Frightening Pests Away From Your Garden With The Easy Gardener 8021 Garden Defense Electronic Owl - Sound and Motion Sensored

On a beautiful day, the sky is blue, the grass is green, the birds are lightly chirping, a baby bunny sits in the dandelion thicket and a mother deer emerges timidly from the forest. Yet, if you're a gardener, this picturesque portrait of nature could quickly become a nightmare.

The birds are squawking, leaving bird seed, feathers and droppings all over your swimming pool and porch as they swoop down to feast on your grass and plant seeds. That little bunny has devoured all of your pansies, snapdragons, lilacs and blueberry plants.

The deer chewed up your trees and left a mess littering your lawn. It doesn't take long before you try to regain control of your yard with something like the $30 Easy Gardener 8021 Garden Defense Electronic Owl - Sound and Motion Sensored.

The ideal use for the Easy Gardener 8021 Garden Defense Electronic Owl - Sound and Motion Sensored is to deter porch pests. Most of the satisfied customers reported having pigeons, sparrows and woodpeckers terrorizing their porches with feathers, nests, seeds, droppings and destruction.

Ideally, you should set the owl under a covered area, where it won't get hit by too many elements, and move the decoy every few days so the animals don't get too used to it. You will probably need to replace the batteries every two months or so to keep it functioning. Squirrels are also easily deterred by this humane home and garden product.

As with many garden products, the Easy Gardener 8021 Garden Defense Electronic Owl - Sound and Motion Sensored is another victim of cheap manufacturing. Numerous consumers report malfunctioning sensors and owls either hooting at all hours of the night or simply not hooting at all.

Buyers report that the bird decoy did not seem to be waterproof and that pieces of plastic broke off when the bird was dropped. Battery holders sometimes jammed with dirt and couldn't be opened easily or snapped off.

If the owl sits still for more than a day at a time, the pests become used to it and may even try to peck at it or chew on it just to spite you! While this natural deterrent seems to work wonders for pesky porch squirrels and pigeons, it may not be for everyone.

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Releasing Live Ladybugs Into Your Garden

No one likes to spray chemicals on their beautiful vegetable garden that holds ingestible food, yet many gardeners feel pressured by chewed-up leaves, desecrated produce and unsightly pests lingering around the crops.

Today more and more gardeners are choosing more earth-friendly methods of pest control. One solution is to introduce live ladybugs to your garden. They're not interested in what you've got going on, but they will be intensely interested in the predatory bugs floating around. Ladybugs love to eat nasty aphids, beetles, weevils and mites!

Arbico Organics live ladybugs have been endorsed by numerous green blogs, such as www.idealbite.com, www.goorganicgardening.com, www.smart2begreen.com, www.organic-eden.com and www.organicgardeningbloghowto.com, to name a few. According to the Arizona Daily Star, Arbico Organics is the only company in the world that produces ladybugs.

"Natural pest control is a growing business," says Pamela Martinez from Arbico, the 22-year-old, Catalina-based company. She adds that they do ship these "tiny terminators" around the world, although live bugs cannot be sent to Hawaii.

The only real downside to buying live ladybugs is that some people feel this may upset nature's balance. An overabundance of ladybugs will send them packing: they'll be in search of food and you'll be in search of the money you've lost.

Even so, the ladybugs make ideal predators. You won't have to worry about them succumbing to other predatory garden pests. The bright color warns others that they look like an unsatisfying meal.

They can release a bad smelling and orange-tasting chemical when stressed, which other predators find downright revolting. Ladybugs have also been known to play dead and even bite! (But don't worry because humans can't feel their tiny mandibles at all.) To order ladybugs of your very own, visit www.arbico-organics.com.

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Tips And Ideas For Growing Mushrooms

Growing mushrooms inside your home is an option available to many people, these days. You can purchase a mushroom growing kit and grow mushrooms to meet your cooking needs. You do not need grow lights or place the mushrooms near a window as mushrooms like the dark and hideaway places around your home. If you have a cellar or a space in your garage, you can take advantage of your facilities to grow mushrooms.

Alternatively, you can grow mushrooms outside in your yard, but you do not need a yard with a garden space to grow mushrooms, as you can grow mushrooms inside your home, in a garden shed or in your garage.

You can find growing mushroom kits online or you may place a request with your local garden nursery. I always buy my mushroom kits online as they have been rather reliable and are easy to grow in a dark corner of my home.

You do not need high levels of water and sunshine as demanded by growing vegetable plants, as mushrooms belong to the fungi family and therefore are different to vegetable plants. Following the instructions on the mushroom kit, you should see your efforts rewarded with growing mushrooms.

There should be instructions in the kit on how to feed and care for your mushrooms. As long as you follow those instructions you will be rewarded with plenty of growing mushrooms.

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