The chemical compound 2,4-D, one of the most commonly used weed killers in the world, has been manufactured in the U.S. since 1947. The product is still at the center of many controversies, especially in Canada where the product is or soon will be banned by approximately 70 percent of the nation. Millions of pounds of the product is still used in the U.S. A report in an Asian newspaper today claimed the U.S ...

John Richardson from Ft. Myers, Fla., emailed me today to ask about a manual tool he heard me talk about recently on the radio. I'm sure it was the Weed Hound, which grips and plucks weeds down to the root and saves bending over. The tool is available at all sorts of places on-line. Here are a few on a Google search: http://www.google.com/products?hl=en&q=weed+hound+tool&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=lHR_SpDVDYmiMcTO-fM ...

In the Northeast of the U.S. and in much of Eastern Canada, where the excess moisture of the summer of 2009 continues to persist, earwigs can be almost as much of a problem as the slugs that posted about earlier. They probably gross people out even more. Earwigs, also known as pinchers, will appear around your home and garden randomly by day, but do their real damage at night. They really don't like sunligh ...

They knew the film’s general underlying story from the newspapers. They were impressed by what they saw on the screen. But when the officials of the World Film Festival of Montreal asked for the official movie credits for “A Chemical Reaction,” they couldn’t quite believe their ears. After they had selected our movie they asked for a crew list, and the answer was always the same. They asked me who was our e ...

INVENTOR OF DR. EARTH A Conversation with . . . Milo Lou Shammas While most 7-year-old boys would do anything to get out of weeding their mother’s gardens and most 12-year-olds would never thinking of swapping shop class for botany, Milo Lou Shammas said the allure of plants and gardening has been with him forever. In his early teens, he was already developing his own fertilizer concoctions from the fish he ...

I tried to take a rare day off from my own self-conceived anti-chemical rat race this past Saturday. I tuned into the results of the Beach to Beacon road race, which attracts elite runners from around the world to Cape Elizabeth, Maine. These competitors all land here at the behest of Joan Benoit Samuelson, the Maine native who hosts the event. At the end of this year's race, the other organizers staged a m ...

It's been almost exactly a year since a Center for Public Integrity report revealed that pyrethrins and pyrethroids were responsible for more than 26,000 human poisonings — making these compounds responsible for 26 percent of all major and moderate human incidents involving pesticides in the United States in 2007. In the past two weeks, reports coming out of the University of California Berkeley have caused ...

As I head out of town with my family today, I wanted to share article by a Facebook friend, Trish Riley: http://www.gogreennation.org/2009/07/the-writing-is-on-the-wall-chemical-contamination-is-dangerous/ ...

This is slightly off the lawn topic, since slugs are not a major pest of turfgrass. Given the spring and summer we've had in the Northeast, though, the subject of what to do about slugs comes up just about every day. So what do you do? Here are a few ideas: With excess moisture slugs can appear in a moment’s notice. The absolute worst thing you can do is head to the garden center for commercially available ...

A new report released yesterday called on homeowners around the Chesapeake Bay to understand the consequences of common household pesticides and to reduce their use of the toxic substances. Here is the text of the release: Pesticides: The Unaddressed Bay Polluter Government and Public Urged to Tackle Chemical Threat For release Thursday July 30, 2009 Baltimore MD, 07/30/2009 – Unaddressed pesticide pollutio ...