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.

I've found from experience that Ensetes can cope fairly well with indoor conditions (both in terms of low light levels and low humidity), unlike some Musa species which seem more attractive to red spider mite. My advice would be to dig it up reasonably soon, while it's still warm, and bring it indoors. If you wait until the cold weather the plant won't be in active growth and is more prone to rotting off. It should still carry on growing, albeit more slowly, indoors, and the reduced light won't do much harm, as long as it goes back outside when it warms up next spring. I've even overwintered plants quite far from a window and they haven't suffered. I'm in London, UK, and our Maureliis are beautifully red, due no doubt to not getting an overdose of sun!

What I'd do: Wait until just before or after first frost to dig & pot the hosta. Use a porous mix to fill in & around the root ball. Move to an unheated shelter to wait for the move. (Any place where they won't get rained on.) As to how you actually transport them will be weather dependent. If it's unusually warm, I'd forgo the rooftop bag where they'll get heated up by the sun. (Weight on the car top also a concern?) Have on hand some ice, frozen in 1/2 gallon plastic milk jugs to pack in between the potted hosta and tuck a couple of blankets over them to keep them well chilled--if you transport them inside a heated car. Another thing you might consider doing--before you load the hosta, put down some large pieces of reflective mylar (cheap tanning blankets), load the hosta & cover with more mylar & then cover with blankets. The mylar will work to reflect heat away from the 'package' and help keep the cold in. Might want to insulate underneath the bottom layer of mylar, too, to protect from any heat rising into the car from the exhaust system. Use recycled styrofoam packing or get a sheet of the cheap (white) beadboard from Home Depot or Lowes. Aim for packaging them in a sort of free form ice chest. Once you're at your destination, transfer to a place in the shade (but not next to any heated structures.) As soon as you can, pop them out of the pots & heel them in somewhere shady (but dry) and maybe consider lightly covering them with something like pine boughs to keep them from getting too wet. Then maybe the easiest thing to do would be to just leave the MA hosta in MA & replace them with southern grown hosta. Spring comes really early in Alabama so you won't have long to wait!

I've taken an interest in learning about Florida gardening because I plan to move down there eventually. What I've read again and again about discouraging nematodes is to maintain a heavy layer of organic mulch. This will eventually break down and improve your soil. Some people mix in cheap clay kitty litter to make their soil heavier. Another possibility is to heavily underplant roses with Marigolds. There is one seed strain of French Marigolds in particular which tested as being very effective at deterring root-knot nematodes -- Tagetes patula 'Ground Control' (aka 'Single Gold'). The one caveat is that the effects won't be seen until the following year, and to maintain the effect, you'll want to replant them every year. As far as planting too deep -- I think many here would say I am guilty of this, but there hasn't been any negative effect which I can see. When I was putting this garden together, I planted my roses (own-root bands that were grown-on in pots for a few months) directly into the native soil in late Summer 2013. Prior to planting them, I had laid down sheets of cardboard to smother weeds and grass, and covered that with trimmings from a tree I was cutting back. This accumulated to about three inches, but it was a very "airy" three inches. Over all that, I put down an additional 6-8" of "proper" mulch (partially composted shredded wood chips). At first, I made concave "dishes" around each rose to allow water to be directed towards their roots and keep mulch away from the canes as I kept reading I was supposed to do, but after the first Winter, the beds were pretty much leveled out. In Spring, I worked an additional 2" of composted manure into that layer of mulch. This meant that what was once the border between canes and roots was now about 8-10" below the surface. Why did I do this? I wanted to give the roses an "early start" on having deep roots for getting water, and anticipated that canes buried beneath the mulch line would eventually root further up, allowing for easier access to fertilizer applied at the surface. Companion perennials were planted directly into this "mulch/compost" layer in Spring 2014, and they grew like gangbusters in their first year. Last Autumn, I wanted to continue adding organic matter to the beds, so I "harvested" fallen tree leaves and spread them to a "fluffy" three inches thick. I also started collecting used coffee grounds from Starbucks -- one 13gal kitchen garbage can-full per day -- and spread this about 2-3" over the leaves. It took about three months to complete. Winter snow has packed this down a bit, and the previous year's additions have started breaking down, so where I'm at now is about where I was after the first layer of mulch -- about 6-8" above the original soil line. This week, I started some early pruning. While there is some snow still remaining in half of the garden, where it is gone there was already life in the top layer of coffee grounds and leaves -- various soil critters are waking up and finding lots of food waiting for them. I've noticed some freeze damage (naturally) on some rose canes, but nothing soft and mushy which would indicate "cane rot". True, this could emerge later in the season, but I also never saw it last Spring when the roses' canes were also buried to about the same level. Why is this not harming my roses? Perhaps because what's covering the canes is actively being broken down by the various organisms in the soil, and that process is different than simply being a blanket of "wet" around the rose canes. Worms and critters keep moving the material around, and fungi digesting the material are sopping up the extra moisture. I don't know for sure -- all I can say is that I don't see any negative effects. :-) ~Christopher