Keeping Mosquitoes Away From Your Garden

Everyone with a lovely garden, patio or deck will surely enjoy sitting outside on a warm summer’s day or evening. But if there is one thing that can blight it for you, it is mosquitoes. Sometimes, it only takes one of two persistent mosquitoes to make your blood boil. Mosquitoes are a pest for sure, but they can also be a health hazard, spreading dengue fever and malaria and several other really horrible diseases. So how do you go about keeping mosquitoes out of your garden?

Maybe you cannot realistically hope to keep mosquitoes out of your garden entirely, but there are some things you can do to deter them and keep their numbers down. Stopping them breeding in your garden is the first step to take. Mosquitoes do not have a long flying span. A lot of the mosquitoes that bother you in your garden will have been born in your garden.

Mosquitoes lay their eggs in stagnant water, so make sure that there is none in your garden. They will lay eggs in water butts, dogs’ bowls, water that has collected in old tyres, bottles and tins and your rubbish bins, so make sure that no water can collect anywhere. Blocked gutters are another breeding site. if you have a water feature, put fish in it to eat the larvae.

Mosquitoes detest the smell of lemon, so you could grow citronella plants, lemon thyme, lemon grass and even a lemon tree, if the climate is right. If not, you could burn citronella scented candles or oil in the vicinity They not only keep the mosquitoes at bay, but the aroma is very fresh and envigourating.

If they are still bothering you, you may have to resort to mosquito repellent. You could drench your clothing with permethrin, like the army does for jungle combat or just smeer a deet-based brand on your skin. There are also a lot of natural mosquito repellents too, such as lemon oil, citronella and eucalyptus oil.

Garlic is supposed to repel mosquitoes, so you could try growing garlic close at hand. It is also believed to repel ticks and has demonstrated to discourage greenfly (aphids) from roses. What could be greener, particularly if you are partial to garlic too?

You could hang up one or two of those lamps that attract insects to them and them vapoourize them with a high voltage shock. These electric bug killers are particularly good for killing mosquitoes and house flies, which can also be a nuisance when you are sitting outside.

They are inexpensive and will go on for years. They give off a pleasing glow and some claim to be able to clear areas of a quarter, a half and even a full acre of terrain of all winged insects by the use of the ultraviolet light and pheromones.

By using some or all of the above methods of keeping mosquitoes out of your garden, you should be able to enjoy your drink, a chat or a snooze in complete peace and freedom from flies and mosquitoes.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on several topics, but is currently concerned with work on mosquito bite treatment problems. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Bite Swellings.

How To Keep Mosquitoes At Bay

If you like to sit outdoors in the summer, you almost certainly have a bit of a garden, patio or deck that you like to relax on of a summer’s evening. With a few flowers for colour and fragrance, it makes a perfect place to relax. Add a water feature and a cold drink and I am away.

That is until five or six o’ clock, at which time the light starts to weaken and the mosquitoes come out. They spoil it for me or at least they used to until I found neat little tricks to keep the mosquitoes at bay – out of my yard and into someone else’s. Not that I wish mosquitoes on my neighbours, but they will go somewhere else, if they do not come to me.

The first thing to do is learn a bit concerning the mosquito. Mosquitoes are not actually very strong fliers and they are easily injured and easily blown off course. Therefore, most of the mosquitoes you meet in your garden were born there. Some individuals say tht mosquitoes do not fly more than a few metres from where they were hatched.

They like to lay their eggs in still water and it need not be that much. Millions of mosquitoes are born in still water that collects in the leaves of living plants. Now, I am not recommending that you cut all your plants down, but you did ought to clean up any old junk in the garden that can retain water.

You can fill in holes and indentations in paths, stow away watering cans and unused flower pots, clean blocked gutters, clear away fallen leaves and maybe think about the flowers that you are buying next time you are in the garden centre. If you have a water feature, make sure that there are fish in it that eat insects – some do not.

The next thing to do is find out which plants mosquitoes do not like and they do have their preferences, just as we do. Mosquitoes abhor anything that smells of lemons. So, you can plant, lemon balm, citronella, lemon trees, lemon grass and anything else that smells like lemons.

If the plants can not quite produce enough lemon smell some evenings, you can help them with lemon-scented candles or citronella oil rubbed straight onto your skin. It is a perfectly natural oil, so ought to not injure you, your kids or your pets. Dogs suffer from mosquitoes as much as we do.

As mentioned above, mosquitoes are not strong fliers, so a decent fan, normally kills hundreds of them a night by dashing them against walls and the fan’s blades. A favourite of mine on a bad night, is a mosquito trap.

One that has highly-charged electrical wiring behind an alluring ultra-violet light, the sound of them crackling away on the electrified wire is very pleasing and extremely effective

One mosquito trap can clear a whole garden, but my all-time favourite is the tennis racquet type bug-zapper, the one that looks like a child’s tennis racquet. Anything that gets past your defences, is a sure gonner, if you have a racquet bug zapper

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on several subjects, but is currently involved with work on mosquito bite treatment problems. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Bite Swellings.

Your Koi Pond After A Storm

A storm can be distressing for your outdoor fish, especially for large koi carp, which, being large, possibly do not have many areas to hide. However, if you have designed your koi fish pond well, you will have taken this into account when your built the pond. Similarly, the pond should be deep enough for your fish to be able to get well beneath the choppy surface level.

If you prepared for the storm, you possibly put a net over the fish pond, so the first thing you need to do after the storm is clear up any fallen debris and take away the net, so that you can get a good look at your fish and what occurred to them. They may be a bit stressed, so move unhurriedly and try hard not to frighten them. Stress is a killer in the animal world as well as in ours.

Did you take the added precaution of sand-bagging the edges of your pond to stop it over-flowing and the fish swimming away? If so, take away the sand bags, so that you can get a closer look.

Now you can get a good look at the upheaval, if there is any. Use a net to quietly skim off any leaves that have blown under the netting and onto the pond. If any plants have been uprooted, put them back where they should be. In general, put the pond back as it used to be, so that the fish feel at home. Again, move unhurriedly and try not to put your fish under any more stress.

If you have to carry out major structural repairs, you could put your koi in a child’s plastic paddling pool until you can sort the issue out. Put the pool in a shaded area and fold the netting over it several times so that the fish can not get out and cats and birds cannot get in. If you can aerate the pool with a pump so much the better.

Put a few plants in there with them for cover and feed in moderation. if the repairs will take a long time, you could ask your local pet shop to take them away for a week or whatever. You will need to pay board and lodgings, but it is better than losing your prized koi carp.

Once any repairs have been carried out, you ought to check the water quality, which could have been affected by debris falling into the pond or by your repairs. Rain, especially acid rain, can have quite an effect, especially if it rained for a long time.

First check the water for nitrates. If the levels are unacceptable (see the testing kit for details), you ought to normalize them. If the levels are extremely high, first remove the plants from the water.

Then analyze the KH levels. If they are low, say, below 100, then you could add a cup of baking soda per 1,000 gallons of water and check again. Whatever you do, the fastest way to de-stress your fish is to reinstate their environment to what it used to be with sparkling water to swim in.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is now concerned with water garden pumps. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for a special deal.

How To Control Household Insects

We all dislike insects getting into the house, do we not? But I do not like squashing the ones that get in either. However, I reside in northern Thailand, 100 yards from thousands of acres of wet rice fields. The farmers spray their fields to reduce the number of insects, but inevitably there are still quite a lot here, especially in the two monsoon periods.

Therefore, we have had to secure our house and ourselves against pests, mostly of the flying variety, but not all of which bite by any means. In the monsoon periods of the year, which are approximately May to June and August to September, the main culprit is the mosquito. There is no malaria where I am, but they are still not nice. Simultaneous with the mosquitoes are the midges, but they are not nearly so many.

When it is not raining, the common house fly is a nuisance. You just cannot teach a housefly not to sit on you or your food, I have attempted it many times. The lessons almost invariably result in the death of the student by corporal punishment.

On arbitrary rainy days hordes of other kinds of flies will hatch out within hours – you can see masses of them coming out of the ground like bees, but they more resemble lace wings. They are totally innocuous, but they get in your hair and everywhere else. Then there are a couple of varieties of fly that eat rice or humans if they get in the way, but they seem to prefer rice.

The first thing we did was have fly screens fitted into our windows. That helped a great deal, but everybody kept leaving the doors open. Then we had screens inserted into the door frames. That really was good for everything except midges and baby mosquitoes that seem to be squirming through the mesh.

We solved that problem by spraying the mesh with permethrin once every couple of months. I am fairly sure that no insects get into our house via that route any more. However, a number of insects were crawling in under the doors, because there were no thresholds or draft-excluders – a draft in Thailand usually being more than welcome. So, I fitted draft-excluders to the doors.

That blocked the scorpions, spiders, millipedes, centipedes and beetles, although some spiders seem to abseil down from the attic into our living quarters. I do not mind spiders so much as long as I cannot see them, because I know that we have a mutual enemy, namely flies.

House flies still get in sometimes, especially when visitors and their kids are about. However, the type of spiders we have most of, do not appear to make webs. They stalk their victims and then jump on them; and they are very quick.

In spite of that, we spray the floors and the tops of the walls with permethrin every month or two as well. This stops the ants from entering the house via the attic and mops up any crawling insects that have gotten in via an open door.

Another significant entry point into your home for insects is your pets. You have to take care of your cats and dogs. Groom them regularly, fit a collar which has been impregnated with insecticide, bathe them in insecticidal shampoo and dust them with flea powder.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on quite a few subjects, but is currently concerned with indoor mosquito repellent. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Repellent For Dogs.

Planning The Landscaping Of Your Garden

Landscaping techniques allow the gardener to transform a simple backyard into a lovely garden. There are many routes to having a beautiful garden, because there are many types to choose from and there are different tastes too. Each to his own. Some styles of garden need a great deal of looking after and others less so, but even a slabbed or concrete backyard requires some looking after.

The best way of going about making something lovely out of your backyard is planning and perhaps the simplest way of planning is to create a plan or a drawing of your garden.

If you choose this route, the first thing you will need to do is get some graph paper and plot the exact size and form of your garden onto it, with as large a scale as will fit on the sheet of graph paper.

After you have done that, put in in unmovable items like a brick shed, a drain or septic tank, a fish pond and doorways et cetera. Then you ought to photocopy it, say five or ten times. This is so that you can make errors, change your mind or even allow everybody in the house to make their own plan from their own investigations and imagination.

If you consider that this is outside your abilities, you are probably wrong. It really is not difficult, kids draw on graph paper all the time in maths lessons. Anyway, if you do not want to do it this way, then you will have to rely on plans cut out of journals.

So, collect all your ideas from magazines and put them in a file. Likewise, if you are making a plan on paper, collect your ideas in a folder, but also mark them on your graph paper.

Set yourself or your team a deadline of say, a two weeks or a month, but you do need to do the majority of your work in the spring or the summer, when the weather is warm. On the appointed day, get together and amalgamate all your plans into one.

Put all the redundant material apart and forget about it. Do not over complicate the matter by having all the designs in the active file. Now you are prepared to go to work and instigate the plans.

The option is now whether you do the work yourself or whether you get a builder in. A builder will have experience, and so will be able to get the work done quickly. They will also be able to provide practical suggestions, if what you want to accomplish is difficult. The other side of the coin is that it is a lot more expensive.

If you decide to do it yourself, you may find it a good idea to split your drawing into segments. It could be completed in quarters of the garden at a time, if that is feasible, or you could do all the groundwork first, followed by the brick and blockwork, then the pond etc. Depending on your plan. The only thing that should to be done last is the planting of the plants

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on a number of topics, but is at present involved with outdoor accent lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

How Do You Acquire Ants?

Buying the right kind of ant farm is an important step in the establishment of an ant farm and there are a variety of types of ant farms to suit the different species of ants. For example, some ants construct large anthills, while the anthills of other types of ants are more or less non-existent.

There are also ant farms to suit. Some ant farms are like very narrow fish tanks. These are suitable for any of the subterranean ant varieties. However, there are also ant farms that are shaped like giant eggs but with a flat bottom. The conical top allows ants to build an anthill.

Some ant farm manufacturers incorporate ants in the package, but others do not. If you have set up your ant farm and filled it with earth or sand, the next step is to get your ants. But how do you buy ants?

Well, there are ant dealers. That surprises most people. There are honestly people who specialize in the sale of ant colonies for ant farms. You can locate one of these on the Internet. Try to use the closest ant dealer to you in order to save the ants trauma from long-distance travel. It is worth using a reputable ant dealer, because you will have more chance of receiving ants that will live long enough to set up an active, vivacious nest.

Before choosing an ant dealer, verify the dealer’s past reputation. Search for testimonials and also look for complaints. You can do this by typing the firm’s name and the word ‘complaints’ into Google. Any difficulties with the dealer should become evident fairly quickly

Unfortunately, sometimes people take delivery of dead ants even from trustworthy dealers, the issue is how the ant dealer deals with the problem.

The best companies will guarantee that you receive your ants alive. These are the preferable ant dealers to do business with. Very often the conditions of the business deal are that if the ants are dead on receipt, they should be returned to the dealer, who will then issue a replacement colony.

Or perhaps the company will offer you a voluntary insurance that the ants will arrive alive or be replaced free of charge. If he does, it is worth taking the insurance up, if you can not find a dealer with a free guarantee

Some ant dealers have shipping policies and to be honest, they all should have them. One of the most common stipulations is that they will not send the ants if the prevalent temperature is above 25c (80f) or below freezing.

Remember, that if your ants arrive on a cold day, they could not be dead or dying, they may just be languid because it is cold. It is quite common for cold-blooded creatures such as ants to become semi-dormant when the temperature drops below a certain level. To confirm whether this is their difficulty, allow them to warm up slowly in the warmth of a typical living room. If they do not ‘come back to life’ after fifteen minutes in a warm room, you have a dispute.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is at present involved with Getting Rid Of Carpenter Ants. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Killing Carpenter Ants.

How To Keep The Water In Your Fish Pond In Good Condition

When people who keep fish talk of how to keep your pond in good condition, they take it for granted that everybody understands that it is synonymous with how to keep the water in your fish pond in decent condition, because the water to fish is like air is to us and everything depends upon it. We cannot be healthy if we are breathing smut, smog and pollution and nor can fish.

So, if you keep the water decontaminated, the fish will be glad and probably breed and the plants will be happy and probably propagate and healthy plants will do their own bit to help keep the water decontaminated. However, you have to get the ball rolling, before others can help keep it rolling and your biggest job here is to get the pond’s water filtration system correct from the start.

You need to set up two types of filtration. The first is a simple mechanical filter that blocks algae, dead plants, leaves and faeces as the water is pumped through it and the second filter is a biological filter that mutates unseen waste from your pond.

This produces a nitrogen cycle and the danger here is that the nitrogen will change into ammonia which will kill your fish very quickly. A easy test is the clarity of the water. It ought to be clear enough for you to see the bottom easily and there ought to be no floating debris in there. No lumps of sticky weed or clogs of bubbling vegetation.

Overfeeding is a trap that lots of novice pond-owners fall into. You have to feed your fish high quality food, depending on what they are, but do not forget that they will get some wild, fresh meat as well. Insects will fall in and mosquitoes will attempt to breed in there and all will get consumed by your fish, so do not be alarmed if they do not seem to be eating much.

An surplus of shop-bought fish food will cause the water to go cloudy and algae to grow. If you would like to increase the proportion of wild game in their diet, put a small night light at the edge of the pool and see how many hundred insects fall into the water to become fish food.

Keep an eye on your plants as well as on your fish. If your plants are dying or rotting, take them out and ask an expert the likely cause. It may simply be that they are the wrong type of plants for your pond or it maybe more significant like the pH value of the water. These are concerns that are easily fixed, once you are aware of them.

The last thing to be certain of is aeration. Your pond water should contain oxygen just as our air should contain oxygen as well. This is also easily achieved. Buy a good pond pump with a filtered intake and two outlets: one for the mechanical filter and one for a fountain. The water falling back to the pond will become rich in oxygen and you should not have any concerns about the quality of the water in your fish pond.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is now involved with water garden pumps. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for a special deal.

The Benefits Of Refurbishing Your Kitchen

If your kitchen is looking a little tired and worn-out, you might be thinking about remodeling it. This is not a job to be taken lightly, so the more consideration you can give it the better. Refurbishing a kitchen can take a long time, which means a lot of inconvenience and a it can cost a lot of money.

That is if you decide to do it yourself. If you choose to get a professional in, the work will not take as long, but it will cost even more money, often a lot more money. However, if you want to do it yourself to save on the contractor’s wages, you can minimize the inconvenience caused by planning the work down to the smallest detail so that you will always have water and at least minimal cooking facilities.

The first key benefit to remodeling your kitchen is the increase in the value of your house. It is the venture that adds the second most value to a home after an extension. However, the amount of additional value depends on the quality of the handiwork and the quality of the materials used. So it is best not to stint and ‘make do’, you will only lament it later.

Therefore, part of your planning must include how far you want to go down your remodeling path. You could repaint the kitchen cabinets and replace the handles. In all sincerity, that may spruce up your kitchen, but it will not add much value and may even detract from it if your painting skills are not up to much. You could replace the units’ doors completely, which is a step in the right direction.

Other valuable improvements include increasing the amount of artificial and natural light available; replacing the worktop and sink and changing the floor. If you renew the floor, you should make it easier to clean.

If you tend to do a lot of greasy or smoky cooking an extractor fan is essential in order to keep a kitchen clean. Cleanliness is a very important factor with modern people. However, people do not certainly have much time (or inclination either sometimes) to spend on cleaning, so convenience is another buzz word. All surfaces should be of the ‘wipe-down’ variety. That is, a quick spray and a wipe over and it is clean. Scrubbing went out decades ago.

The sink ought to be of plastic or resin because they do not scratch as easily as aluminium and scratched aluminium sinks not only look dreadful but the scratches harbour germs. The lighting should be adjustable, but if you have small windows, enlarge them. You can adjust this light with nets and or curtains.

Finally, the best advantage of remodeling your kitchen is that it will be a joy to cook in and that is why you should renovate it if you are not considering selling up just yet.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a range of topics, but is now involved with contemporary dining room tables. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Solid Oak Dining Tables.

Home Remedies To Get Rid Of Bugs

There is a huge wave of public opinion going against the use of chemicals wherever possible. People are instead re-evaluating their grandmother’s old home remedies and they are not being given much support from what I can see.

I guess that this is not unusual, given the enormous amount of money we spend every year on chemicals and the vested interests of the industry itself. A lot of the money we spend on chemicals is for cleaning and the killing of insects.

The majority of us use our insecticides in the house, but gardeners use even more of the stuff outside killing the bugs that eat their flowers and their fruit. Would it not be wonderful if we could revive the way these things were done before the invention of chemical insecticides, some of which, like DEET, have admittedly been around for quite some time – more than 60 years in the case of DEET.

The first thing a good gardener should endeavour to do is look after the environment while tending his or her garden. After all, if the environment is right for your flowers, then they will have a better chance of flourishing.

One of the best methods of doing this is by getting rid of the pests that eat or destroy your plants and the best way of doing this is by helping the predators that eat the bad bugs. Easier said than done, you might say.

However, if you generate the right environment, they will come. Two of the most widespread yet also two of the most voracious predators are ladybirds and earwigs. if you can get those to stay in your garden then most of your bug problems will solve themselves. You can encourage ladybirds by growing herbs such as fennel and dill, which they appear to like.

In order to encourage earwigs, grow dahlias. If you dot a dozen dahlias around your garden you will lure hundreds of earwigs, but put sharp sand around their base, because slugs and snails like them as well.

Earwigs like to crawl under things, so leave a few potted plants about as well, but raise them off the ground a bit by standing the pots on a handful of gravel. This will give the earwigs somewhere to live and will assist with the drainage of the pot.

Depending on where you have your home, of course, the praying mantis is a good friend to have in the garden. These insects look scary and they really are scary to other insects. They will eat any insect they can get hold of, but they are completely safe for humans.

Lizards and frogs and toads are good friends to have as well. They too need somewhere to crawl under and flower pots or large stones are perfect. Put a few stones the size of footballs under your bushes or make a rockery for them to live in. However, cats will kill them, so it is a good idea to inhibit cats from your garden.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is currently concerned with natural mosquito repellant. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Repellent For Dogs.

The History Of Making Candles

People have been making candles for a very, very long time and so you can believe that there have been a lot of changes in the making of candles too. Perhaps the biggest change over all that time is the use to which candles are put. In the beginning, candles were used first and foremost for lighting and in the second place for heat, but nowadays they are used more for embellishment as in religious ceremonies and romantic dinners.

It is not completely certain when the first candles were manufactured or used, but fragments of clay candle holders were found in Egypt which dated back to 4 BC. It is also known that candles were in use in ancient China and Japan. These candles were made from oil extracted from insects and seeds. Meanwhile, taper candles were being used in India made from the oil drawn by boiling cinnamon.

Candles were in use in America during the early years of the first century AD. Before that native Americans probably used oily fish and the bark of the Cerio tree. In fact, when the first European settlers arrived, they used a similar method to manufacture candles from wax extracted from bayberries. Some manufacturers still use bayberry wax in candles, but they are apt to be quite expensive.

Much later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tallow was used to make candles, however tallow is made from animal fat and it smelled very bad, especially when it was burning. Bees wax and paraffin wax were introduced as substitutes for tallow in the early nineteenth century and tallow candles went out of fashion immediately.

People started making candles by dipping in about 13 AD. Candle merchants travelled from town to town and house to house making candles to order. In Paris in about 15 AD, candle moulds were invented and that vastly enhanced the candle making process. They were still having problems though with the wick – they just did not seem to burn consistently. The solution was begun in 1825 when someone braided the wick in a moulded candle.

This procedure was perfected in 1830 when a braided wick was placed in a moulded candle made from paraffin wax. This produced excellent candles that burned evenly without a foul smell. Not much has changed in the cheap, plain, white candles we use today. The biggest modification came with the proliferation of gas and electricity, because it made the melting of the paraffin wax simpler.

The advancement of candles slowed in the twentieth century as candles went out of fashion in favour of gas and electric lighting. The use of candles got a new lease of life in the 1970’s when the hippy culture took to using them again. They are still popular now with the sons and daughters of the 70’s hippies, although nowadays there is a lot more variety. One of the most popular types of candles now are the perfumed or aromatic candles, some of which are used in aromatherapy.

Candle making is once again a cottage or home business with many people making their own brand of perfumed candles in their kitchen and selling them to friends or online. It can be quite a lucrative hobby-cum-business.

Of course, candles are now more of a luxury, stylish decoration than they ever were before. You can easily improve atmosphere and ambiance to any room in your house by the use of candles. In fact, with suitable candle holders you can even use candles outside to brighten up your patio or deck in a modern garden.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on several topics, but is at present involved with researching decorative candle holders. If you would like to know more or check out great offers, please go to our website at Wrought Iron Light.

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