It is a myth that green fruit beetles only eat rotten and ripe fruit. The ones that attack my nectarine trees will eat unripe fruit too. Also as these articles say, control is difficult because they can fly long distances. They are right however that they like to lay their eggs in compost piles, especially ones containing manure. http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/GARDEN/FRUIT/PESTS/grfruitbeetle.html http://www.farmerfred.com/greenbeetles.htm Biological-Biorational Control To date there are no effective commercial biological agents available to control this grub. The most common parasite is a type of digger wasp, Scolia dubia (Say). This beneficial wasp enters the grub tunnel, stings the grub then lays an egg on the paralyzed grub. The resulting larva feeds in the grub, eventually killing it. Increased flight activity in late September by the wasps was noticed after green June beetle emergence. Unfortunately, even though these wasps help reduce the grub population, many people are afraid of being stung and consider them a nuisance or threat to life. These wasps are not aggressive and rarely sting humans. Milky disease products effective against Japanese beetle do not control green June beetle grubs nor do any Bacillus thuringiensis (B.t.) products.

Antechron, Just make sure the Nepenthes pot is raised over the water level on a pedestle to keep the drain holes from absorbing too much water and waterlogging the roots. Nepenthes fluid will refill in a few days if the plants like the climate they are in. If not, they will take some time, maybe even a few weeks, to adapt to your environment. The fluid is composed of primarily sugars and benzoic acid at first, but when an insect falls in and drowns, the plant produces digestive enzymes as well. Just pouring water in the pitchers wll not help the plant other than covering over the symptoms of humidity shock temporarily. Better to fix the humidity by adapting the plants slowly like you are doing with the terrarium so they will grow properly from the start. Nepenthes tend to like partial sun, like what they get under a shady tree. A window that gives morning sun and plenty of ambient light the rest of the day would be good (avoid the brightest midday sun as it can burn some Nepenthes). You could also use 12,000 lumens of artificial florescent light 5-8 inches from the plants.

Hi I was just reading a book called Common sense pest control. It suggests that having a large problem with yellow jackets and wasps indicates something that is attracting them. One thing that is the biggest attractant of these, is garbage, or sweets or meat outdoors. Either pet food on a dish outside, or bottles put out for recycling that have not been rinsed. Or rubbish barrels that do not have secure covers. When I read that it made sense to me, as we had some old garbage cans with holes in the bottoms and no covers and although I haven't seen any insects around them, I don't go near them too often and I don't put the rubbish out. We have replaced the cans with new ones with locking lids. I hope this will improve the situation. Adam

Seedmama, This will come as a surprise to no one, but my self-induced gardening agony is that I try to plant too much of everything even when I know I don't/won't have space for all of it. People who know me understand that I never have enough space for everything I want to plant, and people who don't know me could never understand why I 'think' I need 60-80 varieties of tomatoes, or 300 Sugar Snap/Super Sugar Snap pea plants, 100 broccoli plants (but only 3 varieties so I did show some restraint there), 6 types of onions, 12 kinds of beans, 8 kinds of zinnias, 10 basil varieties and 10 varieties of sunflowers. Honestly, do I need to grow all that? Well, yes I do, or I wouldn't be trying to do it. If we had good soil here, at least it would make a little sense to use that nice soil and not let it go to waste. Unfortunately, we have very dense, thick, slow-draining red clay that requires huge amounts of amendment just to make it possible to grow anything in it at all. This year, we've doubled our garden space although the big 'new' garden won't be ready for planting for another 2 or 3 weeks, and even then it has had only what I consider minimal soil improvement. It will be fenced though, and that's a good starting point since anything unfenced is devoured by deer, rabbits and such. I'm also planning to have at least 100 containers this year and maybe even more unless I run out of planting time because the heat arrives. I wasn't always this way, you know. For our first couple of years here, I was content to have only a dozen varieties of tomatoes, and pretty much one variety of corn, beans, okra, etc. I have always had lots of flower varieties but still not on the scale I have now. Slowly, though, the garden began to expand and I began to plant more, more, more every year. One year in the early 2000s as I struggled to plant everything I had in flats, I remarked to DH that I was really putting pressure on myself to get all the flats emptied and all the plants in the ground by a particular date--I think it was Memorial Day. He wryly commented that it really didn't matter because once I emptied the flats, I'd just fill them up again with more soil and seeds...and he was right. When we decided to move from a large city in Texas to rural southern OK, one of our reasons was so we could have space for more fruit trees, blackberries, veggies and flowers. You have to be careful what you wish for, though, because with all that land available, I can't seem to stop planting. I need a T-shirt that says "Somebody Help Me.....I Can't Stop Planting". All that planting inevitably leads to long days in the garden and in the house dealing with the harvest. At times, I am sure my family and friends think I'm insane. Forty jars of jam/jelly? Fifty jars of pickles? Sixty jars of salsa? You get the idea..... Yesterday, an old gardening buddy dropped by and tried to give me some 'extra' corn seed he had, and I turned it down because I thought my DH might leave me if I told him I needed him to rototill and fence "just one more" area so I could add something else. Then my old rancher friend (who at 88 years of age is more energetic than anyone else I know) told me, regretfully, that his wife told him not to plant a garden this year because her health will not allow her to put up all that produce or help with the harvest, etc. I asked my friend if he was, then, not going to have a garden after all and he never directly answered....but told me he already had his onions and potatoes in the ground and was getting ready to plant corn, and would at least have tomato plants in his molasses feed tubs. He still seemed kind of bummed out about "not" having a garden, so I volunteered to help him. I told him to plant what he wanted and to tell his dear, sweet wife that I would help him harvest the crops and put them up. As I was relating this story to my DH, he finished the ending before I could tell him about my offer to help. He said "you told him we'd help him right".... You know, it is a very wise man who understands his wife and how she thinks and what she's likely to do and still loves her and puts up wih her anyway. So, in two words (although, lol, I used a gazillion more than that), my self-induced gardening agony is "too much" of everything. Dawn