"The paper today said that homeowners should be raking and discarding all their leaves and removing any dry garden debris." thats standard procedure over here in fire prone areas at the start of the fire season. The idea is to remove anything dry that might provide fuel for the fire, particularly around the vicinity of the house and buildings because if you get a fire coming close then all it takes is some embers or sparks to set that dry fuel alight. I guess it's up to you but if you do get a fire coming through then every little thing you do to halt the fire could mean the difference between losing your house or possibly saving it. "I normally do my spring-clean up starting in mid-February, but it takes me 2-3 months to get everything cut back and cleaned up - and you can't even imagine the piles of clippings I generate." just my opinion, it's best not to do that pruning right now which will only generate more potential dry material. I would leave it until the end of the fire season and then prune away, that way you wont lose all that compostable material but you wont have piles of drying material lying around either.

My mom Lives about straight between you and I Trudy,she got nearly two inches of rain, and had some big branches come down, Not on any Hosta though. Or should I say it didn't damage them. Some of the branches were across plants,but never touched. I had to get the chainsaw out and the Tractor to drag branches to the never ending burn pile ! the second I get rid of them by burning, I get a new pile to stack up for the next fire...

Laura, There is some reason you have spider mites in such large numbers then. It wouldn't have to be that you specifically are using pesticides. It could be that you're in an area of town where pesticide use is heavy (or, even worse, the city sprays pesticides to kill mosquitoes and wipe out lots of beneficials in the process) and that wipes out the beneficial insect population that normally helps keep the spider mites under control. I had a lot more trouble in town where neighbors were big pesticide users. Out here in the middle of nowehere, pesticide use is way down compared to what it was in town (except in a bad grasshopper year when the ranchers spray like mad) but herbicide use is up. It also could be you get nitrogen runoff from overfertilized yards if you're in town and your land has rainwater run across it from elsewhere. There's lots of possibilities. I just know that every time someone tells me they have massive spider mites, something is out of balance in their own little ecosystem. The reason plants that are overfed nitrogen are so appealing to certain pests is because they are high in carbs and sugar. That's why too much nitrogen is bad, and I avoid it for that reason. The reason pesticides hurt is because they wipe out the beneficial insects. It could be you have a low population of beneficials for a reason that isn't your fault or too much nitrogen for the same reason. I'm not saying it is the fault of the gardener that spider mites show up, but just that certain practices allow them to get out of control. Because none of us has a protective bubble covering the air space over our property, we are affected by what people around us do. Several years ago in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, some cities went crazy spraying for mosquitoes because of the West Nile virus. Horrible things happened. Organic gardeners who'd spent years building up a good population of beneficial insects lsot them. People who had fish in lily ponds, and some of them were very expensive koi, lost them. Those folks weren't doing anything wrong--they and their ecosystem just were negatively impacted by someone else's action. It happens all the time. Several years ago during a severe grasshopper outbreak, ranchers sprayed seemingly nonstop to combat the grasshoppers, and we lost many songbirds including all the local bluebirds. I wasn't spraying anything, but noticed a definite decrease in bird numbers because birds travel from place to place. Think of your garden as an ecosystem. In a healthy ecosystem, everything stays more or less in balance and no one insect becomes too dominant. That's because every insect pest is eaten by some other one (or by birds, toads, etc.) and every insect eats something or someone. So, if everything is in balance, no particular insect gets out of control and overpopulates. When something, like spider mites, runs amok, there's some reason why. The key is to analyze it and figure out what is out of balance. I have a perfect example from our garden. This year we moved the potatoes out of the main garden and into an unfenced auxiliary area. It seemed to be working just fine, until I realized that every time I hilled up the potatoes, the hens got in there and did their 'digging and scratching' looking for bugs and un-hilled the potatoes. So, I hammered some fence stakes into the ground and put a 3' tall chicken wire fence around the potatoes. Just a couple of days later we had a huge explosion in the population of Colorado Potato Beetles, which normally aren't a problem for us. I hand-picked them forever, but was wondering what was 'out of balance'. Well, first I moved them from an area where they'd grown forever and it is likely the beneficials that feed on potato beetles were still over there in the big garden waiting for the CPBs to show up. In the meantime, 20 or 30' away, the CPBs were in a garden with a low population of beneficials. One night, as I was leaving the potato garden, there was an agitated turtle trying to get in. A light bulb went off in my head. Every year that turtle lives in the potato bed and probably was eating CPBs. Because I'd fenced him AND the chickens out, nothing was in my potato garden eating the CPBs. So, I opened the gate and let him in. I also have let the chickens back in on a limited basis. They seem to be controlling the CPBs again, and I've been reminded that the beneficial garden helpers have to be able to do their jobs. If I move a crop away form the beneficials, I have to take care of the pests myself until beneficials can relocate themselves to the new area. Whenever I have an issue with pests that I normally don't have, if I think about it, I can figure out what has changed. This year we have grasshoppers galore. Normally they aren't a huge problem, but this year they are. What changed? Four-legged predators killed off our 30 guineas last year and we made a conscious decision to not replace them this year in case predators are hanging around wanting to eat them again this year. (We're going to get some again next year.) Since one guinea can eat up to two pounds of grasshoppers a day, that means we're really missing those guineas and it shows in the huge numbers of hoppers we're seeing this year. This probably would have been a bad hopper year anyway, but not having the guineas has made it worse. I have noticed the songbirds are hanging out in the garden more this year and I assume they're bug-hunting while in there. I don't know exactly what it is, but for some reason, you seem to be lacking the beneficial insects that eat spider mites. The solution is to buy and release some or try to attract some. All I did the first three years here was work to improve the soil and to attract beneficials and build up their population. Once I achieved that, the pest problems diminished considerably. I use a few 'tricks' to help me manage the spider mites, and I'll talk about them tomorrow. Dawn

The Red Flag Fire Warning expired.