I'm uncertain what good you'd do by cutting the plants to the ground. Since the plants are new, you obviously had the bug in the neighborhood before the plants got there, so it's not like the bug will cease to exist because you cut your plants down. I'd just spray them and be done with it, but if you want to be organic, I suppose you can dust the plants with diatomatious earth, or spray them with neem oil.

Hi Any area that does not fall below freezing should be VERY careful with the stuff . It is illegal all over the deep south and all tropical countries . I frequently see it for sale in nurseries here in Florida though. Depend on how tough the state wants to get. They don't seem to enforce the laws at least here . Puerto Rico has some tough import laws but I would bet it covers the whole island lol. I keep it because I have never found a susstitute for keeping ponds algae free lol One question about it I've never found an answer to is does it produce viable seed?? Have two ponds less than 15 feet apart and it has never got from one to the other except by moving the plant. I redone an old pond in March and out of curiousity I've been keeping track of the reproduction rate . I placed 5 plants in it. To date I have removed 135 mature plants!!! How is that for invasive ??lol. It does an almost miraculous job of removing stuff from the water and of course the flowers are fantastic. gary

I tried the Mr. Clean magic eraser. It helped the tile a little, but not the grout. Next will be the straight bleach. I'll try to do it tomorrow with lots of fans in the windows because guess what? no exhaust fans :( The kitchen is getting there. We've used up about 4 Mr. Clean magic erasers in there on the cabinets. Seems to work better than most of the cleaning supplies like sprays and Lysol sanitizing and disinfecting wipes. Someone needs to buy stock in those considering all of them that we've gone through! I'm going ot try the TSP solution for the walls and I will probably go over the doors and door frames again with it (if it will not hurt them). Too bad I probably can't use it on the carpets. I believe the resin stuff--everything is sticky. Or was. We've taken down all the blinds and shoved them in the attic. It's amazing how filthy the windows were. My husband found a wasps nest inside the windows :( :( :( We are soooo focused on saving lots of money and moving to our Final Destination as we've begun to call it. Selling turned into a mini-nightmare and we're not eager to repeat the experience, so we're going to be rather picky with what we buy. We already have our neighborhood targeted =D Now time to search the cooking archives for advice on using our new convection microwave. I'm not cooking in that oven, don't care how clean I get it! Well, I say that now, but you guys know I will :) The hubby spent 3 hours scrubbing 2 racks. Too bad we couldn't just put them in some dewey grass-----HOA rules would prohibit it. Thank goodness for Dawn spray! Otherwise it might've taken 6 hours.

Tishtosh I can now only buy dress shirts at Brooks Brothers, because I can get a large neck and shoulders, very short sleeves and a relatively very narrow (for the neck size) waist. They are expensive, but less than custom, and probably less than buying a cheaper shirt and then getting them tailored properly Before, where I grew up there was a Japanese woman who would take my shirts apart at the shoulder, move the sleeves up, and taper the sides, and she did not charge like she was making a whole shirt. The first time I tried to get sleeves shortened anywhere else they got chopped off at the bottom with the cuffs moved up and there was no split left above the cuff. ----- Poverty has changed in America. If you look at the films made in Appalachia in the 1960s, the poor were painfully thin for the most part. They were also poor in a different way. I just got back from San Diego, which seems to have a significant homeless problem and I saw several very dirty, homeless lying right on the sidewalk in the garbage/utility areas of a large building---looking at their cell phones. Now morbid obesity and poverty are related, at least where I live. I even see morbid obesity among the homeless, barring the obvious drug addicts. Many of the patients I see in the teaching program that gets referrals from the public health system are obese, and some of them are so morbidly obese they can't walk unassisted. Most of the poor here seem to eat almost nothing but junk food or fast food, and this is a change from the past. And fast food is full of carbs and hormones. But it's all relatively cheap compared to keeping good food around the house. ------ I also think men's bodies are changing and this also has to do with hormones in food. In the generation younger than mine, especially--the first one to grow up on chicken fingers and the like, there are many many body types on males that are feminized. Bottom heavy, curvy hips and thighs, pear shaped, man boobs. (Some of this may apparently have to do with Ritalin or other ADD drugs too?). Even otherwise thin men in this generation seem to have very large asses and hips and little pouchy bellies. This is not how men were built when I was in my 20s, There were thin guys and there were fat guys and there were muscular guys, but there was not the thin with subcutaneous fat in certain areas type of build.