Earwigs are by far the biggest problem I have in my garden. They can be really hard on plants especially when they are young. I found that you can reduce their numbers but you never truly get rid of them. The best thing that worked for me was to place a damp towel on a hard surface like a tree limb or section of shaded concrete. After a couple of days turn the towel over and let the chickens ave a feast. This method has gotten the earwig population down to a point to where they don't do too much damage in the garden. I have to admit that a few years ago when their numbers were really high I had to sprinkle Sevin dust on my newly planted pawpaw seedling other wise they would have killed it.

This is a great thread. I'm a teacher (though I only do long-term sub jobs right now), and also GT certified and trained. I've also raised two children, one of whom passed all the GT tests as a kindergartner and is now in college. My other child passed a few of the GT tests as a third-grader, but honestly I don't see her as 'gifted.' Part of the problem is that this school district includes achievement tests in the battery of GT tests, which is completely inappropriate, but there it is. And she is an extremely hard-working kid. Anyway, I've always been hugely interested in GT education and absolutely LOVE working with these students. But I'd like to let you in on a couple of dirty little secrets.... The first secret is that there are many teachers, even GT-certified who don't LOVE teaching these kids. In fact, they often appear (to me) to be defensive and ready to shoot down these kids at every opportunity. I think it is difficult for a parent to truly realize this because they aren't in the classroom. But I have witnessed it over and over again.... It's heartbreaking, and I try to intercede when I can, but that isn't always possible. The second 'secret' is about teachers being expected to differentiate instruction for all the levels in the room. It's a joke. Not because the teacher doesn't try. It's just a ludicrous system. It is politically incorrect to group students by ability, and no longer allowed anywhere that I've found. So a typical classroom has students with IQs below 70 and students with IQs above 125, occasionally very far above. Imagine you are trying to teach 25 children something -let's say .... how to knit. Some of your students have been knitting for four years, and some could not tell you what a knitting needle looks like. While you are trying to figure out how to group them, four boys have grabbed needles and are trying to stab each other, two more have grabbed your balls of yarn and tossed them to each other, which has caused them to unravel of course. The girls are yelling at the boys to stop it. Some are crying because they really, really want to learn how to knit. So you finally bring order to the chaos, and figure you can divide them into three groups, which does not truly correlate to the levels in the room, but is the best you can do. You truly need the entire time with each one of the groups. But you only have 1/3 of the time with each of course. And what do you suppose the other two groups are doing while you are working with one? You have given them some books about knitting to keep them occupied, but they are old and have only black and white photos so that isn't terribly successful. So you start with the least experienced group because they need the most time. After you spend ten minutes with the first group, you will barely have begun your session with the second group before a few students from the first group come running over with problems. And then that happens again. So the second group's instruction takes twice as long as it should because of the interruptions. And since the third group's time was used for the second group, suddenly, there's the bell! Guess which group didn't get attended to AGAIN?!?!? You may remember that I was fairly strong-minded in the original post on this subject -and felt you needed to think about removing your daughter from a toxic environment. If she wants to be at this school and the good outweighs the bad, okay. But from the sounds of it, her educational needs are not being met. Which might be okay if you or she are supplementing them at home. The way I see it, there are two types of needs for these kids. The first set of needs is what she needs to get into a college where she will hopefully truly have her abilities matched to her environment. And the second set of needs is what she needs to feed her hungry brain. The first set of needs could be covered in one year rather than four for most of these kids. When the information is drawn out over four years, boredom and frustration set in, and many GT kids simply begin to tune out. Some lose all of their enthusiasm and interest in learning and begin to fail. And then they can't get into the colleges where they might truly flourish for the first time. As I used to tell my son, don't kid yourself -there are some extremely bright people who never made it to college. There is a whole group of gifted dropouts, mostly boys, who didn't get the first set of needs met. And Anele -it sounds to me as if your daughter IS gifted. The sheer fact that she is interested in reading what you describe is a give away. I hope I haven't offended any one here -I am passionate about the short shrift these very top students are getting in the K-12 system, all over the nation. It is a huge loss to them, and a huge loss to our country. It's mind-boggling to me that we put forth so much time, money and energy to the first-string on the football team, but not to the academic team. Okay, stepping down off the soapbox now....

I probably would have had a similar emotional reaction to being asked to share expenses of yet another project. Your outrage / irritation is understandable. But when I re-read what you said was in the letter, I can see a different side. He has an odd property on a hillside where you also share a section (the bottom of the hill?). You don't live there yet so he probably doesn't know how to reach you other than by mail. Maybe he was inspired by all of the work on your property so far and he has decided to landscape his hillside. Judging by your drawing it looks like your strange sliver directly relates to his property and your landscaping focus has been on the square section not the sliver. He is asking if you would like to go in together on a cohesive landscape that would make his odd lot and your sliver work well together. And if you are not interested in that option, he is wondering if you would consider selling him the sliver to make the lot more cohesive. All of that said, I would reach out to him and have a conversation. Be honest about not wanting to sell your property sliver. (That's ok! You don't have to sell. No one is going to make you.) Listen to his proposal on the landscape. Maybe what he's asking is not an expensive hard-scape but maybe just planting consistent plants across the hillside to make it all work together. Come to the conversation with your budget limitations. Be honest and let him know that you appreciate the idea of a cohesive landscape but that your budget is already stretched with the landscaping you have already done to your lot. Stand firm, but be polite. You will be stuck living next to this guy. See if you can come to some kind of middle ground where you keep ownership of your lot and you work together to make the properties look good without breaking your budget. My own story: My last home shared a property line with a really nice family. We both had rather boring mailboxes right next to each other. The neighborhood had a rash of basic mailboxes getting knocked over and so our neighbor proposed that we go in together on some kind of masonry style mailbox. We said we thought it was a good idea. Well one day we came home and there was a new double mailbox being built without us having any input on the design or materials. As soon as the mailbox was done, the neighbor let us know how much we owed them for the mailbox. Initially we were really irritated. They should have consulted us about the design and cost up front, but unfortunately they didn't. Honestly I don't think they even considered the possibility that we might not share the same style. Oh well. We gave them the money and enjoyed having a nice mailbox that wasn't quite our style. It was a frustrating situation and I wish we could have worked on a design together, but keeping the relationship friendly was important.

Just a clarification—I lost track of the post, but someone mentioned Lowe’s having a 30-day return policy. That doesn’t apply to plants. All shrubs and perennials, including roses, have a one year refund/replacement guarantee if the plant dies or isn’t true to name. Home Depot and Walmart have the same policies. It’s incredibly easy to get refunds for roses that don’t survive or are mislabeled, which makes it much less stressful to buy a body bag in my opinion!