and the crows come to eat it. Consequently, the crows don't seem to bother the pecans much. My favorite thing, though, is that being fed cracked corn makes the crows very territorial. That works to our advantage, because we let our chickens out of the fenced/roofed chicken run to free range for a portion of every day, Hawks try to prey upon our chickens, but the crows will relentlessly chase away the hawks all day long. In our case, the crows are the lesser of two evils, and probably are the reason we rarely lose a chicken to a hawk. Our native pecan trees produce relatively small nuts, but their flavor is superb, and I'd rather have them than larger nuts (with less flavor) from some of the commercial varieties of pecans. Dawn