...when you solicit other people's organic material to mulch the "new" areas you've reclaimed from lawn. A couple months ago, I saw a guy trimming all of the hedges at the bank across the street. Next thing you know, he's backed his pickup truck into my yard and he's helping me haul this stuff here'n'there. That was great stuff! Fresh, tender growth from the shrubs mixed with the leaves he had raked off of the mulch. Then there's the trunk-loads of trimmings I've brought here many times from my Mom's house (she refuses to compost,) bags of sawdust from honey's work, bags of peanut shells from a friend's chicken farm, and bags of pine needles from honey's Mom's house. ...all happily composting in a giant pile near the back fence, waiting to be dumped on a new lasagna bed next weekend. ...when you spend an hour putting potted plants in the yard to get rained on, then an hour getting wet & icky putting them back on the porch. ...when there's a rainy morning in the summer and you go to work outside, since that's the only time it's not too hot. ...when you've timed a move so it will be a good time to dig up your plants and bring them to the new place too. ...when you hear yourself thinking, "If this grass was mowed, the beds would show up better." ...when you realize you've been absent-mindedly deadheading someone's plants while you're at their house visiting. ...when you end up with so many pots of cuttings that you don't even have anywhere to plant them.

I haven't had much trouble with squash bugs on either melons or cucumbers, but some people have a lot of trouble with them. However, I do try to kill squash bugs when I see them, so maybe I kill off most of them before they can find the cukes or melons. Usually I grow the winter squash, melons and cukes in the back garden, which we never planted this year because of the incredibly heavy rainfall, so the squash bugs in the front garden are separated from the cukes and melons by over 100 yards. I don't know if that is why I don't have squash bug issues on the melons or cukes. This year, the melons are in the front garden and I haven't seen a squash bug on them, but I do think I wiped out all the squash bugs in June because I haven't seen any of them since then. I have Sugar Baby watermelons and Hale's Jumbo muskmelons in the front garden and haven't found any sort of pest on them yet, except for spider mites which are everywhere here in the summer and get worse as the heat worsens. The spider mite population ought to be peaking now and should start to fall soon, so I think my garden has outlasted it this year. Stockergal, I am sure the farmer who once farmed our land planted the bermuda, and I hate it. When we bought the place we had beautiful native grasses mixed with wildflowers and it was so beautiful and everything peacefully coexisted together. When it came time to mow all that down short in the area selected for our home site, so that the builder could start construction of our home, we instantly had bermuda grass pop up everywhere. Without the taller prairie grasses to shade it, it took over the area and outgrew everything else. I've been fighting to keep the bermuda grass out of beds of ornamental planting ever since. The thing that works best for me is to shade it out, but once trees are big enough to shade it out, you do have to plant a shade-loving ground-cover for erosion control. and we'll never be rid of all the bermuda because our yard never will be fully shady. Hailey, Have the row cover ready. The minute one squash pops up out of the ground, the squash bugs and SVBs will materialize out of thin air. Dawn

Debra, I have a lady bug house and the lady bugs won't use it. They do try to overwinter in our barn-style garage, our screened-in back porch (we cover the screening with greenhouse plastic in winter to turn it into more of a sunporch) and our laundry room (I vaccuum them up and relocate them back outside). I have found that lady bugs follow the food. They'll be in my garden as long as there are bugs to be found, but once they eat everything they like to eat, they move on. You can't keep them around in a mostly bug-free garden because that is un-natural. They have to follow their food supply. Some years we have enough pest-type bugs around in the pastures to keep some of the lady bugs around, but that has not proven to be true this year. So, when late-season pests, like spider mites, showed up, I didn't have lady bugs around to eat them. I guarantee you, though, that before the first frost they'll return to overwinter in their usual places. I'll have to have a little chat with them about why they abandoned our garden this summer and didn't come back in time to help with the mites. I could have bought and released more, but those usually are the Asian lady beetles and they do like to come inside the house and are a colossal nuisance because of that. I love the lady bugs and often have them all over the place, but this was apparently a bad lady bug year here. Dawn

Hi Ryse: Thank you for your organic ways. Here in Chicagoland we had JB with last summer drought and heat. But a friend within 5-minutes drive, next to a creek and a lake had zero JB ... so JB feast on plants for moisture. My next-door neighbor put a Japanese beetle trap on her peach tree ... which attracted beetles to her tree, and my peach tree was NOT infested. I put a big brown grocery bag under my roses, shake it, then JB fall down ... then I close the bag and stomp on it with my feet. I do the same with a big plastic bag. From eHow: "Some plants, instead of repelling pests, actually attract and then kill them. Larkspur and four-o-clocks, for instance, both attract Japanese beetles but also contain substances toxic to them." Four-o-clocks smell really good. Another excerpt from eHow: "Garden plants that repel Japanese beetles include tansy, rue, garlic and catnip." The below link from Gardens Alive has more ways to combat JB. Good luck to you, Ryse ... Last hear I had to cut all my roses in bud-form before the JB get to them. When we first moved here with no trees, I had the WORST infestation of JB ... then we planted 26 trees ... lots of birds came by, with a decrease in JB population. Here is a link that might be useful: Gardens Alive on Japanese Beetles