From the Looney Tunes studios of Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, PA, it is time for a stinging episode of chemical-free horticultural hijinks - You Bet Your Garden.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath.

What presents a bigger danger to you and yours?

A hornet's nest hanging on a nearby tree or shrub or a hole in the ground with smooth-skinned bee-like creatures buzzing around?

On today's show, we'll explain why Elmer Fudd is always wrong to break out the broom when a vacuum cleaner is clearly what's called for.

Otherwise, it's a fabulous phone call show, cats and kittens.

But guests are busy buying up all the meat tenderizer they can find.

So we will take that heaping helping of your telecommunicated questions, comments, tips, tricks, suggestions and jarringly judicious justifications.

So keep your eyes and/or ears right here, true believers, because it's all coming up faster than you do in the 30-yard dash with a thousand stingers close behind.

Right after this.

Support for You Bet Your Garden is provided by the Espoma company, offering a complete selection of natural organic plant foods and potting soils.

More information about Espoma and the Espoma natural gardening community can be found at espoma.com.

Welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

From the studios of Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, PA, I am your host, Mike McGrath, and we have a terrifying and informative Question of the Week for you.

We're going to talk about the two different kind of hornets that might appear in your landscape.

One is mostly seen in Warner Bros cartoons.

And if you don't act like Daffy Duck or Elmer Fudd nothing bad will happen.

The other is lesser known and much more dangerous.

We'll tell you all about them after a bunch of your dangerous phone calls at... Gail, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Hi, Mike, how are you?

- I am just ducky, Gail, thank you for asking.

Ducky is glad to be free of his mask in the post-Covid world, at least for a little bit of time.

Can we just get a couple of months?

- Definitely!

- Catch our breath before we go back underwater again.

How are you doing, Gail?

- I'm doing pretty fine.

It's a nice day here and looking forward to getting out after work.

- Very good.

Where is here for you?

- I'm in Lake Ann, Michigan, today.

- What can we do you for?

- Well, I have a question after listening to one of your shows a couple of weeks ago, and I've heard you say many times not to use grass clippings in our compost because of the possible effects of residual herbicides.

And my husband and I have been trying to for several years keep grass under some trees and keep it growing.

And for the last few years, we've resorted to weed and feed to try to help it out.

But it hasn't been successful.

So now we're changing gears and we're giving up on the grass.

We're going to put in a native shade garden.

But do we need to still worry about any residual herbicide in the soil affecting the new plantings?

And if so, is there a way to minimize that?

- Boy, I wish you had called before you tried the weed and feed.

You know, as much as I dislike these garden chemicals in general, the problem with grass under a tree, of course, is the tree, not only the shade it throws, but the intense competition for nutrients and water from the tree's roots.

So, you know, you're kind of going against nature when you try to do that.

What I would do... How big is...?

- That's what we found.

- Yeah.

How big is the circle of death around the tree?

- Oh, it's actually between two trees, and I would say that it's probably about 20 feet by 10 feet, so it's a fairly large area.

- OK, what I would do, first of all, is I would mulch the area with compost.

Of course, that's what I'm going to do.

A plane crashed down the street, get the compost!

So I would mulch the area with compost.

You'll like the look of it, the nice blackness.

And what I would do is I would continue your thought of shade-loving perennials, but let's plant them in containers the first year or two.

And you avoid that soil.

And in the meantime, the only way of getting residual herbicide out is through watering.

Now, when herbicides were old school and they kind of went away on their own after six months or a year, that was easier to do.

These residual ones, I mean, they get paid to hang out there, but the more water in that area, the better.

And I wouldn't try to grow anything in it right away.

But you can use the space creatively, you know, put out a couple of pieces of statuary there.

You know, the little boy peeing on the plants is always in good taste.

- Definitely.

And some other stuff.

And in terms of organic regulations, three months should... Three months!

Boy, I wish it was only three months.

Three years.

And it's safe to plant things there that are designated organic.

So, two years and you can call what's growing there transitional.

That's if you were growing for market.

But I would do the containers, you know, for a couple of years.

Who knows?

Maybe you'll like it.

- OK, OK, yeah, that's a great idea.

Hopefully we can get through all the tree roots.

- Yes.

All right.

Well, you take care.

Have a good season.

Bye-bye.

Number to call... Michelle, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Hi, Mike.

Thank you.

- Well, thank you, Michelle.

How are you doing?

- Pretty good.

How are you?

- I am just ducky, thanks for asking.

Ducky's proud to be back again after a little vacation.

Where is Michelle?

- I'm outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

- OK, what can we do you for?

Well, I have got a couple of carpenter bees living above my back door and you walk out onto a porch, so they are kind of... You know, I don't want them to be there, but I want to avoid killing them if I can.

I peeked into the hole the other day.

I was hoping they had finished their cycle for the summer and that they moved out and I could plug the holes and then paint the wood.

But I can actually see bees in there.

- Yeah, I should know more about the life cycle, but if you look online at a good university extension website or call your local extension service, they'll be able to tell you when the babies are born and everything is done.

I'm not really sure.

They probably... Actually, I have no idea whether they re-use those galleries or not.

What you can do now is go to a hardware store or a home center and get some solid blocks of cheap soft pine, untreated pine, and use a use a drill with a five-eighths inch bit to drill a starter holes into the block of pine just in like a half an inch, and hang these.

Do you have trees or anything near this area?

- Um...

I don't have any trees in the backyard, I have trees in the front yard, so nothing close by, but I'm just thinking.

I wouldn't want to put it on a fence, right?

- Sure.

Go ahead.

I mean, you know, if the fence is unpainted wood, they're going to go for it anyway.

But put up a whole bunch of these nesting blocks.

And then, you know, if you really want, you can wait till they're out pollinating.

But if you can find out when the babies are born, it would be nice to do this afterwards, but get the blocks up now.

And if it's safe, that is, the nest is empty while they're out gathering pollen, then you would immediately put up, you know, staple up some metal screening so they can't get back in the original hole and then spray that whole thing with almond oil.

Don't buy it, don't buy it like a health food store, go to a massage therapist supply house or buy it online.

They sell it by the gallon, because that's the carrier oil that massage therapists use.

And if you just stain... What is it, redwood or cedar?

The wood?

- Actually, it's just pine.

It's pine that wasn't treated for outside use... - Got you.

- ...when somebody replaced the door.

- Yeah.

Cowboy architecture.

I know all about it - Right.

- Yeah.

So you can try just staining the wood with almond oil.

I mean, you got a gallon of it.

Put it on with a paint brush and keep the old hole, you know, boarded up, so to speak.

But if you put up enough of these nesting blocks in the right kind of place, you should have them nesting in there.

So you get their fabulous pollination and they don't eat your house.

And by the way, they are very slow to do any kind of structural damage.

And they won't bother you if you don't bother them.

So, you know, it's not urgent that you take care of this, but it is good that you take care of it.

So get the wood blocks up.

Stain it with almond oil.

And really that should be all you need to do.

- Thank you very much.

- My pleasure.

Bye-bye.

888 492 9444.

Bill, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Hi, Mike, how are you doing?

- I am just ducky today, Bill.

How are you, sir?

- I'd say peachy today.

- You're peachy.

I was told that you were peachy in good weather and ducky in wet weather.

Peachy and Ducky would make a great team.

Where are you, Bill?

- I'm in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

- What can we do for Bill?

- So, I'm calling with... ...with a bit of a tip in our war against the spotted lantern fly.

- Oh, a dread, dread invasive insect.

- So I've had... My cucumbers...

I've had spotted lantern flies all over the stems.

All kinds of flowers, and like one cucumber all summer is all I've gotten so far.

So, I was looking at them and thinking, you know, they're sitting there, they're not on anything else in the garden.

How can I get them off?

Knowing that if I try to knock them off in the soapy water like I do with Japanese beetles or something, they're just going to jump away.

They're not going to land in the bowl.

So...

I thought I'd try your tip about Shop-Vac that you suggest for yellowjackets combined with soapy water.

I took the Shop-Vac, took the filter out, put about an inch of water in the bottom.

Couple of drops of soap in there and started vacuuming the spotted lantern flies off of the cucumber.

They are nymphs that are starting to turn red.

So the little ones that are black with the white dots and then some of the bigger ones are starting to turn red.

So they're not the adults yet.

But it is the nymphs.

- Yeah.

But they probably feed more in the nymphal stage than they do even in the adult stage.

But there's no reason to believe that this wouldn't work with the adults as well.

I know people who've used it against massive invasions of Japanese beetles too on their roses and just go out there and suck the suckers up.

And you remind me that in the earliest days of organic gardening, really before there was chemical gardening, one of the first machines that was invented for crop protection was a giant vacuum machine.

If you can imagine like a tractor with downward-pointing nozzles but instead of chemicals coming out of the nozzles, it was sucking insects up into the machine.

And my understanding is these machines were responsible for controlling a terrible outbreak of some kind of insect or another on lettuce crops in Texas.

And they were very efficacious.

They worked great.

But you know what happened?

You know, chemicals begin to be discovered, they begin to be promoted.

Extension agents of the day were telling farmers they were living in the past, they had to garden in the future.

So these machines fell by the wayside.

And I've kind of been waiting for them to come back because, especially with low-to-the-ground crops, these giant machines were great.

And your idea is great, too, doing it on a smaller scale as long as you can run an extension cord out to your garden.

Right?

- Yeah, I mean, just ran an extension cord out the window.

Worked pretty well.

What I discovered, the leaves are very susceptible to getting sucked in.

So I take the nozzle, I get it in past the leaves by the stem, and then I turn the Shop-Vac back on and, you know, it sucks up those nymphs.

They are tricky little buggers.

If I'm on the north side of the stem, they will run around to the south side and hang on and try and not to get sucked into the vacuum, but just move it around a little bit and eventually when they try and jump off, they get sucked right in.

- They seem to have some Darwinian advantages.

They have been incredibly successful, so to speak, as a species, and they're spreading like mad.

But obviously a vacuum, vacuuming them off is a perfect solution.

And, you know, there are different kind of funnel traps you can make that are illustrated online.

If you go to Penn State's extension service bulletins, they show you a trap that funnels them in and traps them before they can get to the canopy of a tree or something.

You know, generally they're after trees.

But you're not the first person to tell me they like cucumbers.

- Yeah, we've got the funnel traps on our maple trees and on our apple trees, and those are working great.

They're just...

They are too big to try and wrap around the cucumber stuff.

- Yeah, I think so.

- We're getting plenty of them and the vacuum's working on the cucumber.

- Well, that's excellent.

I'm glad you're keeping them under control, because not just are you saving your own crops, but you are limiting their numbers to go out and pester others.

You're in a huge agricultural area out there on the western side of Lancaster County.

- Yeah, we're trying to do our part and trying to protect our trees, too.

I mean, it's not all altruistic.

We have some skin in the game as well.

- I hear you.

All right.

Well, you keep up the good work, and next time you come up with an invention that's already 120 years old, you call us right back and remind us of it.

- Will do.

Thanks a lot, Mike.

Take care.

- My pleasure.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

And now it is time for a hugely important Question of the Week.

Cate writes... Well, thank you, Cate, because this is the perfect time of year to warn people about the only, quote, bee-looking type of insect that they must be wary of, especially when those insects appear in or near a garden bed.

That means, yes, you do unfortunately have, quote, hornets nesting under your herbs.

I say, unfortunately, because underground hornet nests are populated by yellowjackets, the deadliest flying insects in the United States.

Now, remember, kids, all yellowjackets are hornets, but not all hornets are yellowjackets.

Say that three times real fast.

And this missive is doubly timely, as my fellow Channel 39 and WLVR person, audacious Art from accounting - all hail they who sign the checks - just called me at home with a similar but completely different question.

Art's neighbor had just noticed a classic Warner Bros cartoon hornet's nest in one of Art's shrubs and was worried that the inhabitants thereof posed a danger to the neighbor's children or maybe its grandchildren.

Art wasn't sure which, but math leads me to believe it probably isn't both.

Anyway, to illustrate the danger difference between these two types of hornets, Art mentioned that the nest hadn't been visible before the hedge was trimmed recently.

Hello, anybody home?

If some jamoke trimming a shrub right next to a hornet's nest wasn't attacked, why worry about some kids playing theoretically a yard away?

The answer is our attachment to childhood cartoons, whether it's Donald Duck, Elmer Fudd, Tom and Jerry, or Sniffles the Mouse, the first side of that football-shaped hive hanging in a tree is the cue for Elmer to get a broom, antagonize the otherwise genial creatures and get stung multiple times upside his head.

Don't be like Elmer Fudd.

Now, there's a good T-shirt just waiting to be made.

Leave that nest alone.

And the bald-faced European hornets within will continue to dine on your caterpillar pests until frost and then they'll expire.

That nest will not be re-used by new hornets the following season, making it a nifty show and tell item the following year.

Kids can take the now deserted nest to class and cut it down the middle to expose the intricate architectural marvel that nature has created inside.

Hey, kids, if you do this, for best effect, assure everyone that any hornets left inside are long dead.

And then add... ...at least, I hope they are.

Same for yellowjackets.

As frost approaches, a new queen will leave the nest, leaving the males to fend for themselves.

And we all know what that means - that they will quickly die.

As with above-ground hornets, that nest likewise will not be re-used the following season, but in July and August, it is buzzing with nasty, aggressive, mean-tempered and not at all nice yellowjackets, which can, and do, number in the thousands at this time of year.

Approach the nest and you will be attacked.

The first string of attackers will inject you with a pheromone that incites the other occupants of the nest to pile on.

Run, and they will chase you.

Freeze, and they will sting you.

Yes, you are screwed, blued and tattooed.

Once you get to safety, apply a meat tenderizer containing propane, made from the papaya fruit, to the stings to denature the venom.

Works like a charm.

If they chase you towards a grocery store, buy a whole papaya, cut it into sections and rub the chunks on your stings.

If you are, quote, allergic to bee stings, slam the EpiPen full of epinephrine that you're supposed to have with you at all times into your thigh and then hightail it to the nearest emergency room or doc in a box.

Do not hesitate.

Depending on the number of stings, you could be in serious trouble.

Deadly serious.

But let's prevent that, shall we?

Wait for a cold night and take an old canister vacuum or Shop-Vac outside and plug it into a grounded outlet.

As you approach your target, have a helper ready to spray any sleepy guards with Pam or similar spray-on cooking oil while you place the hose as close as possible to the entrance hole.

But don't turn that machine on just yet.

Wait till the morning and then hit the switch and watch with fascination as the aggressive creatures rise up out of the nest to attack this noisy invader, flying to their doom by the dozens.

When no more yellowjackets appear, tape the hose shut tightly with duct tape and only then turn off the machine.

Leave it to bake in the sun for a few days and then dispose of the bodies.

Well, that sure was some important advice for those of you with deadly holes in the ground, now, wasn't it?

If you would like to read this important information over at your "leesure" or your "lesure", the Question of the Week appears in print at the Gardens Alive website.

Just click the link for the Question of the Week at our website, which is still and will forever be youbetyourgarden.org.

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Mike McGrath was created when he was bitten by a werewolf with mange.

He didn't even get the cool hair.

Yikes.

My producer is threatening to open my vacuum cleaner early if I don't get out of this studio.

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I'm your host, Mike McGrath, and I'm busy harvesting green beans and beet greens.

Say that six times real fast, kids.

I'm admiring my big green tomatoes, waiting for them to turn red, and this year's fabulous garlic harvest, while avoiding ticks, mosquitoes and late night TV ads, at least until I see you again next week.