Organic way of killing? HAHAHAHAHA. That cracks me up. We have tons of mosquitoes where I live. Every entrance to the house has a can of spray next to it. The goats are srayed with fly spray (that is rated for mosquitoes). The birds don't seem to mind them but definately do get bitten. There are flocks near me that has had West Nile Virus found in them. If your animal water sat stagnent for a couple weeks then yes, you could have raised a crop of skeeters. If the pasture grass is tall, then yes, they are probably living in it. If I were you, I'd keep skeeter spray nearby. Spray the animals, spray myself, and wait for the cold to kill them offf. If you are really concerned you can cut the pasture grass and either fog or spray. Home Depot sells several products in a bottle that attaches to your hose that you just spray directly onto your lawn (or pasture) that kills them off. Keep in mind though, that they can fly into your area from up to a mile away and even though you kill them,new crops are hatching daily. Just don't provide them any breeding habitat on your property. That's the best you can do. Oh, and if you fog, make sure none of your neighbors have bee hives. I would not be a happy camper if someone killed off my hives.

Kateskouros, I think I've got a list somewhere that has them all. However, eventually it turned out that as I finessed my ad blocking system that I was missing a bunch of them so could no longer keep track. BUT the ones I could see? I never remember who they are until I see their name somewhere else. For the rest of my life I won't be able to tell you who had the most annoying GW ad... but for that same life every time someone mentions AngiesList I'll think OMG that was the most annoying ad. Somewhat like the groupon superbowl ads...

I do spray that guck on new shoots and canes (basal breaks) which I am excited about, and buds also if I notice them. We always cage newly planted roses, until they get big enough so that some grazing will not kill them. We are lucky - we live 4 blocks from downtown, and as my DH says, by the time the deer get to our garden, they are just on dessert. Only 1/3rd of an acre, and by a busy street in the middle of lots of houses. The deer walk down the sidewalks and cross at the corners - really! We have 150+ roses, and I do not mind some nibbling, especially since they are either full or lazy, and only munch at deer height - hardly anything below or above. That's why I have always planted lots of climbers! This year about 6 weeks ago, a doe gave birth to twins in our garden (parts of it are sort of wild and overgrown). One morning I woke up to see the below out of my bedroom window. I grabbed my camera - the below pics were taken through our 110 year old wiggly Victorian window glass, so pls forgive the bad quality. She spotted me in the window (see the second pic) took umbrage at me staring at her kids, and took them away, and I haven't seen that trio since. There has been some nibbling at night, but no sightings. I must admit that, although I would never feed them deliberately, they are welcome to some food and shelter and water in my garden now when we are in the 5th year of a horrible drought. Jackie

You think birds are eating your cauliflower plants? I've never seen that happen (but I'm not saying it won't happen). One easy way to figure out what creature is "stealing" plants is to lightly dust a white powder (I've done it with flour once and diatomaceous earth on another occasion) on the ground around your plants after you've planted them. Obviously this works best on a calm day or evening when the white powder won't blow away. Any small creature that is stealing your plants should leave footprints in the white powder, and from them you ought to be able to figure out if it is a rodent, bird, rabbit, etc. Bird netting placed over PVC hoops is the quick fix to protect plants from birds. I use bird netting at various times to protect plants. I feed the birds all winter, but sometimes they get hungry for something green to eat. My garden is full of birds and, as far as I can tell, they haven't bothered a thing this year, and I've got lettuce plants varying from 4 to 8" tall. Sometimes they pick at the lettuce, but they haven't this year. I am surprised that the stores up there do not have strawberry plants in containers yet. They were in stores here in 3" peat pots from Bonnie Plants around the end of January, or possible even earlier because I think I saw a variety I didn't want in mid-January and just waited a couple more weeks for a variety that I wanted to arrive. Those first rounds of strawberry plants sold out fast, but then they got in new shipments around mid-February, and the good varieties for this region sold out. Then, there was a new shipment this week. I will say that our local stores here saw the warming trend and jumped right on it and now you can buy almost any veggie you want (well, I haven't seen watermelons or winter squash) as transplants in the stores here the last couple of weeks----not just the cool-season crops, but almost all the warm season ones as well--tomatoes, peppers, corn (silly to buy it as transplants and expensive too), cucumbers, summer squash, etc. Of course, we are nearing the end of the time to plant cool-season plants, so naturally the warm-season ones are showing up, but for most of those it still seems early to me. In Sherman, TX, yesterday, I saw hanging baskets with strawberries in them, plants in 3" pots and some larger plants in 4-6" pots. Meanwhile I found my non-gardening hubby circling the containers of strawberry plants in our garden yesterday, trying to find the almost-ripe strawberry because I had sent him a photo of it on Friday. It was in the last container he looked at, and it still isn't fully ripe. I guess when it ripens we will celebrate by cutting it in half and having half a strawberry each to celebrate the arrival of spring in our garden. I have planted strawberries from bare root in the past, and those plants did well for a couple of years, but I like the small plants in peat pots. I do remove the peat pots and not plant them (because we are often dry and the peat pots wick moisture away from the plant roots) but the plants take of fast since they already have a good root system when planted. During the last 4 or 5 years, stores here have begun carrying veggie transplants much earlier than in the past. It is a trend that kind of worries me---because I fear brand-new gardeners will be lured into buying plants that cannot go into the ground as early as the stores have them. Hopefully people do their research and understand when each type of plant can go into the ground and have a reasonable chance of survival before they buy the plants. I'd hate to see people putting tomato plants or pepper plants in the ground during the last week of January or first week of February just because the plants appear in the stores around that time. On the other hand, once soil temperatures reach the right point, and air temperatures are in the right range, I'd plant early if it felt right, but then, I have heavy-duty floating row covers that give 10 degrees of protection so I can take some chances. New gardeners seldom really understand how much our temperatures spike up and down at this time of the year. Case in point? I believe it was on Friday or Saturday a week ago that we hit 82 degrees here, but then about 5 or 6 nights later we hit 26 degrees. The 82 degrees tempts people into planting warm-season stuff early, and then the 26 degrees kills the warm-season plants. Then the stores make more money as people come back to buy replacement plants for the ones that froze. I wish the stores would post recommended planting dates in stores so new gardeners would know when to buy the stuff they see on store shelves, but they're never going to do that because it would hurt their plant sales too much. Oh, and do you have rabbits or other small animals around that might be nibbling your plants? A rabbit got into my garden a year or two ago and went to town nibbling on nasturtium stems. I didn't figure out what was eating the nasturtiums until I actually saw the rabbit. Then, it ran from me and went back out in the same spot where it apparently had entered the garden, which showed me where it had found a way into the garden through the fence. I patched that spot and haven't had a rabbit in there since. Yesterday I found a hole dug under the garden fence, and after searching, I found the spot where the hole came out into the garden. A big hole. It is big enough that a possum, skunk or armadillo could have dug it, but I've never seen them dig a prolonged tunnel that runs several feet underground. I'm going to fill that hole with large rocks today and put soil back on top of it, and then I'll run the cultivator over the tunnel to collapse it. No matter what we do, the critters seem to find a way in if they're hungry enough.