Search Tags:  mike mcgrath

The tubes that take out ticks!

Tick Tubes are one of my favorite tick-prevention devices. They're cardboard tubes filled with cotton balls soaked in a pesticide called permethrin that's especially deadly to ticks.

Tags: Garden Plot, ticks, garden

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When to seed, fertilize and weed your lawn

Right now is the time to spread corn gluten meal on your lawn to prevent dormant weed seeds like crabgrass from sprouting as you give the turf a nice gentle spring feeding, Mike. But don't delay.

Tags: Garden Plot,

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Pre-sprout your peas for good St. Patrick's day luck

Happy peas for St. Pat's! That's right, peas. St. Patrick's Day isn't just for wearing green, it's also the unofficial kickoff to growing some delicious green-green peas.

Tags: Garden Plot, peas, attack, stinkbugs

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Tips on getting rid of those stinking stink bugs

All of the stink bugs that snuck inside your house last fall to hibernate are now waking up and coming out of hiding to crawl all over your morning bowl of Lucky Charms. What can you do?

Tags: stinkbug, Garden Plot

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Don't let spring fever lead you astray

WTOP Garden Editor Mike McGrath will appear Saturday and Sunday, March 10 and 11, at the Fairfax Home Show on the Annandale campus of Northern Virginia Community College.

Tags: Garden Plot, lawn care

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Timing is everything: Crabgrass and cherry trees

The ideal time to apply corn gluten to prevent crabgrass is generally when the local forsythia blooms, but it is always when the soil temperature reaches 55 degrees, as measured 4 inches down.

Tags: gardening, Garden Plot, crabgrass, corn gluten

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Lawn care time is a-comin'

The only safe and sensible time to sow cool season grass seed is mid-August, when the soil is perfectly warm and the next nine months will be nice and cool.

Tags: lawn care, Garden Plot

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New lawns don't require murder weapons

Tags: Garden Plot, herbicides, rose bush, peat moss

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Getting roses for Valentine's Day? Know the language of flowers

In the Victorian secret language known as the "Floral Code," each kind and color of posie holds a specific meaning. Roses in general do mean love, but the key to what kind of love is in the color.

Tags: improve, Flower Code, Valentine

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Keeping your lawn on drugs will cost you $4 billion

Local lawmakers acknowledge that legal limitations on fertilizer used by homeowners would lead to cleaner water essentially for free, but that such actions "face strong opposition from fertilizer lobbies."

Tags: lawn care, Chesapeake Bay, weeds, Garden Plot

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