Feb. 23 Column: Season Introduction

Well, today is a milestone because it marks the beginning of my weekly garden columns for the 2020 growing season! This first column is a season introduction. Here is a link to it in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Dig into learning.

In it, I mentioned how dreadful earwigs were in Inland Northwest gardens last year. If you live in a different region of the country, I’d be interested to know if they were especially bothersome in your garden as well. But no matter where you live, how did you deal with them?

There are several options for dealing with earwigs organically, which you’ll find in my column. But even more importantly, I devoted nearly half of it to the many ways we gardeners can locate reliable sources to resolve problems as well as increase our gardening skills. It’s so important to look for research-based information and educational opportunities. You’ll find many classes listed in my online Events calendar.

One suggestion I didn’t have room to include in my column is to consider joining a local garden club. You will learn so much by going to their meetings, hearing wonderful speakers and talking with other garden club members. Here in Spokane, we have a lot of garden clubs. The largest, most active one is the Inland Empire Gardeners with over 400 members! Wow. They put on fabulous events such as the Garden Expo and Spokane in Bloom Garden Tour, and they hold monthly meetings with excellent speakers.

If you are new to my columns — and this website — welcome! My columns run every Sunday in The Spokesman-Review newspaper here in Spokane, Wash. from February to October. And I always shoot a weekly video on a gardening topic, which you’ll find embedded within these weekly blog posts, as well as on my YouTube channel.

And one last thing about earwigs: I do have an information page on earwigs in my Organic Pest Control section, so be sure to take a look at it and the pages on many other troublesome insects.

If you need to find the section again, just go to SusansintheGarden.com, click on the “Guides” menu and look for “Organic Pest Control.”

OK, here is this week’s video, another season introduction of sorts!