With the warm weather, everyone has questions about insects, and I’m often asked what pesticide can be used to control them.

Most of the time, these are fairly easy questions to answer, but sometimes they can be harder. When this happens, I have to read the label of the pesticides.

When there is a pest problem in the garden or landscape, the best way to handle it might not be a pesticide. The solution instead might be cultural practices, such as traps or natural enemies of the pest.

A few weeks back, I wrote about some of the winter weeds that are now present in lawns. The warm weather has gardeners thinking about summer weeds in the lawns, so I have been getting questions about when pre-emergent herbicides should be applied.

The best way to control summer weeds is to start early and use pre-emergent herbicides to kill the weed seed as they germinate. This is especially true of the grassy weeds, such as crabgrass and goosegrass.

When most gardeners think of a vegetable garden, they are thinking about the vegetables that grow in the spring, summer, fall and winter.

These are all annual plants that live and grow during one growing season and then die.

By having annual plants in the garden, gardeners are able to rotate the plants around to help reduce diseases and insects, and keep the vegetables from depleting specific minerals in the soil.

But there also are vegetables that are perennial, living for many seasons and years. One perennial vegetable is asparagus.

Christmas Day has finally arrived.

I hope everyone got what they wished for or needed.

The tradition around our house is that we get together as a family on Christmas Eve and open gifts. Then, on Christmas Day, the little ones open the gifts from Santa.

There are many traditions at Christmas. One of them has to do with mistletoe. The other day, I was watching a Christmas movie and someone was walking around at a gathering holding mistletoe over people’s heads and getting them to kiss.