do home remedies for weeds or garden pests work? ask jeff gillman

Kindra Clineff

North Carolina State Extension wrote an excellent publication on terrestrial flatworms, with common species around yards and gardens in the Carolinas called land planarians or hammerhead worms: https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/terrestrial-flatwormshammerhead-worms.

Evil Weevils do everything but ride motor bikes.

Everyone loves falafel—it’s a year-round staple, and the frozen options at Trader Joe’s make it incredibly easy to prepare. But today, you should probably rid your freezer shelves of any Trader Joe’s falafel: In the company’s third food recall this week, on July 28 Trader Joe’s recalled its fan-favorite Fully Cooked Falafel after being informed by the supplier that rocks were found in the food.

If you are looking for an easy and cheap ways to keep you plants safe in home and yard, then do not miss this list on the most Common Items in Home to Solve All of Pest Problems!

Buying new clothing is exciting. So exciting, in fact, that you probably want to put on your new pieces and show them off as soon as possible, right? But when you do, there’s probably a small part of you wondering, “Wait, should I have washed this first?”

Homeowners have had to combat root-knot nematodes for as long as home vegetable gardens have existed. Nematodes are microscopic worms in the soil in high numbers that can cause damage to susceptible plants. Traditionally, the vegetables most affected were beans, watermelons, cucumbers, and especially three grower favorites: tomatoes, sweetpotatoes, and okra. Although there are many types of nematodes in the soil, root-knot nematodes are some of the most common and cause the large galls or knots you see on the roots of susceptible plants

While many think of vegetables when using the word garden, the basic definition of a garden, as a plot of soil in which plants are grown, is widely inclusive. Gardeners are passionate about native plants, fruits & vegetables, turfgrasses, roses, houseplants, container plants, mosses, and other plants, too numerous to list.

Ferns have been on the planet for more than 300 million years—about twice as long as flowering plants—and in recent years breeders with sophisticated eyes have introduced extra-showy varieties for our gardens.No wonder there is a focus on ferns, since they are naturally deer-resistant, mostly adapted to shady gardens, and hey, you don’t need to deadhead them since they’re not flowering plants. You can’t attribute any of those qualities to, say, a daylily.On my radio show and podcast, Tony treated me to a 101 on ferns and how to use them in the garden (that’s a tiny section of the 28-acre private nonprofit Juniper

100 Great Plants: From the English newspaper The Telegraph, a list of 100 great garden plants. (An aside: Why don’t our newspapers have garden sections like this one?)The Ambergate Lists: From Ambergate Gardens, Mike and Jean Heger’s nursery in Minnesota, a series of great lists covering topics from plants for deep shade to plants that don’t require frequent division.Vinnie Simeone’s Lists: Vinnie manages historic Planting Fields Arboretum on Long Island, my old stomping grounds, and has taught me many things. His personal website includes links up top to lists as desired as deer-resistant plants and plants for

I SAID IT A FEW WEEKS AGO, when I saw a change of the guard at my feeders a couple of weeks ahead of “normal”–do the birds know something I don’t yet? Seemed to me then that winter’s first teases must be close at hand. And now the National Weather Service says it may drop to 33 one night this week, slightly higher the others (not as scary as parts of Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa, where I see–egads!–winter weather advisories and freeze watches and warnings).

“Last year [2012] at the overwintering sites, the area occupied was at only 60 percent of its previous low,” she says. “It had been declining, but that was astonishingly low.”The migration-monitoring program Journey North also reported lower stats in 2013’s cold spring. And though the numbers were only preliminary when we spoke that fall, University of Minnesota’s Monarch Larva Monitoring Program seems to indicate that “we’re at about 20 to 30 percent of our average,” Oberhauser says, acknowledging that these drastically lower numbers might be a “new normal.” But she’s not sounding defeated, by any means.A big positive: A lot of people are interested in monarchs. “Though it will be difficult to make up for all the habitat we’ve lost, we can make that ‘new normal’ as good as we can.”  (Ways to help are father down this page.)what going wrong for monarchs?MONARCH