I've tried tilling the soil but I guess they're either deeper then my tiller gets and/or there's just too many. I do invite all the people I know that fish to come and collect all that they can but that doesn't really put a dent in it because the entire tree is infested and it's too tall to safely get high enough up in the tree. People start calling and dropping by the house in the summer to ask if I have any worms yet. I've heard they are especially good for trout and we do have several brown trout streams nearby. I'm beginning to think that my only option will be removing the tree. They are still small and haven't made much of an impact yet but buy this time next week half the tree will be gone.

Mary and Brandon, I have to agree with both of you. Mary, I can understand your love of gardening, and don't want to take the love out of it to make it science. I am a gardener too, but I used to be a scientist, but then I guess there's never a "used to be" - I always will be a scientist whether or not that's what I do for a living. When I was working at it I was a botanist and worked in several different labs, both at universities for scientists on faculty and at medical centers for doctors/medical school professors. I used to be the one doing those studies, and like Brandon, I firmly believe in them. The journals where my work was published are very careful and have other scientists review the papers before they are accepted for publication. I remember one time when I observed something and repeated the experiment over and over always with the same result- like you said, Mary, - seeing is believing. I spent mind-boggling hours and hours, days and days, on the microscope counting and measuring to get sufficient numbers to be able to run statistics on. We called in the professor who taught the university Biometry course (biometry = the science of using statistics in life sciences). She worked on the numbers for a couple of weeks then told us she couldn't back up our findings. There was some missing data we had no way of obtaining. We were so disappointed, and that study was never published. I suppose we could have bent the rules as Mary said she observed, but we were ethical and just kept of working trying to fill in the blanks so we could eventually report our findings. Yes, there are disreputable people who publish studies that are questionable. Some have actually "padded their data" and reported findings that were false. Some of those people have been caught too and have lost their jobs and reputations! I still believe what I observed is true, but nobody in the scientific community will ever hear about it because my boss and I had more integrity than the people Mary described. A few posts back I mentioned a guy in Memphis who did an experiment with coffee grounds in his garden. If I had said he did a study that included statistics, Mary, would you have believed what he observed? Scientists actually DO garden and get dirt under their nails and mud on their gloves.Alan Armitage and Michael Dirr (you are probably familiar with those names) established studies at the University of Georgia on garden plants. Those studies find varieties that are best suited for our Southeastern US hot, humid, climate. Please check the link below that describes that they started and how it effects our gardening. You have to believe those "studies". Your gardens probably include some of those plants Drs. Armitage and Dirr found to be ideal for us to grow. I know I check the The Gardens at UGA to learn about new plants that can be counted on to grow well for me because they're suited for out climate and the UGA studies prove it. Looking at the results of those studies saves me a lot of money and time too. Time I can be enjoying my garden instead of worrying about this and that plant that I never should have planted in the first place. I hope to still be digging in the dirt when I'm in my 80's and 90's. Maybe by then some scientist will have come up with a foolproof way to eradicate slugs from our gardens.

mboston, I am very sad to hear your dil lost the baby. Personally, I don't believe the chemicals won't hurt pregnant women or their babies, and it would have infuriated me to hear the guy say such an inane thing. I'm not blaming the chemicals for the miscarriage, but I know they are very toxic. When I was pregnant with my second son and dh and I were renting an apartment near Fort Benning, not far from Florida (he was in the military then), renters who had filthy living habits moved in above our apartment. They moved out a few months later without giving any notice and were gone a few weeks before the landlord realized it. In that period of time, their apartment became a roach haven - it was horrible. And of course when that apartment became empty, the roaches all came to live with us - YUCK! I spent many evenings spraying and swatting them, then I began to feel sickly, was having problems breathing, was having nightmares about them, so I had to quit. At my next OB visit, the doctor told me NOT to be anywhere near any roach-killing chemicals. The landlord ended up calling a professional exterminator (yes, he should have done that right away) and also put us up in another apartment until the roaches were gone. I think my doctor's written statement motivated him to do that, as I was still in my first trimester. It seems the seller should bear some (the lion's share, actually) of the responsibility in this case. I would check into your local laws to see what can be done. You've already received great advice about how to kill the roaches. I do hope this is resolved quickly.

I will add, the frequent use of the word "poison" in stone's narrative suggests a less than complete understanding of what the various materials actually are, and what they do. If a specific herbicide has been compounded in such a way as to interfere with one or more enzyme pathways within green, vascular plants, is that a poison? The word poison has an actual and specific meaning. In human terms, a poison is a material which, upon being consumed, causes immediate life-threatening reactions. So, are herbicides which are designed to interfere with one or more essential enzymatic pathways within green, vascular plants poisons? Not to you and me, and not to moss (non-vascular) and not to a mature tree trunk which the material has drifted onto (No green tissue exposure). It is indeed tiring to see the same simple-minded "chemicals are bad" kind of thinking here. So, what about plants which exude allelopathic materials from their root tips? Must they be banished so as not to be poisoning the environment? This is just way too beginner for me. And in support of TR's comments above, you, stone, are putting lots of words in our mouths here. No, you're not the only person on this forum-if you can believe it-that would first seek out the desirable plants in a scenario such as above, for saving before proceeding to do any other work. It must be hard to live your life, knowing as you do that everyone else is an idiot who doesn't know what they're doing. +oM