There is an important distinction that needs to be made here. OrTHENE and OrthoNEX are NOT the same pesticide. They are the same to the extent that both employ the active ingredient ACEPHATE. But OrthoNEX is a mixture of Acephate with the fungicide that is sold as FUNGINEX. The warning on the Funginex bottle warns against getting even the smallest amount of this product in your eyes...it can cause blindness. You should not inhale this product either. Orthonex is the product that used to be (and probably still is) sold as ROSEPRIDE, and is used to prevent blackspot in roses. These chemicals are not "nothing". They have an impact on the environment every time you use them, whether you see it or not. If you are using Orthinex and you don;t really need to be preventing fungal disease, you are using a doubly environmentally unfriendly gaent unnecessarily. I stopped using all forms of chemical pesticide and herbicide (like Round Up) when I began to notice physical abnormalities in the local population of native green treefrogs on my property. I live on 5 acres of land and have pretty extensive ornamental plantings, as well as a population of frogs that probably numbers in the tens of thousands (our property backs up to a Nature Preserve and a natural wetland). We noted that the new generations of baby treefrogs were hatching out on our property with deformities, mainly missing eyes and deformed heads, and some with missing limbs, when we were using Cygon 2E to control black pepper scale on bromeliads and Orthene to control magnolia scale on palms. The treefrogs were using our bromeliads as incubators for their eggs and tadpoles. We stopped using it and within 2 generations we stopped seeing these genetic abnormalities in our frogs. This was a very scary wakeup call to me, especially as we have a well for our water. THINK before you spray.

* Posted by cindy_john (My Page) on Tue, Apr 20, 10 at 10:49 I was so happy to have initially found this forum and hear from all of you, most have been so helpful and nice. However, I come back a few days later to update you all and see someone says I'm a troll and another tells me to move to a high rise building...how nasty is that! To those 2 or 3 people: please do not come to my garden on the days I am spraying, I will more than likely take one look at you and think you are nasty insects and take appropriate action. Wow, so everyone who doesn't agree with you using dangerous chemicals to "kill nasty bugs" is a nasty bug and should be elminated?! Nice!! And I stand by my high rise suggestion, anyone who wants to kill all bugs "because they are terrified of them" and has no concept of beneficials and no desire to learn, is a gardening menace.

Thank you Kimmsr for your response, however I have a few questions/concerns. For those of us who have just moved into a home and have just started to try to go the organic route this is difficult. My builder laid the sod on top of 4" of builders sand. Not much organic qualities in that. If I understand correctly, it honestly takes years of organic treatments to build up the organic matter in your lawn to make it healthy and to hopefully deter bad things from happening. In the meantime, however, I have gotten cinch bugs and had to place insect killer on those patches because the bugs would have eventually killed that area of my lawn. So, until I can get a "healthy" lawn after a few years of organic treatment am I stuck in limbo with not being able to apply any synthetic type of insecticide? Do I simply let the bugs take over, and replace sod?

I'm glad to hear we weren't the only ones seeing ticks in winter. We don't have too much of a problem with them on the civilized couple of acres of land around the house and garden, but our woodland acreage and all our neighbors' ranchland that surrounds us, tend to be heavily populated with ticks. We had guineas for almost 10 years and they are great about eating ticks and everything else, but they roam too much here for me to be able to keep them safe from predators. Ours routinely roamed not just our property but that of 3 or 4 neighbors (who didn't mind them and often talked about getting their own guines) adding up to a couple hundred acres, keeping all of us happy and tick-free. After predators wiped out our last flock, we didn't replace them. Our chickens eat ticks in the areas where they free-range but they also are easily distracted by many other insects so don't devour ticks as voraciously as guineas do. The chickens only roam over about an acre, but that acre is pretty much tick-free. Our dogs rarely have tick issues (unless they've gone running through the woods) but our cats play in the woods all the time and occasionally come home with a tick or two. Our dog yard which the chickens cannot, for obvious reasons, enter, remains tick-free and almost totally flea-free and we don't even treat it with anything. I don't know if that's because the guineas wiped out everything (I think the last year we had them was 2008) or if it is just that the chickens keep their population too low to spread into the dog yard. Angela, There are various organic flea and tick products that are low in toxicity that you might consider using. Beneficial nematodes, which you apply to the ground mixed in water (they're microscopic so you don't see them) can break the flea and tick populations in the soil. There's various other sprays or powdered products used to treat the ground or to spray the sides of buildings (one way fleas and ticks survive when you treat the ground is they climb up onto building walls, fences or tree trunks) when you treat your property. When we first moved here and built our home on what was fallow farm and ranch land that had been leased out to a guy who ran cattle on it, we had a lot of ticks and fleas. It took us a couple of years of consistently treating the animals (we used Cedarcide animal dip and also sprayed our ground in and around the dog yard with it) and the yard, and we never used anything but organic products. Back then we bought Cedarcide either at one of the organic nurseries in Texas or maybe at one of the Home Depots in Texas (there are none close to our southern OK location so we have to cross the border to go to an HD store) that were somewhat close to us. I don't know what the big box stores in the OKC metro or NE OK carry, but when we lived in Texas, we always found a better selection of organic products back in those days in Home Depot than in Lowe's. I have noticed that some Lowe's stores (in Texas, not at the one in Ardmore, which is the closest OK Lowe's to us) do carry a lot more organic products now so you might check and see if the ones near you have anything like you're looking for. One place that we bought Cedarcide in TX probably was Marshall Grain Company as we always went there when we were visiting our family members in Fort Worth, but I haven't been there in a couple of years now and don't know if they still carry Cedarcide. They do have a website so you might look and see what they have on it---even if you don't order anything from them, it would give you an idea of what sorts of low-toxicity products are out there. We also bought and spread food-grade D.E. (not the swimming pool filter type of D.E. which can harm lungs if inhaled) on the ground that first couple of years to help with flea and tick control. You also could buy one of the liquid Spinosad formulations and spray the ground and surrounding trees, shrubs, other plants and walls (from ground level to 5' up) with it. That might be your best bet. If you have flowers that bees and butterflies visit, I wouldn't spray them with it. There are a couple of companies I've used in the past for purchasing organic products online. Both Arbico Organics and Planet Natural generally have a wide selection of organic products and also have informative pages that describe how to combat whatever pest is plaguing you. You might visit their flea and tick pages and see what they have. Good luck, Dawn