Gardening is really eye-opening to how many different insects we share the world with, isn't it? Don't worry, of all the insects you encounter out there only a relative handful are pests to our vegetables. You'll get familiar with them pretty fast. So, just about any caterpillar can be treated with Bt, so that's most of the list you've encountered so far. You can grt it in a powder form for dusting plants (Dipel) or in a liquid concentrate for mixing up sprays (Safer Thuricicde e.x.). Those are organic, if that is important to you, and very effective. Also think about row covers maybe. I find it better to identify actual pest problems and then deal with them than try to be proactive and get ready for all the possible pests that might arrive. For example, we usually have a moderate cabbage looper problem but not this year. So, I'm glad I didn't spend the time dusting those this spring to prevent caterpillars that weren't there anyway. As for the SVB, well, there are a several discussions on this here. Using the search function should bring those up. Anyway, tomaotes, peppers, and okra... Sounds like some good eating coming your way!

Greetings Jenny! Its always good to see a fellow proponent of organic gardening. A few questions that may lead to possible suggestions: Have you taken full advantage of microlife? You are using organic ferts which is great, but to get the greatest advantage of organics over salt ferts you need to have strong microlife living in your growing medium (dirt). This includes beneficial aerobic bacteria (which you most likely have covered due to your ingenious oxygenated organic teas) and most importantly Mycorrhizae fungus. The fungus lives symbiotically with your plants by making a mycylem network throughout your grow medium and then fruiting directly on the roots themselves. The fungus chelates all of the minerals to make them more readily available to the plant and in exchange is fed with excess carbohydrates that are shed from the roots as a normal byproduct of their growth. The fungus also buffers your PH and acts as a front-line immune system. If you get a good and diverse set of microlife going it can even keep down multi-celled pests. Bugs like gnats, whitefly and the like all have a part of their life cycle where they fly down to the medium and plant some sort of egg. The eggs will be attacked and digested by particularly vigorous microlife before they get a chance to hatch. Getting this kind of microlife while heavily employing unnatural salt ferts is virtually impossible. If you haven't employed something similar already, I would highly reccomend Hydro Organics Rooter's Mycorrhizae Super Pack as a great source of dormant spores to give your micro-life a kick-start. A less advanced but easier to find alternative is Espoma's Bio Tone Starter Plus, which is an organic fertilizer mix (4-3-3) that contains a small variety of Mycorrhizae spores and dormant aerobic bacteria. You can find it at Lowe's, its great stuff. You also mentioned using an aquarium air pump and stone to oxygenate your tea which is an awesome idea, but have you considered that similar pumps and stones may work even better when aerating your growing medium constantly? This kind of setup supercharges your microlife and provides huge quantities of oxygen to your plants' root systems, allowing them to take up nutrients far more readily. Getting it right is a bit more complicated then an old-fashioned pot of dirt, but is nowhere near the complexity of hydroponic setups from which the concept is stolen. I've outlined the process to a fair degree of detail in my own grow diary over in the tomato section, I've included a link to it if you are interested. Oh, and one last thing. Something that gave me trouble and could be effecting you under that massive 1000 watt HID lamp: I found that my growing medium tended to dry out quite rapidly under these sorts of powerful lamps. A good way to lock in moisture and reflect a lot of that energy is to put a 1/2 to 1 inch thick layer of pearlite on top of the medium. However, your rapidly expanding foliage may soon make it a moot point :) Good luck and happy gardening! Here is a link that might be useful: My indoor tomato diary

Thank you so much! Spring migration keeps me so busy taking more photos, I've been getting far behind. Every time we stop by the Minor Clark Fish Hatchery we see something different 4-25-10, Minor Clark Fish Hatchery, Solitary Sandpiper From April 23, 2010 birds plus we spent the weekend camping and birding at the Kentucky Ornithological Society's spring meet at Jenny Wiley State Park, so tons MORE photos to sort, edit

javara is a very legit and safe program we have used and recommended it for years on the help forums. the old ones can be removed manually but using javara just makes it easy and gets some that you may miss manually. any versions you show other than the latest version can be removed. Java has recently added a feature that is supposed to remove the old version it is replacing but they never put out anything that would remove the versions prior to that so it is not surprising to see some very old versions still listed on older pcs. How I would proceed, do the update from the java icon on the pc, that should provide you with 7-7, then run javara and let it remove all other versions it finds.