Hi Naomi! Sounds like a frustrating problem. I have crazy ants in mine, but no fire ants.....yet! Gosh, I hope I didn't jinx myself. As awful as fire ants are, remember that all ants are decomposers, so they are really assisting the process as they help themselves to your goodies. I really don't have a sure fire answer (no pun intended), but I would try a number of things. If you are up for it, put your boots on, get your pitchfork, and spend a couple of minutes every day disturbing them. Maybe they will move if there is regular disturbance. If your pile is not too wet from the rain, you might try adding daily water with a hose, to the disturbance time. In our heat, it can be difficult to keep a large pile moist, so it may actually be beneficial to water it daily, unless you've gotten lots of rain lately with Fay. I think small amounts of daily UCG may not be enough. Have you tried to get the large, plastic bags of UCG from SB and cover the mounds with them? Personally, most of the time, I put UCG straight on my plants. I use it as compost itself and I feel like it's precious and that I might be wasting some of it if I process it through my compost first. If all else fails, and your pile is not too big, try covering it for a few days with a tarp. Fire ants generally like sunshine, so they will move somewhere else. Maybe not permanently, but long enough for you to be able to turn your pile without fear of being attacked. I don't know if there is any basis to this, but I'll tell you what works for me in my yard. When we moved here, less than 3 years ago, this yard was sort of abandoned. Fire ant mounds were not uncommon. We are big mulchers (several inches of wood chips in many areas). We have no fireants except at the very edges of our property (where the mulch stops). Very rarely, in our utility area of the yard, when the mulch gets thin, I might see a small, linear mound forming by my stepping stones. If I get some wood chips and cover the exposed areas thickly, the ants disappear again. I don't know why, but that is my experience. If you can get wood chips, you might lay that as the foundation of your compost pile in the future? Or maybe just the immediate surrounding area? Another note, if you have any way of getting your pile to heat up quickly, for sure they would go away, but this usually requires larger amounts of material at once. Lastly, I wanted to mention that the compost pile I have on the ground in my yard I reserve for mostly yard waste.... and an occassional nitrogen burst from my DH. I end up putting my kitchen scraps in my two bins, where creatures can't get to it. Sometimes I put leaves and paper in these as browns if things start getting a bit funky, and it goes back to being fresh. Wishing you luck and a pile of gardener's gold for your trouble. Please keep us posted on what happens. I'd like to know what ends up working for you so I can learn from it too. Don't let this discourage you. You'll find the solution. Happy composting! Anna

Hey all, so in the end, it just turns out that there was a lot of ants and those buffalo treehoppers (which I took are care best I could). However, on my other plant at home, I noticed these tiny little insects and I'm having trouble identifying them. They are only on the top of the leaves or on the buds of the peppers and seem to leave some sort of clear excretion behind. Here are some pics, did my best to capture them: (on the leaf): (here you can see it on the one pod that is focused in on:) (unfocused, but they are on the pod just north of the big one hanging down:) (another pic, mostly to show the excretion they leave behind.. its shiny) Thanks in advance for any insight!

When the sprinkler guy came out Monday, I had to pull out all of the spinach that had overwintered. It was a whole plastic grocery bag full, which is more than we could eat before it when bad, so this morning I blanched and froze it to use for cooking. The kids hate cooked spinach, but if I use it in a pasta dish I can sneak it past them : ) Yesterday, I moved a couple of mums and hibiscus ROS to an area where I am making a new perennial bed. I know I'm doing it backwards, I should have prepared the area, and then moved the plants, but I wanted to moved them while they were dormant, and I haven't had time to go pick out the stone that is going to edge this area. Where I stood to take the photo are the electric and cable boxes for the neighbors house, so hopefully this will hide that a bit. You can see one of the new apple trees in the background. Once I pull up the rest of the sod and get the area edged with stone, I plan to move some Kniphofia (I wintersowed last year), Lavender (wintersowed this year from Skybird's seeds), and some Alyssum 'Golden Queen' (also wintersowed this year). Happy digging, Bonnie

Im not trying to be childish at all it just seems that there are alot of people on this forum that are so critical about random stuff. I apologize for not using punctuation but it seems to me that a garden forum is kind of a dumb place to have a hen pecking contest, Im sorry I am the VP for one of the largest fiber operations in TX leaving me with very minimal time to even post questions much less make sure that all my I's are dotted and T's are crossed, and she didn't even offer any helpful advice it was just blah blah blah I think your stupid and I'm smart because I am ever so eloquent and use punctuation marks big whoop my 4 year old learned that this year. Listen guys I am an extremely hard working business woman who is a mother of four and a leader to many and if this was and email to one of my clients, or sales reps I would make sure all of the punctuation marks that were necessary were there and I had sectioned my thoughts into stanza's and paragraphs but Im doing the best I can with what little time I have life is too short and I can't believe I'm writing this, because this is five minutes of my life spent in trying to offer up some insight to the people on this forum that I feel hide behind their computer and have nothing better to do than to pick fights on local POP servers! So that being said I bid you adue and just know I really dont want to make garden buddies and I will eventually get the help I need I just use this as a reference point, I hope I didn't offend anyone with this post but if I did get over we are all here to do what............ you got it grow some tomatos :) have a good one!