Garden & Wildlife

Voles aren’t moles. If you’re seeing raised ridges and mounds, that’s moles. Knowing how to get rid of voles starts with this distinction: voles leave surface runways – shallow, 1-2 inch wide channels pressed into the lawn, often with clipped grass along the edges. They’re the ones eating your tulip bulbs, girdling your fruit trees…

Knowing how to get rid of possum depends on what you’re actually dealing with: a visitor wandering through at night (rooting through bins, eating pet food), or one that’s settled in under a deck, shed, or porch. These need different approaches. A visitor you can usually deter. A settled animal needs active removal first, then…

Knowing how to get rid of june bugs means treating two separate problems in one insect. The brown beetle slamming into your porch light is the adult – a nuisance that lives for a few weeks, attracted to light, and not much else. The real damage comes from its larval stage: fat, C-shaped white grubs…

Getting rid of bees outside starts with knowing what you’re dealing with, because how to get rid of bees outside depends entirely on the species. Honeybees, bumblebees, yellow jackets, and hornets all read as “bees outside” to most people, but the response differs. Honeybees are best relocated live by a beekeeper rather than killed. Yellow…

There’s a difference between methods that actually reduce the stray cat population around your property and methods that just redirect stray cats somewhere else. Most deterrents are in the second category – useful for protecting specific areas, but the cats are still there. If you want them gone, that requires a different approach. This guide…

Before reaching for insecticide, figure out what you actually have. “Bees in the ground” is usually one of three things: solitary mining bees, yellow jackets, or occasionally ground-nesting bumblebees. The species matters because the right response is completely different. Mining bees (small, fuzzy, often copper or black) are solitary and docile. They almost never sting…

Before anything else: what are you actually dealing with? “Ground hornet” is a catch-all people use for anything that stings and lives in a hole. Most ground hornets people panic about are yellow jackets – and the species matters a lot. Yellow jackets are the ones that send people to the hospital. Aggressive defenders, especially…

That white powdery coating on your plant’s leaves is powdery mildew – a fungal infection, not dust. Knowing how to get rid of powdery mildew on houseplants before it spreads to the rest of the collection is the whole game: it travels by airborne spores, and once conditions allow it on one plant, others follow.…

Every fall across the southeastern US, these small olive-green shield bugs show up by the hundreds on the south-facing wall of your house. If you’re trying to figure out how to get rid of kudzu bugs, start here: they’re not there for food or shelter in any interesting sense – they want somewhere warm to…