My son bought the coolest caulking gun from Home Depot - it was only $10 . The beads came out smooth & it was dripless,too. Even the tip turned so you could change the direction of the bead while keeping it smooth. It had a gizmo to cut off the tip of the caulk tube,too. Talk about builing a better mousetrap ! LOL ***** It's the little things in life that make us Happy !!!

I give up! :O( My once robust and healthy roses look pitiful now. I spray and I spray and the bugs just keep coming! I'm still going out to find those same bugs still chewing and sucking the life out of my roses. The jps are increasing in number on top of it and the bs is getting worse despite me spraying for it. I've spent a bunch of money already trying to combat the problems and don't know if I should keep trying or just give up and let the roses try to fight it on there own. Duchess de Brabant looks the worse and she is one of my very favorites. She bearly has any leaves on her and the ones she does keep getting attacked by bugs. I have always raved about how healthy this rose was and now you wouldn't know it to look at her. Everyone one of my roses now are effected and look just terrible. :O( I'm just hoping that they can bounce back from this. Mrs B R Cant also has little leaves left as does Hermosa. Their would be tons of blooms I could be enjoying but all and I do mean pretty much all the buds on my roses are being chewed by either thripes, jps, and or those sucking insects. Everytime I go outside to make my rounds of picking and squishing bugs, plucking the bs leaves that have yellowed and cutting infected buds I just want to cry. I'm sorry for blubbering but it is so frustrating and sad to see them looking as they do. I've just never seen it so bad like this before. I don't know what it is. ~Meghan

Actually several years ago I had to call poison control as well. It was a Sunday afternoon and my Boo ( who never ate any of my plants except the veggies) ate an amaryllis bulb. I knew they were toxic and was floored that he was munching on it since he had NEVER touched any other plants before ( you can bet I didn't do that again). Anyways, the thing is with toxic stuff either you want to make them hurl or give them activated charcoal but I didn't know which and the ER vet was not able to tell me unless we came in. So, I called poison control....they did charge me $50 BUT they told me that if it had been a household chemical or a store bought product ( with the packaging) then I would not be charged the $50. But since it was a plant, I got charged. It was still cheaper that the ER and the solution was activated charcoal so we did our thing, he was closely watched and everything was fine, and I never planted another toxic bulb in the backyard again!

I saw this tread and thought "Oh my God! My father has come back from the dead!" When we lived in St Louis, my parents lived in an old (c1914) three story house. My father had his "gun room" on the 3rd floor - reloaded all his own shells. He also had multiple bird feeders on our terrace and in our small, narrow backyard. Daddy took it VERY personally when a squirrel would get the food out of the bird feeders. He spent a fortune on "squirrel-proof" bird feeders; they were not. So he would stand at the window on the 3rd floor and use an air rifle (the kind children use to receive for Christmas) and shoot the squirrels at his bird feeders. My mother and I were horrified; I'm sure some of the neighbors were as well, but no one ever called the police. The squirrels always won. They just sent in reinforcements and my father could not be on guard 24/7. No, it was NOT dementia. It was just a man who was born in a small rural town in 1901 who was given his first rifle at age 6 and allowed to go out shooting with a buddy. Amazingly, no one was ever hurt. If they shot a song bird, his mother had plenty to say about it. To him, this was normal. You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy.