I can hear that you're very frustrated, but I don't understand why you want to take such drastic measures, lol. Though, I have thought about scrapping the whole thing from time to time. I'm a first time gardener. I have to tell you that we had snow on May first, lol, so it sounds like we have similar areas. If your squash are otherwise healthy, you shouldn't get flowers until now anyway. Spray the evil bugs off with your garden hose and then give em a real good spray with soapy water. I was a little freaked out over a few different kinds of good bugs in my garden (ex: pill bugs eat compost). Are your cucumbers small because they've just formed? Or do they need to be pollinated? If they're healthy, they'll just keep producing more cukes until a few get pollinated correctly and one grows to full ripeness. If you planted in mid-May, most tomato varieties won't be ready to produce yet, lol. I have two romas that are two feet tall. Every other plant is four feet tall or taller, but those romas I started a bit later (mid-May, btw) and haven't started their real growth yet. One of them has decided to keep up with the Joneses and is trying to produce, and that has it's own set of issues. Overall, if your leaves are green, you're doing just fine. Toss a bit of compost on those squash and get rid of those bugs. One word of caution is, if those little bugs you found are squash bugs, I understand they'll saw right through your stems, so you should take immediate, decisive action. It doesn't sound like them from your description. IMHO: you're doing just fine, you're entering the home stretch, don't give up just yet. Grace, Carolyn P.

Squirrels are a possibility. They repeatedly exposed the roots of a large hosta "fragrant boquet" that I planted a couple of years ago. Last year it came back in the spring but as a very reduced plant. it was so badly damaged I dug it up, divided it and re-potted it in 5 different small pots and am nursing them back to health on my screen porch. Back in the 90's I was planting a large order of various spring bulbs. I had placed the bags of bulbs where I wanted them and had started back at the beginning of the line and started planting. I came to a spot where a bag of crocus bulbs was missing. I looked all over and couldn't find it. I finally gave up looking. Later, around Christmas, I happened to notice something about 50 feet off the ground in a crotch in a large Red Oak. It was the very distinctive color of the bags of bulbs that I had planted in the fall. A squirrel had apparently carried it into the tree and left the bag there. As I think more about it the neatness you describe doesn't sound like squirrels which I've observed to be very messy when digging among my plants, throwing the dirt everywhere. It sounds more like a cat or a raccoon and my money would be on a Raccoon looking for grubs or worms. If you have outside water and food bowls for a cat or dog they will take pet food or things they've dug up and wash them in the water bowl. Makes a big mess but is a sure sign they are working your yard.

Just a few of the reasons why I would 1,000 times prefer someone to revive a relevant thread rather than start a new one . . . Part of the reason search sucks so much is there are a bazillion threads on "spice storage" (or whatever the topic is). So type in spice and wade through 85 search results. I would much rather similar issues be confined to a single thread. Some of the best threads that buehl has saved and lists are the ones with many many responses over a long period of time. Why do people start a new thread every time they make any little change to their layout to ask for opinions. "I moved the door to the other side, here's a new thread, what do people think". Yeh, what about all of the people who had already spent time helping you and may have been following your thread ? You just disappear off of the original thread with no thought to the people helping you. And what about the people who start helping on the new thread, they have no idea what the background story is and changes that have already been made or rejected and the reasons. I think it is so much better to keep everything confined in one location. CEFreeman, I also find it more interesting to read the entire story in one place. How about the person who starts a new thread for every single possible little decision they have to make. Help me pick my sink. Help me choose my hardwood. Help me pick my backsplash. What color cabinets should I use. Seriously ??? How about keep those things all in one thread. So true robotropolis !! it's polite to revive an old thread instead of starting a new one if your topic is exactly the same. That way people don't have to bother posting all the same info they did before. Then new people can just add on their responses. Not to mention the fact that being able to read all of the old responses might give a new poster an idea for something else and give a new spin on things. And Nosoccermom !! "Good" reviving: Posting a follow-up that shows the finished project Follow up with resolution to problem Update on how something performed over time (problems, durability, repairs, success) Update on new product LOL @ attofarad I am an "oldie" around here (since 2003) when there was an extremely limited number of threads available on the forum. If I remember correctly, only 10 pages of 30, so 300 threads total. And once a thread dropped off the last page, it was gone forever. There was no way to resurrect all of that helpful info. Even if you knew the URL, GW would just show something like "sorry that thread cannot be located". And old threads were no longer searchable either. After a very short time period, you could not even find a cached copy on google.

Make that weekly. Weeding is a regular job in gardening and little and often is far more effective than waiting for a jungle and then doing a huge splurge. As the digging, it needs to be as deep as the weed roots, as kimmq said. A fork or spade's depth is a good start and that is more than 6 inches. A garden fork is a good tool for weed digging as you can roughly sift the earth as you turn it using the tines.