I sent you a message on American Ponders. I think I will have Lilypons, Chubby and Hollandia.... I'll know for sure in approx. two weeks. Gotta go thru the lilypond! :) Thanks, Bonnie

Shamae, How big are the bugs? I know you posted a photo, but without something whose size is known (like, for example a dime or a penny or something) placed beside them to provide context, it is hard for us to understand what size your pests are. Spider mites are roughly the size of the dot over the letter "i". They are very hard to see with the naked eye and hard to view in a photo, though once you're used to seeing them, you can flip over a leaf and look at the underside of it and see the tiny mites on the plants then. Sometimes, folks new to spider mites aren't sure if they are seeing spider mites and we tell them to hold a clean white sheet of paper underneath a plant leaf and thump it. Tiny insects the size of a period will fall onto the paper and begin moving, and if that happens, they likely have spider mites. It actually is easier to identify mites on plants by the damage they do than by seeing the mites themselves. If you can tell us more about your pests, perhaps we can help you with an ID. If, by chance, they are the same size as spider mites, I'd suspect chiggers, but the pests in your photo look larger....more like the size of aphids? Not that I'm saying they are aphids, but rather that's just the size they are. Are you here in OK? Was your compost wet or was it dry? The more info you share, the better we might be able to help you figure out what it is that you're seeing. Or at least what it isn't. Dawn

Scott, At the present time I still have high hopes for our native plant population. I saw a lot of them come back after 2005-2006 when it had seemed unlikely for them to surive. However, with a lot of the native plants that are dropping leaves now, we may not know until next year if they were only dropping leaves and going dormant now in order to survive or if they were dying. One thing I've noticed here is that the native trees don't die during the dry year---they die the next year. Trees can live a while on stored energy and often will survive the initial drought year and then die a year or so later. Often people get confused about why the drought didn't kill the tree. Actually, it did but it was just a slow, delayed death. Pat, If I never see a wildfire again, it will be fine with me but we have a few here every year. We rarely lose a home to one because our homes tend to be more out in fairly open and easily accessed grassland. We do have a ton of trouble with the ones that are in rocky, hilly areas with less access, particularly if their hills are covered in cedar trees. Last weekend we had one grassfire come within a few yards of a home, but the firefighters arrived in time to save the house. I was shocked at how close it got to the house in such a brief period of time though. Our winter fire season here is usually the problem time. It is unusual to be having this many big fires in summer. Even though summer is often hot and often dry, we don't have the strong winds most of the time that are more common in late winter and in spring, and usually we're green enough that summer fires move slowly. It is so dry here now, though, that fires in 6 to 8 to 10 miles of gentle southerly winds seem to be running about as fast as the winter/spring fires pushed by winds in the 30s to the 50s. It definitely has been a shock to a lot of the firefighters these last two or three weeks to see the fires running like mad ahead of them. I'll give them credit though. As soon as they can see the fire and they realize it is exhibiting extreme wildfire beavior, they call quickly for more departments. That's the whole key here to stopping one of these---getting the manpower, water and trucks there so you can stop it quickly. If you don't stop it quickly, you may be fighting it for days and days. We've only had a couple of multiple-day fires so far this summer. Suzie, That's bad news about the well. I read an article this weekend about all the people in Texas who are having to have their wells lowered, at the rate of at least $25 per foot. They have no choice as the aquifer has dropped so much lower. Trying to keep a light-hearted attitude here in our county, we've been joking that 'brown is the new green', but it is no laughing matter. Brown and crunchy is just flat dangerous, and the ranchers and horse folks are having to make tough decisions about whether to keep their animals, or how many to keep, or how to feed the ones they keep. It is sad. We had a little rain shower this morning but even though it felt nice, the small amount of rain that fell wasn't enough to make a difference in any shape, form or fashion. Still, for that hour or so that it was sprinkling and thundering, the temps dropped and it felt really nice for a little while. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Article--Drought Taking Toll On Texas Aquifers

Pat, We have them in all different colors here, though mostly browns, greens and blues. In a wet year we have billions of them, and in a dry year merely millions. Seriously, we aways have a lot because we have 5 ponds, 3 creeks, a swamp and at least 3 different areas where springs come bubbling up out of the ground. At the present time, though, only the lilypond has water in it, but only because we add water weekly with the water hose. Everything else is as dry as a bone. I always have them around the garden and yard, even in the worst of droughts. We have bats here most years, but I don't think we've seen any at all this year. We don't have a bathouse, but leave very tall snags (standing dead trees) in the woods for them. It could be that they are out there in the evenings, and we aren't seeing them because it is too hot to sit outside in the lawnchairs and watch them like we usually do. We're not seeing as many barn swallows either, so it may be the insect population (excluding spider mites and grasshoppers) is lower than usual so it cannot support a large predator population. Dawn