A friend of mine is a dog breeder in Puerto Rico and lives right next to the jungle. For years she had serious tick infestations and had to use Frontline for her dogs constantly. This past year she started spraying a garlic spray called Mosquito Barrier in her yard once a month and the problem ended immediately. She has not even had to put a single dose of frontline on her dogs since she started. She didn't mention mosquitos, but garlic spray certainly worked for her when it came to fleas and ticks. With summer right around the corner, I am planning on buying some for my land today. Also, about guineas, before we moved onto our land we put some adolescent guineas on it in a strong dog kennel, planning to release them when we were living on the land 24/7. Within a week the coyotes had eaten all 25 of them, they had pried through the chain link. Of course, our land already had coyotes so I can't say they attracted prey animals but the guineas were certainly defenseless from them. Here is a link that might be useful: Garlic Spray

I just sent the following email t the manufacturers of the Worm Factory. Following is their not very satisfactory response: I am a fairly new user of a Worm Factory (the real one, I think), but not new to worm composting. I am now on my third tray, and here are the issues I am experiencing: The lid, which sits inside the working bin allows rain water to get into the the bins. The bottom two layers are getting very compacted - about 50% and The finished compost is very wet, almost a clay consistency due to the heavy infiltration of rain. It is very annoying that I need to invent a lid to prevent these issues - I bought a factory made system so that it would not look slap-dash! Question: Is there a good way to dry the mucky bottom layers out? Is there any value in putting some sort of spacer, or stop between the trays to limit the compression? I am only on my third tray but see an awful lot of compression in the lower levels. (some of it due to the weight of the saturate top two trays...) Is there an aesthetically pleasing way to keep the rain out? For the price I did not expect to have this problem. ------------------ And the company's response: "Thanks for the email. I apologize for the issues you've been having. The standard Worm Factory is not meant to sit outside in the rain and if kept outside it needs to be placed somewhere will it not be soaked, like under an overhang or shed. It seems all your issues may be stemming from this. Moisture is an important aspect to be controlled in worm composting, and having your bin soaking wet is no good. The compost should be moist to the touch, but not dripping wet. The best way to dry out the bin is to put some dry sheets of paper down to soak up some of that excess moisture. You do not want to put spacers between the trays as they should be resting directly on top of each other. The reason for this is that the worms can't jump between the top level of compost on the tray below to the tray above, the holes on the bottom of the top tray need to be physically touching the top layer of compost on the bottom tray for the worms to climb through. Unfortunately, the standard Worm Factory was not meant to sit outside in the rain. We did release a newer model, the Worm Factory 360, which comes with a moderately weather proof lid that hangs over the edge of the top tray, and a redesigned base. However, we do not sell the individual components of our models."

I'm sorry that the link I provided doesn't take credit cards - I suggest Googling for the item and finding another vendor that does if you don't have a Paypal account. May I offer another perspective on the Lyme Disease crisis? I know that many people really feel that a diagnosis of Lyme is a devastating, life-altering, health issue. I don't know them so I can't dispute their beliefs or health status, but I can state that I have had Lyme and been treated for it (twice) with a course of oral doxycycline, both times successfully and I do not have any long-term issues. My poor DH had neurological Lyme (positive spinal tap and Bell's palsy) and he was also successfully treated without long-term consequences, though in his case it required a PIC line and 30 days of very expensive IV antibiotics. In my rural, farming neighborhood, nearly everybody has had Lyme, at least once. We live in the upper Hudson Valley in a Lyme "hotspot". I find feeding ticks on me at least dozen or more times each year, despite fairly rigorous anti-tick behavioral precautions. (I use no sprays or insecticides on either myself or clothing.) I do keep doxy on hand to take prophylactically (single 200 mg dose) if I find a tick I don't know, for certain, has only been on me for a few hours. (That strategy has always worked well until the advent of Anaplasmosis which can be transmitted much earlier on. It is unknown how much time is needed for Anaplasmosis, unlike Lyme which needs a bite of 18-24 hours duration. In the case of the bite where I got Anaplasmosis, the tick could only have been on me less than 6 hours, and probably only biting me a good deal fewer hours.) If you live in a tick area you might consider discussing post-bite prevention antibiotics with your MD. (And as a side note unlike some drugs which can lose potency over time, doxy both loses potency and becomes toxic. So, please, don't use old doxycycline, ever.) Since I expect to encounter ticks, daily, I only rarely discover a tick that could possibly have been on me more than a few hours. (Example 21 bites last year, but only a single instance when I didn't know for sure that there was no way it could have been on more than 6 hours. And even though I took the preventive doxy for it, it was not a matter of having missed one after being out, just a failure to do a tick check prior to going out for the day.) Which brings me to my most important strategy suggestion: If you live in a tick area, or plan to go to one: do a thorough tick check BEFORE (or daily in the am in my case where I live in tick-hell) you go out. This gives you a tick-free starting point to age any subsequent bite. I also change out of my outdoor clothes after being in the woods or gardening as soon as I come inside. I never sit on the couch, or a bed, or on a rug in tick-exposed clothes - in fact I won't even sit down, except in the bathroom, in tick-exposed clothes. I wear tall boots (Wellies) for much of the year. I have separate outdoor coats for going out into tick areas and going to the grocery store. I routinely tuck all my layers in carefully: undervest into panties, turtleneck (with cuffs!) into pants, shirt into trousers, etc. I find only very thick socks will stop tiny nymph ticks, so I don't bother much tucking pant legs into socks. Working in my woodlot, I wear Carhardt bib overalls with slightly over-long legs that slop over my shoes. I never, ever, wear shorts, or sandals, or a skirt in a tick area unless I am prepared to be there for only a few minutes and then go in and strip down for a full tick check. My late Mother who was an ornithologist (wildlife biologist who specializes in birds), made for herself one-piece, zip-front overalls because she worked in very tick-infested areas of the world (with a whole different set of virulent tick-borne diseases.) I've been thinking of digging out her patterns and seeing if I can make myself some lightweight ones for summer this year as I anticipate being even more exposed than usual. I had to give up one of my most-cherished daily activities: walking out in the early morning with my cup of OJ to see what had come up overnight in my garden because I usually did this in my long nightgown. Ticks just adore hopping on to flannel and then hiding in the seams only to come crawling out the next night in my bed! Notwithstanding my fairly elaborate anti-tick strategies, I want to point out that a tick bite, even a diagnosis of Lyme disease, is not necessarily an enormous health crisis. True, some people seem to find themselves engaged in protracted issues, but most people do not. There is a substantial, and thriving, cottage industry promoting long-term Lyme disease problems. Ordinary, straight forward, evidence-based, medical care in most cases is more than sufficient. Don't assume that just because you've heard of Lyme horror stories that long-term problems will inevitably happen to you. And in the case of Anaplasmosis, what I am recovering from just now, there is NO known case of long-term, or chronic, infections. In researching it after I got out of the hospital, I found many of the so-called "Lyme-Aware" websites lumping all tick-borne diseases into the chronic-crisis viewpoint. But deep research into the medical literature at a medical library refutes this. One person who I encountered recently in my effort to get the word out about the presence of Anaplasmosis (someone really promoting the whole chronic-Lyme thing) told me that my high post-disease Anaplasmosis antibody level was "proof" of the disease remained lurking, insufficiently treated, in my body. Um, no, the antibodies show my own system's response to the infection and its state of being able, now, to better defend against it in the future. This is how vaccines work! I suggest taking a good deal of the chronic Lyme online information with a healthy dose of skepticism. Your own primary care doc can take care of you quite well in the case of Lyme. You don't necessarily need to be treated by a so-called Lyme-Literate physician. Do daily tick checks (at least 2X day); decide on some family strategies for minimizing the risk of bringing ticks in on clothing to drop off in the house; consider getting a script for prophylactic doxycycline for tick bites of unknown length; put Frontline on your pets if they go out; get any tick off completely and promptly and without squashing it while doing so; clean the bite with hydrogen peroxide or Betadine; lay in a supply of Benadryl topical cream if you, like me, get very itchy on the third day after a bite; take the 14 or more likely, 30-day, course of treatment if you develop any a tick-borne illness and don't make yourself too crazy over the highly-promoted, but remote, potential of long-term illness. It's not inevitable, nor even, likely. Please note: I am not saying that some people don't develop long-term illness from tick-bites, just pointing out that there is considerable hype, and a lot of misinformation, out there related to Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses. I urge you to keep in mind that most people do not have any serious problems. And I really don't want to dispute Alisande, someone who I respect a great deal. But I don't agree that the treatment protocols are confused. In the case of Lyme and Anaplasmosis, (the only two I have personal experience with)they are pretty straight forward. When my husband was diagnosed with neurological Lyme (a stage worse than "simple" Lyme), I checked out various so-called Lyme-Literate medical practices. Some were so obviously doing "wallet-biopsies" on prospective patients that my alarm bells went off. As Alisande says most won't take conventional insurance or Medicare, require significant up-front cash payments and there's substantial uncertainty whether their treatments are any more effective than standard care. We opted for standard care and even at that advanced stage, it was a complete cure for him. What is very effective against the risk of of all tick-borne diseases is: personal vigilance (daily, careful tick checks); prophylaxis of some bites; and recognition and prompt treatment of any illness. In the case of three of the four possible tick-borne diseases in the NE (Lyme, Anaplasmosis, Erlichiosis and Babeseosis) doxycyline treatments of varying lengths are the cure for the early-stage disease. Only Babesiosis requires different antibiotic regimen. HTH, L.

"What triggered this catastrophe?" Let me count the ways. 1. Too much food. 2. Compounded by Waaaaay too little bedding. 3. Further compounded by 107F! 4. As luck would have it a Black Solider Fly Larvae found a perfect place to lay her eggs. 5. As her cute litter buggers grew they ate all the food the worms had not gotten to yet. This quickly released a lot of moisture into the bin. 6. The wet hay and rabbit droppings sealed oxygen from the bin. 7. The moisture turned acidic and released volatile things. 8. Leaving little oxygen or more likely a build up of carbon dioxide in the bin. 9. One worm sub-combed first adding its body moisture to the volume. Then two. Then four. ... On the negative side. Expect to do this again. Don't ask how I know. On the plus side you are now the proud owner of a well functioning Black Solider Fly Larvae Bin. BSFL will eat more faster. BSFL can handle more heat. BSFL are free to you. BSFL want to work for you. They volunteered! Some people feel BSFL are cuties and have more personality than worms. But pay no mind to poster Darth 5. Maybe these are your people: http://blacksoldierflyblog.com/forum/ Here is a link that might be useful: That Was Easy!