Wildlife pests are extremely frustrating. They dig up our flowers, devour our vegetable gardens, and potentially spread disease to our pets or even to people. When we find out we have a wildlife problem, we get very emotional and develop a serious vindictive streak. All we can think about is revenge when we find our juicy tomatoes laid to waste or our meticulous garden work dug up or trampled!

That anger can make us reckless and cause us to do things we shouldn’t do. The first thing many people think of is to poison or trap the offending animals and effectively remove them from the premises. But the experts at Moxie pest control know that these techniques aren’t reliable. There are several reasons it can fail or even backfire.

They Can’t Be Sustained

Just how long are you willing to keep refilling a container of rat poison? Pests aren’t like people. They don’t have deeds or leases that only allow them to live in certain areas. Consequently, if you have rats in your garage, you won’t solve the problem by randomly putting out poison. You’ll kill some rats maybe–but you’ll just end up with some different rats.

Expert pest control can not only address the immediate problem but also help you create a strategy that will give you a long-term solution to the issue. Another option is to utilize natural repellents that will permanently deter pests from visiting.

They Can Cause Legal Problems

Just as pests don’t have boundaries, they also don’t know what you are trying to do. That may sound silly, but it’s just as silly to think that poisons, traps, or other home remedies will only affect the pest you are targeting.

If the rat poison smells good to the rat, it will also smell good to other animals. Neighborhood cats and dogs, desirable wildlife, and potentially even people can come into contact with the improvised pest control measures that you use. Injuries or deaths could land you in court with a serious and indefensible position. The outcome of legal action will leave you with costs so great that you’ll wish you had left the pests alone.

They’re Just Cruel

There is a right way and a wrong way to go about pest control. Being humane can be the furthest thing from your mind in the heat of the moment when you discover a problem, but before you take measures to deal with the issue yourself, remember that killing a pest isn’t as neat and clean as it appears.

The reality is that while many forms of pest control are designed to kill the pest, they are also designed to do so as humanely as possible. An improvised system done at home is not going to meet this standard. A professional company has much better methods for eliminating the problem without being needlessly cruel.

Pest problems are frustrating. They’re destructive, expensive, and messy. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and try some DIY steps that you think will take care of the problem, but the reality is that these actions are more likely to fail or to leave you with even bigger problems. When pests are a serious issue, a professional is your best option, hands down.

In my experience swiss chard is incredibly easy to grow. It tolerates the cold well so you can start growing it very early in the spring and have fresh greens even when the weather is still chilly. It handles itself well even in the hot temperatures and lasts well into the return of the cold.

When the temperatures start to dip and frost is coming more often than not I start harvesting the remainder of my swiss chard so I can preserve it for use in the winter. A cold frame, like I might use for my spinach, simply won’t work because chard gets quite tall. In the house and into the freezer it must go.

But what can you do with frozen swiss chard? Well, you can use the leaves much the way you would use spinach and the stems can be used the same way you use celery. Here are some ideas for using preserved swiss chard…

Leaves:

• Add to lentil or bean soup
• Scramble in eggs for breakfast burritos
• Add to casserole dishes
• Top homemade pizza
• Adding to quiche, tarts, and frittatas
• Add to green smoothies
• Add to dips in place of spinach
• Add to curry dishes

Stems:

• Pickle them and eat throughout the winter
• Add to chicken soup
• Stir fry with other veggies in Asians dishes
• Puree them for use in tahini or hummus

How to Preserve Swiss Chard

Gather your swiss chard from the garden and clean well. Cut the stems from the leaves. I blanch and freeze stems and leaves separately and I also reserve some longer stems for pickling and canning.

Blanch anything you desire to freeze for three minutes in boiling water and then immediately transfer to an ice bath. After they have cooled a bit strain out the water. From here you can squeeze the water from the leaves and add handfuls to a cookie sheet or silicone muffins trays and freeze. This creates portions you can use in many different ways rather than a massive chunk of frozen greens.

Freeze or pickle the stems or do both. Enjoy!

I have been gardening for years and I have dealt with a variety of pests and bugs. I have grown pumpkins for many years and never really had a problem with anything munching on them. Then we moved to our new homestead and I started a new garden in a totally new space. Let’s just say that my first year in our new space has been a real challenge. It has left me wanting to pull out my hair.

We had slugs eating our beans and hosta. We had caterpillars eating our cabbage. We had deer eating our tomatoes. We had aphids eating our roses. We had rust disease on our apple trees. We also had squash vine borers eating our squash plants…pumpkins, zucchini, and yellow squash. It was a complete nightmare at times but I did manage to make progress on most of these fronts and next year I am armed and ready. Pests beware!

This post though talks about the infamous squash vine borer. When your squash plants start to wilt and yellow a bit many times you assume they need more water. Except more water doesn’t help. So you take a closer look and you see a sawdust frass around the vines at the base of the plant. It looks as though something is chewing them up and spitting them out. And truth be told something is. The squash vine borer is a moth that lays eggs around the stems of squash plants. Caterpillars emerge and eat into the stalk  and with enough feeding damage to the stem, the entire plant can die. The damage they can do is astounding!

How to Get Rid of the Squash Vine Borer

You need to start with some prevention in the early spring. Most of us buy starts or transplant starts that we grow indoors. You can wrap the stems of your squash seedlings with medical gauze. It is flexible enough to grow with plants but prevents caterpillars from eating into the stems.

Spray your plants with BTK (Bacillus Thuricide). It is a beneficial bacteria that controls the larva stage (caterpillars) of certain moths. It will not harm beneficial insects. I also use it on cabbage and plants in the brassica family who are attacked by moths/caterpillars. You can also spray with Dr. Bronner’s soap. Re-spray both after rain. Wipe down the vines, stems, leaves with a damp cloth to remove bugs and eggs once or twice a week. After spraying dust them with Diatomaceous Earth and create a ring around the plants to create a barrier.

You may want to cover your squash plants right up until they flower with a row cover, a cage, or some kind of gauzy netting that will not give moths access to the plants. Once they flower you will need to remove these impediments so the pollinators can visit.

Lay out yellow bowls full of water. The borer moths are attracted to the yellow and will drown themselves. It kills off some of them and also lets you know they are in the area. Once you spot them you will want to start digging lightly in the soil looking for them in the pupil stage. Kill them on site or give them to your chickens/quail.

Prevention is going to do more than going into attack mode AFTER they have become a problem and your squash plants are dying. Arm yourselves now for next year!

Top image credit: Jim, the Photographer

Say what? Peeing on your compost? Yes, you read it right. It might seem like a slightly unorthodox gardening practice but it could be your own personal contribution to the green cause because compost can be greatly improved by the addition of human urine. Gardeners always want to improve their compost and their garden soil right? Yes!

If you pee on your compost, it has a double environmental whammy. It speeds up its decomposition so you can get it on the garden more quickly, and it also saves water because you don’t have to be flushing nearly as much. Urine contains potash and nitrogen, and these make it a rich fertilizer. It has an NPK ratio of about 11-1-2. And to add to its richness, urine contains urea, which helps to speed chemical reactions involved in breaking down organic material. So, for the health of your garden you may want to pee on your compost heaps. Don’t flush a free, naturally-created nitrogen product down the toilet.

For straw bale gardening urine is a wonderful conditioner because of the nitrogen. It helps the bales start to break down in the weeks before planting, it is free, and it much more natural than the commercial nitrogen products. We have used straw bales and urine on our own homestead with great success.

If you are concerned with hormonal or pharma byproducts in your urine you don’t have to be. Compost gets hot enough ideally to burn off anything potentially harmful. I recommend the book Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants to find out more about this practice. You also can’t use all your pee on the compost because this would make it entirely too wet and a balance has to be achieved. If you plan to add urine directly to active garden beds or container plants you will also want to dilute it.

All us green folks want to recycle right? Well, look into pee-cycling too for a better garden.

It is the worst when pesky mosquitoes keep you from enjoying the outdoors, especially your own backyard. Some of us with harsh winters don’t want to let even one summer night go to waste, so what can be done to keep those blood suckers away??

Well, your garden can actually be used as mosquito control headquarters if you plant strategically!

Just be aware that none of the plants I am going to mention can keep mosquitos simply by growing them in a garden or inside a container. I think many people misunderstand and think that all you have to do is grow certain plants and the mosquitos will smell them and stay away from the area. This is simply not true.

You need to grow the plants and then USE the plants. They contain great natural mosquito repellents that you have to apply personally. The mosquito repelling plants only work if you strip off the leaves, crush them up, and rub them on your exposed skin. When you use these plants in this way they work just as well as any chemical based repellent you will find in stores. Even better, if you grow these repellent plants then they are always available when you are outside working in the yard or just relaxing on your patio.

Plants to Repel Mosquitoes

Lemon Balm – This is a great mosquito repelling plant because it produces large leaves fairly quickly. Because it so easy to grow and it is actually on the invasive side (like mint), you may want to plant it in raised beds or large containers.

Lemon Thyme  – This lemony scented planted is one of the absolute best mosquito repellents you could ever grow. The caveat is that it is small plant with tiny leaves so you have to grow a lot of it to last a family through mosquito season. However it is a trailing plant perfect for large containers and hanging baskets.

Catnip – Another great plant that can be used to keep those skeeters away but I have never been tempted to grow this one because I don’t want cats in my yard.

Before you crush up some leaves and rub them all over your body or that of your kids do a patch test first to determine how your skin will react. Rub the leaves on the skin of one forearm only and give it some time. Just because something is natural does not mean is always 100% safe for you personally. The are potent plant oils we are dealing with. Also don’t assume that because many of the repellent plants are lemon scented means you can just go ahead and use lemon or lime leaves. These plants have been known to cause serious skin reactions, especially if you are in the sun.

Other Ways to Keep Mosquitoes Away

A fan – If you are enjoying some time outside on your patio or laying on a deck or lawn chair then set up a fan to circulate air around you. Mosquitoes cannot fly very well so a strong breeze will keep them away.

Standing water – Don’t allow standing water to pool around your house. Clean gutters of debris often and make sure rain barrels are secure and cannot become mosquito breeding houses.

BTI – Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis is bacteria used to control larvae stages of certain species. You can use dunks or granules in areas where there is water around your home to decimate the mosquito population. It is a natural biological control and it will NOT harm bees, birds, frogs, toads, pets or people. It only affects mosquitos and certain flies.

Attract Birds – If you want fewer mosquitoes then you may want to attract more predators that eat them. Bird houses for nesting, bird feeders, and bird baths with fresh water will usually mean more birds and fewer pesky mosquitos.

The mosquitoes may invade your yard and make it a less likely for you to enjoy your time outdoors but you can turn the tables and use it as command central to combat these blood suckers and get back to enjoying every lazy summer evening you have. Good luck!