Hoping all continues to go well, Sherry. Grim time for you both. Illness, of any kind, seems like a scary prospect in the US so I am really glad that you are able to access good facilities. Big hugs winging your way. Am faintly astonished by the gardening clothes. I don't have any. I just wear what I am wearing......but then again, probably everything I have looks like candidates for the junk pile so who cares about rips or grubbiness. As for bras - well, I am a 70s girl so grew up in an era of naked chests (for feministas) and have maintained this (ahem) 'look' forever (and amazingly, they are nowhere near my knees). I made extra cash as an artist's model for years, even (well, especially) during pregnancies so am definitely lacking the modesty gene. Growing up poor with many siblings kinda removes any squeamishness you might have around privacy issues. I am not even going to think about annoying earworms (bloody Puff was one of mine too) - too many and they take over my brain - even worse, I am sure my lips are moving too as I am singing away in my head. Haikus are certainly not going to wash for this verbose word lover - almost as bad as the ridiculous Twitter - am usually just warming up after 17 syllables or 140 characters or whatever. Brevity has never been one of my virtues (my family and friends who are regularly bored into submission, would surely agree).

Y'all are too funny. The 'panic' statement was NOT aimed at or inspired by any one person, but don't y'all think there's a little bit of that "oh no" panic in all of us when we discover one garden pest or another has arrived? I just figured it was that time of year, and wanted to encourage everyone to view their garden/yard/landscape as an ecosystem and understand that ecosystems need balance, and that includes a balanced bug population. The only people I know who have really serious insect issues are the ones who routinely spray broad-spectrum chemical pesticides (and I have folks around me in the country who do this too, it is NOT restricted to only city folks) every time they see a bug. Once they've wiped out the good bugs, there's no one left to help them with the bad bugs, and bad bugs always rebound more quickly. Andria, bugguide.net is a good bug ID site and there are others, but that's the one I use the most often. Bt products should state on their label which Bt they are, unless it is clear in their name. The ones I buy have an Ingredient list and specify which Bt in that list. Bt kurstaki is sold in many products, and often it says Caterpillar Killer in large letters on the label. You'll find it in Thuricide and Dipel, among other products and, yes, the caterpillars you see on cole family crops are controlled by this form of Bt. The 'san diego' strain used for Colorado Potato Beetles will feature a Beetle somewhere on its label or in its name, like the product 'Colorado Potato Beater". The 'israelensis' strain used for mosquito larvae will have mosquitoes on the label and is found as mosquito dunks or as a granular product you can sprinkle into ponds and other still bodies of water. To avoid harming butterflies, I try to use Bt 'kurstaki' as little as possible, but it would be hard to get a good crop of cabbage without it. I don't spray the broccoli though, and I don't spray tomato plants with Bt to kill hornworms and fruitworms. I just handpick them when I find them and count on the help of the parasitic wasps. Boomer, Thanks. I think we have more than two kinds of gardeners here...we have many kinds and we all just do the best we can with what we've got. I gardened in a big city until I was 39 years old and moved here. I remember when folks sprayed DDT for everything when I was a child. Heck, I remember us kids running or riding our bicycles in the 'mist' that came out of the tanker truck when the city sprayed for mosquitoes. (It is a wonder the chemical exposure didn't kill us all!) I've tried raising a big 8' x 10' garden in a yard that was 95% shade, and was thrilled to have 6 tomato plants. I've done square foot gardening. I've done container gardening. What I do now is Biointensive gardening the John Jeavons/Alan Chadwick way. It works better for me than anything else I've ever done. You have to work with what you've got, and we've all got different challenges. And, in case you're thinking it is easy out here in the country, let me tell you.....I have ranching neighbors who spray large amounts of chemicals and it sometimes causes me problems. You just have to deal with the hand you're dealt. I get very frustrated when their herbicide drift kills or damages plants in my garden, but there's really nothing I can do to prevent it. I don't think pesticides are used as much as they used to be out here, but they're still used at a level that makes me uncomfortable. In one very, very bad grasshopper year, so much junk was sprayed to kill grasshoppers (and it didn't kill them!) that many songbirds died. We didn't see a single bluebird for over three years. During the last decade, I've seen a big shift in attitudes here...even the diehard chemical-using farmers and ranchers are trying really hard to do things in a much more sustainable way, and that gives me hope. They used to laugh at me, the organic nut, and now some of them ask me "What would you do for....." and I try to give them the best organic answers I know. Being more sustainable and 'green' is in, and that's a really good thing. Still, even though I prefer to garden as naturally as possible, I would defend anyone's right to use a chemical product if that is what they believe is best. I just think there's a better way. I don't even like using pyrethrins/permethrins because of their toxicity, and I would never use Rotenone. Neem is OK, but I only use it as an absolute last resort...so maybe one time every three or four years. I avoid most soaps and horticultural oils because they can burn foliage in hot weather. I guess, when it comes right down to it, that's not much I use other than hand-picking, squishing, or drowning pests. I do like Spinosad and love iron phosphate/Spinosad for the sowbugs and pill bugs. I use Nolo Bait every few years for hoppers (this probably will be that year....based on what I'm seeing in terms of how large the current nymph hatch is). I use more companion planting than anyone I know, and I use the companion plants either to attract beneficials and pollinators or to repel unwanted pests. I always describe my beds as a crazy quilt, because each bed is a blend of veggies, flowers and herbs. Some of the 'old farmer' types here refer to my companion plants as 'your weeds' but I just laugh it off. In case you think I don't get that little panicky 'oh no' feeling when I see a sudden influx of pests, you're wrong. I get it too. Then, instead of reaching for a chemical solution, I work on using a natural one. There have been a couple of times that I panicked and bought a chemical pesticide, and then couldn't force myself to use it. lol Guess what? The pest issue resolved itself and I didn't lose my crop or even a significant portion of it. Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, but it has taken me my entire life to arrive at the point that I understand that. When we moved here, we had lots of pest insects, and seemingly few beneficial insects. I worked really hard for 4 or 5 years to control the bad guys and attract the good guys, and finally had one of those years where the good guys showed up and took care of the bad guys. There were a couple of years like that, and then one year, the good guys didn't come. Do you know why? Because our population of pest insects was too low to support the good bugs. It took me a while to understand that, but then it was an 'aha' moment and I finally got "it". Laura, I loved your description of your ecosystem and all the wild critters in it. I think it is simply wonderful that your daughter is learning so much at such a young age. Debra addressed the lady bug issue....all shapes, sizes, colors, including solid black ones. I've even seen pink ones here. They're pretty cute. Jleroi, Some of the most fierce battles I've ever seen are between praying mantids....but there's all kinds of life-and-death-drama between the various wild things every day. It is fascinating! Tigerdawn, This wasn't aimed at you. lol You're going to be fine. Trust me. I have a gardening friend who used to reach for the pesticide every time he saw a bug and has just decided to wait until a certain level of damage is being seen. Guess what? He rarely sees the damage rise to the level he thinks is 'too much' and now he realizes that the insects are not nearly as damaging as he thought they were. Glenda, My friend, Fred, is a big Sevin user, but he's really backed off in the last few years, and I can't tell his garden has any more pest issues than it did before. I think that after years of giving me a hard time about 'hogging all the bees', he finally decided to stop spraying so much and see if his bees would come back....and they did. He proudly stopped by one day recently while I was working outside to announce that the bees were working his fruit trees like crazy. I was excited for him. Dorothy, I think I'll look and see if Rodale has a bug guide somewhere online. You'd think they would. I used to have a great insect book, but I must have loaned it out or something because I can't find it now. All of you might get a big kick out of this: one year when our son was in high school, they had to do an Insect Collection, which of course was not high on any teenager's priority list. Once our son's classmates realized we had every bug in the world here at our place, some of them came by to 'catch bugs'. I wasn't sure if they thought it was great that we had so many bugs, or maybe terrible that we had so many, but they were able to catch all the different kinds of bugs they needed in just a couple of hours! Then they all worked together to identify them, and that helped me learn the names of some of the more obscure bugs, like Southern robber flies. After that, we were the 'go-to guys' for anyone doing a bug collection...nieces and nephews who lived in 'nuked' neighborhoods in Texas, DH's co-workers kids from Texas, etc. Need a bug? We've got 'em here. : ) And, once they came here to collect bugs, they learned we had lots of wildflowers.....which then gave them an idea where to come when it was time for the Texas kids to do a wildflower collection. Dawn

Cook, either outside or in. Of course my first response might have been something about the toilet seat, but that is too obvious.

I find all the ATTRA articles on pest control useful and have lots of them bookmarked so I can refer to them as needed. The only potato pests I ever see are Colorado Potato Beetles, and I don't necessarily see them every year. I just hand-pick them (wearing disposable medical gloves) and drop them into a bowl of soapy water to drown. If you handpick every single one you see early in the season, you can get them all before the population explodes. If you see and ignore 3 or 4 CPBs, all of a sudden you will have hundreds. You also can spray with Spinosad, but I generally don't. I don't want to eat food sprayed with any pesticides at all if I can avoid it. I probably don't use Spinosad or anything else more than once or twice a year. I've had the same bottle of Spinosad for years and years and haven't used it all. It may be too old to be effective by this point. I always start with the least toxic remedy, so for me, hand-picking wins out over spraying anything. If I work my way up from least toxic to most toxic option, with the spraying of any pesticide (organic or synthetic) being the absolute last thing I resort to. Thus, I rarely make it to the final resort of spraying. It is easy to develop an over-reliance on spraying, and I try to avoid that. In my lifetime, I have seen many highly-touted organic pesticides become increasingly less useful over time because of overuse, so my feeling is the less I use anything, then the more effective it will be when I do need it. Overuse of pesticides, whether they are organic or synthetic in nature, leads to pests developing resistance to them. That's part of the reason that some forms of Bt do not seem to be as useful as they once were. I'd hate to see that happen with Spinosad. Then, there's the past history of some once-popular organic pesticides that people used a great deal until we learned how dangerous they were to human beings. Rotenone is an example of one of those. Once believed to be relatively benign to humans, we now know it is linked to some diseases like Parkinson's Disease. One thing that I worry about with products like Spinosad is that any of them might end up being the next rotenone. There was a time when no one thought rotenone caused any issues in humans and it was used for decades before we learned otherwise. Spinosad is so new that I wonder if somewhere down the road we'll find out it is not as benign as we think. The main way I use Spinosad is as a granular product that controls fire ants. It also is an ingredient in Slug-Go Plus that helps control pill bugs and sow bugs if they reach damaging levels in a garden. I almost never use it as a spray product. Sprays can affect many insects, both good and bad, and perhaps animals as well, whereas granular bait products only affect the insects that ingest them. Growing horseradish (in pots, because it can be highly invasive) is said to repel CPBs. I don't know if it does, because some years I have some CPBs anyway, but it likely doesn't hurt. Horseradish is most useful if the pots it is growing in are placed close to the potato growing area. I never see onion pests so cannot help you there. Is there a specific onion pest you have issues with? Honestly, I don't do much for many pests: 1) Your garden is its own ecological system so you are going to have insects, good and bad, all the time. It is unrealistic to expect to have a pest-free garden. 2)Most pests are easily controlled by hand-picking early on, or by covering something like cole crops with floating row cover to keep the pests off the plants. Early attention is key. For example, if harlequin bugs show up on cole crops, I handpick and drown them immediately and after a few days of that, I generally never see another one. They are like Colorado Potato Bugs, though, in that if you ignore them when they first show up, their population can skyrocket amazingly quickly. 3) I focus more on attracting beneficial insects to the garden and letting them deal with pest insects. The beneficials handle most of the pests for me, so that lets me focus on the insects that are an issue. And, in general, I ignore pest insects unless they are doing a fairly high level of damage. Unless a person is heavily spraying their garden with pesticides, there's always going to be insects around, both good and bad. There's no such thing as a pest-free garden. Many pests are merely annoying and might, for example, chew holes in leaves, but I leave them alone if it is only minor damage. Beneficial insects need to have pest insects around to feed upon. If you kill off all your pest insects, what are the beneficial insects going to do since there's nothing in your garden for them to eat? They are going to leave your garden and go elsewhere in search of food. Then when more pest insects show up, you won't have the beneficial insects there to help you keep their population under control. 4) I focus on the early-season pests that harm seedlings. For example, everything needs cutworm protection early in the season. Otherwise, many young seedlings won't survive. During the rest of the season, I ignore caterpillars as much as possible except, of course, for being diligent about hand-picking cabbage worms and cabbage loopers off cole crops as soon as they appear. It is easier, overall, to just grow them under row covers though. Or, to spray with Bt if they do appear. Bt is wonderful for controlling earworms and European corn borers on corn, but planting corn as early as the temperatures allows often enables me to get a good corn harvest before the corn pests even show up, so I favor early planting as a pest control method. Clearly no one wants to eat heads of lettuce with holes chewed in the leaves, so I might pay more attention to a pest that shows up on lettuce, but then I almost never see pests on my lettuce. Many caterpillars only do cosmetic damage and turn into beautiful moths and butterflies, so I ignore all those sorts of pests as much as possible and, in fact, grow plants specifically to attract some forms of caterpillars---growing enough parsley, dill and fennel, for example, to not only feed us but to feed the swallowtail caterpillers as well. 5) I feed the birds year-round, so my garden is always full of birds and those birds eat pests. I always have a birdbath for water for the birds and keep it filled year-round. Birds will control a lot of pesky insects for you. Most winter days we have dozens if not hundreds of birds here feeding and their tweeting and chattering is almost too much, but if the worst complaint we have in winter is that the birds are noisy, then we're having an easy winter. If you want for birds to be in your garden eating grasshoppers in spring and summer, you've got to be doing something to attract them to the garden, so I do all that I can to encourage the birds to be here. The same is true of toads, frogs, turtles, etc. I try to keep them happy and in the garden all the time because they eat a lot of pests. Unfortunately, turtles will eat low-hanging tomato fruit, but losing a few tomatoes is a small price to pay for having turtles on bug patrol in the garden. Most of the pests that I consider a problem are only a problem in the years when there's tons of them. A few grasshoppers in the garden? I don't worry about it. But when big swarms fly into the irrigated green garden in summer as the surrounding fields dry out and turn brown, then the hoppers become a problem. Once the population of grasshoppers is that big, all the birds are eating all the grasshoppers they want and still cannot keep up with the population. Pesticides might knock the grasshopper population down for a few days, but then a new swarm flies in to fill the void. Even when we had a flock of 20-30 guineas that free-ranged on our property during the day and went into the guinea coop to sleep safely at night, the guineas couldn't even keep up with the grasshopper outbreaks in the worst years and each guinea can eat up to 2 lbs. of hoppers per day. Sometimes you win, and sometimes the pests win. For all the time I spend in my garden, I bet I don't even spend 3-5% of it working on pest control. The major pests, beyond early-season things like cutworms, CPBs and flea beetles, are later to appear---squash vine borers, squash bugs, stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs, corn earworms, European corn borers, etc. All those later pests do direct damage that impacts the crop, so I do what I can to control them, but I never get all of them, and that's just how life goes. I bet that 95-98% of the insects in my garden on any given day are not doing enough damage to anything to warrant my attention. I just let them be. Cucumber beetles fly in from the fields every day during the growing season. I'd drive myself insane trying to have a cucumber beetle-free garden (which is never going to happen anyhow without the use of toxic chemicals). I just try to knock back the early population hard in order to keep the overall population lower. Once the cucurbits reach a certain size in their growth, they tolerate cucumber beetle damage. Because the larvae of spotted cucumber beetles feed on corn roots, I like to kill all the early cucumber beetles I see, which I am seeing most years even before corn planting time rolls around. Spotted cucumber beetles feed on at least a couple hundred kinds of garden plants, so no matter what you grow, even if you don't grow cucurbits, you're going to see the beetles around. To maintain your sanity in the garden, you have to pick your battles, and I do. Letting weeds grow in and near the garden is one of the worst things you can do because insects often live in and feed on those weeds. I have to be realistic, though, as we are surrounded by ranches where the pastures are mostly native grassland. Some pastures have lots of forbs mixed in, so those pastures really are filled with insects. There's no way my garden could be an insect-free oasis in the midst of an ocean of thousands of surrounding acres of grassland, so I just do what I can without losing my mind. Different people tolerate different things. My garden always is full of bees and wasps of all kinds during the growing season, and they are amazingly beneficial. I'm just thrilled to have them in the garden. Wasps of all kinds, for example, feed on caterpillars. Some of my non-gardening friends are afraid to step foot in my garden because a bee or wasp might sting them, but I've learned to work around the bees and wasps and, for the most part, we get along. I might get stung by an agitated wasp once or twice a year, but if that happens, the world doesn't end. A lot of people have issues with aphids, and certainly aphids pop up occasionally in my garden. Pea aphids, for example, will eventually show up on my sugar snap peas. What do I do? Nothing. If I am patient and wait a few days, the lady bugs magically appear and will, over the course of a week or two, eat all the pea aphids. I don't get many aphids on many other plants though, likely because I am exceptionally careful to avoid feeding high nitrogen plant foods to most plants. Plants with excess nitrogen are incredibly attractive to aphids, so this is an example of how a gardening practice can either attract a lot of pests or not. Many people overfeed nitrogen to their garden plants and then have to battle the huge population of aphids attracted to plants that were overfed nitrogen. I only give high nitrogen to the plants that actually need it, like onions and corn. With each pest a gardener encounters, you have to ask yourself if anything you are doing is attracting those pests to the garden. Sometimes a gardener can be inadvertantly attracting the very pests that drive them up the wall. Sometimes there is something about a specific variety that attract pests, whereas a different variety of that veggie is not a pest magnet. I don't grow Piricicaba broccoli as much as I once did because it seems to be a magnet for aphids, whereas Packman is not. When I notice that a specific variety attracts more than the usual number of pests, I drop it and grow a different variety. One of the best trap crops is sunflowers planted outside of and well away from the veggie garden. Sunflowers are very attractive to stink bugs, so I use them to draw stink bugs away from my garden. It isn't that growing sunflowers outside the garden magically gives me a stink bug-free garden, but just that the sunflowers will attract some of the stink bugs away from the veggie garden. You have to find what works for you in your garden. I have as many flowers and herbs in my garden as I have food crops, and it drives my "old farmer/old rancher" neighbors crazy because they favor monocultures. A lot of them, too, think I'm wasting perfectly good garden space on "weeds" (their term for my herbs and flowers) when I could be using that space to grow more food. They also spray their monoculture crops, though, and I don't. I'd rather be surrounded by herbs and flowers that attract beneficial insects than surrounded by pesticides. It just happens that the herbs and flowers not only make me happy, but they work for me. And, as it happens, I still grow more than enough food. We have plenty for us to eat fresh, plenty to put up for future meals via canning, freezing, dehydrating and root cellaring, and plenty to share with friends. I could understand their objection to my use of space for herbs/flowers if I was whining that I needed more space to produce more food, but that doesn't happen---we get more than enough of a harvest. It is just that companion planting herbs and flowers among veggies seems offensive to conventional farmers and gardeners who prefer to grow monoculture crops, and the fact that I do it seems to make some of them very uncomfortable. And, I'll just add, that I never criticize their use of chemical pesticides, fungicides and herbicides unless their herbicides are drifting into my garden and killing my plants, so it does tick me off a bit when they come into my garden and tell me that my herbs and flowers are a waste of gardening space!