I am an Exterminator. I have my WDI license. (Wood Destroying Insects) I inspect and treat for Eastern Subterranean termites at least 2-3 times a week. Firstly, jeremiyjs, the guy above me, has no idea what he's talking about. Almost all termite invasions occur through hairline cracks below the soil line in the foundations of a home that the owner will never see or be able to see. Situations where termite tubes and termites are seen before they hit a basement sill plate are few and far between. If you've found them in your mulch, or tubes on your foundation and they aren't in the wood of your home consider yourself luckier than tens of thousands of others and get your house treated immediately. Not seeing termites does NOT mean you don't have them. Mulch does not attract or detract termites. Mulch does not transport termites in bags. If there are termites in it they will die without their colony. Mulch IS food for termites, and if found termites will eat it, but they will not seek out mulch anymore than they will your home. Termites forage blindly, making random tunnels and tubes in search of wood. Mulch will not protect your house from termites or guarantee early warning. One job I did the owners had mulch around their entire house. They didn't know they had termites till they were tunneling through the drywall in the living room (drywall material is just packed dirt to termites). Their mulch was untouched. There are on average 13-14 termite nests an acre. These nests can tunnel 1/2 a mile in a single day when foraging, but usually don't. Any given nest will have several sources of food that it's workers go to. If they are eating your mulch, it's not going to stop them from eating your house as well. Termites require moisture to live. They do not require you to provide it for them by watering, though it does make things easier for them. Subterranean termites do not live in wood, they live in soil, this is the main reason moving mulch will not transfer a termite infestation. (Drywood Termites are a completely different story.) Treatment: Get a foundation treatment. This is when your exterminator will inject or trench termiticide 6-12 inches deep around your entire foundation. I recommend Termidor specifically out of the various termiticides. Do NOT rely on baits or monitoring stations to protect yourself. Termites are just as likely to skip them and hit a house as they are feed on them. The Rule of 5: Termidor will last for 5 years in the ground before fading. A new nest takes about 5 years to reach a point where it can cause significant damage to a home. Newly built homes are generally safe for 5 years because of this. The Rule of 5 is subject to Murphy's Law, but holds true 99% of the time. Long story short, if you have evidence of termites anywhere in your yard they could sit there and never touch your house for 100 years. Or they could find a crack in your foundation and be inside your drywall in less than a month. Get your house treated.

Even the big box in Austin Texas is giving the nod to some natives, but they still keep selling what works in Delaware. You can order buffalo grass sod from them. I feel like putting a gun to the pot of the forsythia and shooting it before it is planted on a a Central Texas caliche hillside. We have been approaching developers that are building subdivisions and recommending leaving as much of the native ground undisturbed and introducing native grasses and giving the new owners a recommended plant list and a copy of Sally Wasowski's Gardening with Native Plants. We also got him to undersize his roads.We have had .success with this one developer. Water is a huge issue in Texas. I just wish he hadn't planted that 5 acre leaky lake on the very top of the hill and filled it and drained the water table in this area. All the neighbors wells are dry. His straw is bigger and deeper. The deeds actually limit what they are allowed to put under lawn. One success at a time. Our success here was helped along by a huge legal success where we forced another absentee landowner to clean up a natural spring that his subdivision had totally fouled with over application of fertilizer and clearing of the native grasses so they could put down their suburban ireland look on an uplands above a glorious water hole and waterfall. We succeeded in him stopping his battle because he finally came down from Connecticut to see what all the hubub was about and meet the neighbors and found out why they would never stop fighting. He did change the planting of that subdivision also back to the native and cleaned up the water hole and removed their retention pond out of the recharge zone. I have always had tall grass. The only time we whack it back is if we here about a grass fire somewhere nearby. It is all native bluestems, sedges, dropseed, indiangrass, etc. It was there before we built and I am too lazy to do anything about it. I do have a growing garden within the native framework and I am not a purist about everything having to be native but it has to live and survive and not become invasive in the native framework. Now if I could only get rid of the bermuda an KR bluestem in my front pasture, I would be happy as a clam.

Wow you guys all sure have a lot of naughty but mostly cute critters just making themselves at home eating up your gardens! We had some deer when we first moved here but they mostly stay out of the yard now. They didn't like our dog. I remember when we lived in Wyoming and several large mule deer would make the rounds of all the houses in the neighborhood every evening like clockwork. They were not afraid of anyone. They would even climb up the stairs to one neighbor's two story deck to eat out of the planters they had up there lol. PattyW, speaking of botflies, we had a baby squirrel rescue one time that our cat (yes, cat) was nursing and raising alongside her kittens. The squirrel turned out to have a botfly in its tummy. Apparently its quite common for squirrels around here to get them. I had to pull that thing out and it was soooo gross lol. I could show you some really yucky pictures....LOL!! BenT, the frogs don't seem to eat the poisonous caterpillars or grasshoppers. I wish they would eat the grasshoppers they get huge here and eat up everything especially my hibiscus! Even the dumb chickens won't eat grasshoppers :/ ~Sjn

Hey Jay, the Smilax and Rubus are in a thicket at the back of the lot and Im just going to let them grow wild for the birds. It was hard to get that close to the Rubus to take the picture, had to step through a lot of poison ivy. I just looked at that Astragalus, and on BONAP, none of them are native in my county but canadensis is close. I didnt really have this concept when I was ordering these plants and seeds a couple years ago. Crassicarpus looks like a good one for you to grow, and a food source. Ribes hirtellum and triste are native to my county, but the thorns on mine dont seem to match. My property used to be farm land I wonder if somebody grew that Ribes on purpose at some point. I just noticed a couple weeds in my front flower bed. One was a walnut tree, the other, an oak. One in the white oak by the looks of it too. Thanks squirrels! into the pot farm: