By Tamara Galbraith

As September takes a bow, let's tip our straw hats to the official flower of the month, the Aster.

The hardy blue aster (Aster novae-angliae) is the common fall-blooming variety. Asters produce large clusters of delicate daisy-like flowers in many other colors, like white, purple, lavender, pink or red. They are hardy in USDA zones 4 through 9, depending on the variety.

Asters should be planted in moist well-drained soil, amend with Kellogg Amend before planting, and in full sun to light shade. The clumps get big quick, so give them some room. Divide the clumps every 3 - 4 years in the early spring or in late fall after the flowering has finished.

There are also dwarf varieties which aren't quite so pushy, but in the fall -- when it seems like the burnt autumn colors of mums are everywhere -- a big, fat blue aster can bring a welcome flash of pastel to the garden.

Green tomatoes can be ripened indoors provided they have reached a reasonable stage of maturity, but it makes sense to ripen as many as possible on the plant. As soon as a severe frost is forecast, however, harvest the remaining fruit and ripen as many as possible indoors.

Frost will kill tomatoes, but you can often extend their season by a few weeks and ripen a few more fruits on the plant with protection. Bush plants that are already low-growing are best covered with a large cloche. Packing straw beneath the plants first will also provide a little insulation.

Cordon-trained tomatoes must be lowered before they can be protected with cloches. Untie the plant and remove the stake.

Lay a bed of straw on the ground, then carefully lower the plants onto this. If you lay all the stems in the same direction, you will have a neat row of tomatoes that are easily covered with cloches.

Fleece can be used to offer wind protection and enough shelter to keep off a degree or two of frost, though it does not warm the air during the day in the same way as glass or some rigid plastics. Drape several layers over low-growing varieties, and peg it down securely along each side, and at the ends.

Fleece can also be used to protect cordon tomatoes while still staked. Sheets of fleece can be wrapped round, or you may be able to buy fleece produced as a tube. Simply cut off the required length, slip it over the plant, and secure at the top and bottom.

By Carol Hunter
Just Gardens - Garden Design and Consulting

One quiet Saturday morning, even before the first three gulps of coffee, our beloved Weimaraner, Merlot, nudged my arm, lifted his face toward mine and grunted with his teeth apart. He had 'retrieved' something from the yard. In the spring, that something is always an immature apricot. But this was September. "I've got a treat for you here in my mouth," he was letting me know. I pried open his mouth, the human way of accepting said gift, and was instantly horrified. The 'gift' was an open packet of rat poison. The worst kind of rat poison - Bromethalin - which is a neurotoxin, can be deadly, and has no antidote.

Although there need not be an anecdotal origin to this article, this is a very serious one. After finding one dead rat in his yard, a neighbor placed many rat killer packets around the garden and on the garden wall. Now for me, this begs for a question. If the discovered rat was dead, what was the need for the poison? But, beyond that simple question is a greater problem... human intolerance of pests (rats or mice or other) in the yard.

A corollary to that would be: Do we really understand most creatures' roles in the environment? And then, of course, the purpose of this article: "Are we aware of the impact of the poisons that we introduce into our homes and gardens?"

Not infrequently, we face home and garden pest issues. Some of these pests are seemingly quite "icky" and become classified as undesirables. A short list of the most common pests looks like this:

Insects - ants, roaches, aphids, bees, wasps...
Arachnids - spiders
Mollusks - snails and slugs
Mammals - rodents (sewer rats, roof rats, house mice), opossums, squirrels...

The focus of this article is about the poisons that consumers use to rid their homes and gardens of these pests. However, I would be remiss if I didn't mention a virtue or two for several of the critters on the list. Bees and wasps are our pollinators, ants too for that matter. We desperately need them for a healthy environment. Most spiders feed on soft body insects such as flies, pillbugs, ants, etc. They are good guys in the garden. Ants are beneficial too. They are useful scavengers that clean up dead animals and debris in your house and garden; they aerate the soil and prey on other insects. Opossums may give you a scary look that appears like gnarly teeth, but that look, sometimes accompanied by a fake hiss, is this creature's only defense. They are actually docile, and not one bit interested in you. They can be, however, be quite interested in eating snails. So these are good guys in your garden too.

As for the other critters on this short list (by now, I'm sure that you all are adding to this list, depending on where you live), there are ways, other than poisons, to managed these undesirables in your home and garden. That management system is called Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. In brief, the IPM system teaches monitoring to determine if and when treatments are needed, and teaches physical, mechanical, cultural, and biological tactics to keep the pest numbers low, using the least toxic means possible.

Please read the accompanying article on IPM and consider this change in your approach to home and garden pests.

Take a trip to the local hardware or home supply store and head toward the garden center. There are rows of products for pest control - pesticides. Pesticides are classified by their targeted group, i.e., insecticide (insects), fungicide (fungi), molluscicide (mollusks), predacide (vertebrates), or rodenticide (rodents). The average homeowner gets overwhelmed with all of the product choices, look-alike packaging, and marketing ploys designed to draw us to their particular product. But what is the right choice? As a consumer, how can you make an intelligent choice?

IPM tells us to first identify and change the cultural cause inviting the pest. Examples of this would be to remove the food or water source (for ants, roaches, mosquitoes, rats), and if that doesn't work, move to the next level of the IPM treatment strategy. That level is direct suppression through physical/mechanical controls (create physical barriers by patching holes in your home), biological controls (attract or release ladybugs into the garden to eat the aphids), and least-toxic chemical controls, such as insecticidal soaps and safe fungicides. If these safer, less toxic controls don't work to your satisfaction, you can always escalate - if you must.

Observe the cautions on the label. Signal words are caution, warning, or danger, caution being the least toxic and danger being the most toxic. This labeling is there for your safety and the safety of the environment. Here's an example. Lambda-Cyhalothrin is a home roach, ant, spider killer and can be used indoors and outdoors, per the label and it lasts up to nine months. Now, that nine month time sounds good to the consumer wanting a long kill time for these critters...but what comes to mind for me is this question: "Do I want some chemical that stays chemically active for up to nine months in my home, near me, my family, pets, food and whatever?" Nope. I'll use window cleaner. That kills ants too. By the way, the precautionary label for this product was caution - the lowest level. And my internet search on this chemical found that it's highly toxic to fish and bees, less toxic to other animals. The fine print of the labeling did mention the fish toxicity, but not the bee toxicity. My point? Understand the product that you plan to use and its impact upon the environment.

If you have chosen to escalate, consider the toxicity of the product - its toxicity to humans, to animals and to the environment. Is it toxic to non-targeted individuals (human, animal, or plant)? If introduced into your home or garden, can it "drift" via the soil, water, or mechanically (animal movement) - causing harm to non-targeted individuals? Can it contaminate the soil? Can it drift from the soil and end up in our water systems?

Let's think back about my neighbor and the packets of Bromethalin. That neighbor felt absolutely terrible about what happened. But what he hadn't considered, and I'm sure he is not alone, is this ability of the poison to 'drift .' Some creature chewed through the packaging, carried it away from the deposit site, and dropped it into our yard - a physical 'drift'. And he also hadn't considered that the poison might be harmful to other creatures beyond the label on the packaging. After all, printed in large words was "RAT KILLER - Kills Rats and Mice." Sounds like a targeted population. What the label doesn't overtly tell you is that it can also kill people, dogs, cats, opossums, squirrels, or any other creature that consumes the product.

On a positive note, after induced vomiting, enema, and three days of charcoal slurry beverages, Merlot shows no sign of the neurotoxin poison.

Parting thoughts:
I'm currently reading a wonderful book entitled The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Now, the premise of his book is skewed differently than this article. Pollan ponders and discusses an answer to his question: "What existential difference is there between the human being's role in this (or any) garden and the bumblebee's?" His point: who is manipulating whom? Are we manipulating the nature that surrounds us or, as his book suggests, is nature cleverly manipulating us? Does the beauty and configuration of the flower make it so attractive to us, and therefore we 'select' that flower type/color and propagate for generations and ship it all over the world. Who controlled whom? After all, are we really stand-alone entities outside of nature and thereby controlling nature? Now that is a large question.

Are we really "in charge" of each of our own immediate worlds? And if we are, should we be? Or are we simply a part of a small ecosystem that exists in the location where we've placed our individual homes? Hmmm. That presents another question. Who is the pest, "them" or us?