I have been having very good luck injecting my pumpkin vines with BT. Takes a lot of vigilance and is time consuming, but it is working well.. I go out and look for entry points every two or three days and inject. I inject the BT at several points, both above and below the entry points, I have cut off a few leaves a couple of days after injecting and found the dead worms in the leaf stem, so it does work, it is just a challenge to keep up with and requires thorough coverage of the vines. The sections of the vine that have been damaged go from pale white back to green within a few days of injection, indicating the worm is dead and has stopped feeding.

Good to know the wrens are liking slugs as well as cutworms etc. I took copious pictures this morning of the fledging of five baby Carolina wrens from the pig flower pot sitting on my deck railing. Little downy heads and short tails, they navigated like drunken sailors. Yes, this year the Pig Family had FIVE BABIES. Over the last 6 weeks, I've watched the parents building the nest, then bringing an assortment of bugs and such, sometimes it seemed like they were showing me the prize catches, how could those little babies eat such big things!! Our lunch-time table and umbrella is within three feet of the nest (2nd year to use it) and I put a pot of bougainvillea in the corner to screen them from our threatened closeness. I feel so proud this morning. All is well with the world. Mother Nature is taking care of business.

A lot of people mistake other beetles for the Japanese Beetle. There is one beetle in particular that is very similar with similar feeding and appearance and is commonly mistake for them in Oklahoma. The Japanese Beetles are not widespread in Oklahoma and have only been here for a few years in the counties that have them now. There is a regularly updated list of counties and states that have them but I cannot recall the website name right now. I will look for it. After seeing some (I thought) I contacted the expert at OSU a few years ago and he told me that we very likely did not have them near me at that time. He provided a picture of a nearly identical one that is the one usually mistaken for them here and it turned out that this was exactly what I had. Since then they have turned up in a couple more Oklahoma counties and in larger numbers but still the northeast is the only area confirmed with them in this state according to the official national JB monitoring page.

You can use it any time. One reason to leave a compost pile alone and let it "cook" for a while is because the high temperatures reached internally in the pile kill diseases. Still, you can use it whenever you want.