I'd like to clarify something here. The Bayer Rose & Flower spray in the photo IS a systemic. That's rather unusual for a spray - most sprays only work on contact. This particular spray kills on contact, but it is also absorbed by the leaves, so that when any pests that didn't get sprayed start sucking on the plant's fluids, they get poisoned. From the photo, it looks like you have mealy, or perhaps it could be some sort of scale, or both. Doesn't matter. Mealy actually is a type of scale, so the treatment is the same regardless. jennie, your infestation looks pretty bad, so I would isolate this plant in another room for a month or so and wash your hands well after you handle it before tending to other plants. It is probably a good idea to unpot it, sterilize the pot, clean up the plant with alcohol, and then spray with the Rose & Flower spray. But at that point, I think you would be OK to repot with clean, new media and water as normal. You need to go back and respray at whatever intervals the directions say. I don't have mine handy, but I think it says something like spray 3 times, 7 to 10 days apart. The reason you want to do this is to make sure you kill all the generations of bugs. These guys reproduce very quickly, and the eggs and some stages of the scale life cycle are very resistant to pesticides. So you have to spray again to catch them after they hatch, or when they are juvenile crawlers, or whatever. Why didn't your other plants get it? The pests probably came in with your infected orchid, but they were small and only a few, so you didn't see them until the problem had escalated. I had an orchid from a good seller that sat in my dining room for months and suddenly broke out with mealy. Luckily, it hadn't joined my collection of 40-odd orchids yet, so the mealy didn't spread. But that's why a quarantine of a new plant is always a good thing. I would watch your existing plants carefully over the next year - the mealy may show up on them too. If you want to be extra careful, spray all your orchids, not just the infected one, or at least spray the ones that were next to it. Mealy and scale are tough opponents, but IF you follow the schedule on the spray bottle, you should triumph. Oh, and I would cut off the flower spike altogether while this is going on. The mealy are already stressing out your plant, the flowers are only requiring extra energy that it needs to fight the pests.

I have voles and possibly moles. I've seen the voles (mouse-like creatures) but I have loads of tunnels in the yard. So maybe that is a mole. Farm stores and big box home and garden stores have granules which are labeled non toxic and won't harm pets. You have to get the granules into the tunnels and water it in. My understanding is you water and do more granules going towards the end of your property lines, driving them away. To be honest, I did not want to fool with the watering part. There was also an earthworm-looking bait, it looked like a fake rubber earthworm, supposedly they eat it and it kills them. I didnt' want to use this becoz I have a small dog, and altho I don't think she would get into the tunnel and eat the earthworm bait, one never knows. And then poison bait not eaten will get into the environment. The next gizmos were solar-powered and battery-powered sonic emitters. The thing made a beep every 30 seconds, which I didn't like. So far I have decided not to intervene, becoz, while I have lots of tunnels, I don't see any plant damage, all my bulbs are up etc. So we are peacefully co-exisiting at the moment. Laurie

these are clovers. It's almost impossible to remove them one by one. I would simply remove a large patch of grass and weeds and replace that spot with new sod. However if the task is so huge, you could try increasing the nitrogen content of that particular spot by using high nitrogen fertilizers (use slow release). Be careful, high nitrogen fertilizers can burn grass so use slow release ones. It wil help reduce clover growth. I recall a patch in my yard not returning after such an increase of fertilizers.

The soil I garden in is sand, Lake Michigan beach sand, and adding any kind of soil, unless in extremely large amounts, is a waste of money since what ever soil you add will go in and attempt to fill in the pore spaces between the sand particles. Lots of organic matter, compost, shredded leaves, etc., is all that sand needs to fill in those pore spaces so both nutrients and moisture can be retained in that soil. I have seen people around here spend large sums of money on "topsoil" or "garden soil" to add to their sand only to see that washed in with little benefit long term. "Topsoil" is nothing more than the top 4 to 6 inches of soil from someplace and may be nothing more that what you already have with a bit more organic matter in it.