Thinking about having a garden this year?
Maybe you’ve already plowed or are building a trellis for your peas or are harvesting asparagus, rhubarb and spring onions.
If you’re a budding gardener, I’m sure you have a lot of questions about weeds, soil and seeds.
And if Jeff Ishee isn’t around to answer your horticultural questions, you can always ask me.
Remember that seeds sprout best when planted in the ground. Don’t scatter them on top of asphalt and expect to get a crop.
Another tip: Read the labels on all plant food and weed-killer products carefully and follow them. You could end up killing the lettuce and fertilizing the chickweed.
Do you wonder how to keep ants from crawling on your zucchini?
Since I’m an organic gardener, chemicals are out. Scolding them won’t help, so I suggest putting up a picnic table near your plants and keeping it covered daily with fresh salad, sandwiches, cakes and soft drinks. Introduce the ants to it and maybe they’ll leave the zucchini alone. If not, pull up the bushes. Chances are somebody will offer you their leftovers.
Of course if they’re fire ants even that won’t help, and I would recommend picking each ant off with tweezers and drowning it in a glass of warm beer.
What about getting rid of slugs?
If you try and use them in vending machines, you’re liable to get arrested. I’d recommend making a necklace of them and giving it to your mother for Christmas. Even if she doesn’t like it, she’ll wear it.
You mean the creepy, crawly, slimy garden slugs?
I know people who pour salt on them, but it leaves a sticky, gooey mess. Others put out plates of beer so the slugs will imbibe and drown. But beware. I had so many slugs in my garden last year that I would have been terrorized by a board of drunken gastropods if I had tried it.
My suggestion is to cultivate a taste for them. People eat snails after all. If you eat slugs, word will get around the slug community and soon they’ll be gone.
Have you let your azaleas get too tall?
Cut them off at ground level and burn the roots. I hate azaleas.
Last summer, Japanese beetles destroyed roses. The year before they decimated beans. What’ll they do this year?
Who knows? But as a precaution, keep your vehicles and small children indoors.
Your neighbor gave you a compactor plant for Christmas. You water it regularly but it has shriveled and is dying. What are you doing wrong?
A compactor plant, or munchum garbagium, is botany’s newest ecological creation and you’re probably not feeding it properly.
It needs garbage — trash — at least a pound a day.
Feed it aluminum cans, wet paper towels, old newspapers, fishbones, etc. and I think that you’ll see immediate improvement.
Warning: Don’t let the kids or the family pet get too close. It thinks everything is garbage.
Write Fred Pfisterer, a retired editor for The News Leader, at fpleader@comcast.net.
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