As much as we hate to admit it, fall is coming to our neck of the woods. During late summer and early fall, critters begin to look for homes to spend the winter. It would appear that soon the flies will be in our homes, looking for a winter home, too. They have already made their annual invasion of the store. Thankfully, we all have good aim with fly swatters.
The pre-eminent pests that give so many people the creeps when they show up in homes are mice. Now is the time they begin to scout out a warm winter retreat. Most homes have enough tiny openings that allow mice in.
Late last fall, we told you about a relatively new product called Mouse Magic. It comes in packets that are placed inside your home to repel mice from entering. They last 30 days. We had a lot of positive feedback on it. From now until the time the ground freezes, you should be placing Mouse Magic around your home to keep the mice at bay.
Late summer and fall is also the time mice go looking for food. That hunt for food makes them easy prey for the ticks that carry Lyme disease. To control the ticks, a product called Damminix — tubes filled with cotton balls containing a tick killer — can be placed around your yard. When the mice pick up the cotton balls, they will be exposed to the tick killer, which sticks to their fur and kills the ticks that try to hitch a ride on the rodents.
All indications are that the tick killer doesn't affect the mouse. But by killing the Lyme-carrying ticks, you can greatly reduce the chances of contracting Lyme disease in your own yard. Damminix tubes should be placed around your yard now through September and again in early spring.
Our vegetable gardens should be very happy to see a week of sunshine and a period of relatively dry weather. However, plants will need fertilizer to make new vegetables. You can use either a granular or water-soluble fertilizer to feed plants. This is especially true of tomato plants. As I have said before, if tomatoes don't get enough potassium fertilizer, they will be very slow to ripen. People tend to forget that vegetable gardens need fertilizer right up until the time the frost kills the plants. If you want to salvage a harvest from your garden, you had better be feeding your vegetable garden until then.
Hardy mums are now available. Many people want mums to be a true perennial in their gardens. The secret to having hardy mums come back next year is to get them into the ground early in the season. This gives the mums time to get a root system out into the soil before the ground freezes. So, if you want hardy mums to be hardy, get to planting.
Well, that's all for this week. I'll talk to you again next week.
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Tim Lamprey is the owner of Harbor Garden Center on Route 1 in Salisbury. His Web site is www.Harborgardens.com. Do you have questions for Tim? Send them to ndn@newburyportnews.com, and he will answer them in upcoming columns.
