https://www.facebook.com/108894041296912/

Grow It Right, 5226 Walmore Road, Lewiston, NY (2026)

10/13/2026

No food, no water, and a dark box. That's what a stunned bird, a cold baby animal or a turtle hit on the road needs from you in the first hour, and the fourth thing is a phone call. Everything else on this list needs you to walk away.

October is moving season, and much of what looks abandoned is leaving or arriving right on schedule 🐾

A stunned bird under a window. Cover it with a soft cloth, set it in a closed box somewhere dark and quiet, and leave it an hour. No food, no water. If it's bright-eyed and flapping, open the box outside and let it go; if not, call a licensed rehabber, because a bird that looks fine can be bleeding inside. This is peak migration, so turn the porch lights off at night and put decals on the glass 2 inches apart.

A young fox on its own. It isn't lost. Fall is when fox families break up and the young disperse to find their own ground, and a healthy fox trotting through the yard in daylight is normal this month. Leave it alone and don't feed it; the one to call about is the fox that staggers, approaches people or has lost its fur to mange.

A box turtle on the road. Carry it across in the direction it was headed, set it down on the far shoulder, and don't take it anywhere: a box turtle moved a mile from its home range spends the rest of its life trying to walk back. A cracked shell is a rehabber's job, and they fix more of them than you'd think.

A hummingbird still at the feeder. The feeder isn't holding it; the shortening days send it south on their own clock. Leave the feeder up two weeks past the last bird you see, and all winter in the Gulf states and the West, where rufous and Anna's hummingbirds stay.

A bat inside the house. Thick gloves or nothing, and no skin contact for anyone. Close the room's doors, open a window and let it leave on its own. If it was in a bedroom while someone slept, or near a child or a pet, don't release it: trap it in a box without touching it and call the county health department, because a bat bite can go unnoticed in sleep and the bat needs testing. This is general safety information, not medical advice.

An opossum stiff on the ground, teeth bared and drooling. It's playing dead, not dead, and it can stay that way for hours. Give it room, bring the dog in, and it walks off when its nervous system lets it.

The general rule: if you're not sure, call Animal Help Now or your state wildlife agency's rehabber line and describe what you see. No food or water for any animal you're trying to help. Watch from a distance.

Some need a box and a call. The others need room to leave 🌿

10/13/2026

The earwig in the bathroom sink this week came in for the winter, not to breed: a glass and a postcard put it back outside, and a door sweep and a bead of caulk around the window frames keep the rest of them out. It belongs to the fall parade of house guests, with the stink bugs and the lady beetles, and like them it does nothing indoors but wander.

It gets the same reaction as the cellar spider on the ceiling: you see it, you want to squash it. It's just as harmless and more useful in the yard 🍂

The pincers have a name, cerci. The earwig uses them to defend itself, hold prey and court; picked up, it can give a light pinch, with nothing injected. It carries no disease, and despite the name and the nickname, pincher bug, it doesn't crawl into ears any more than any other insect that likes a dark crack.

In the garden it works while you sleep. It eats aphids, mites and insect eggs, and it chews through fallen leaves and rotting plant matter, which is the recycling half of the job. The apple and pear growers of Washington State know it well: they hang rolled cardboard shelters in the trees to build up earwig numbers, because the earwigs clean the woolly apple aphid and the pear psylla off the branches 🍎

The one time it's a problem is when there are too many and too few aphids to go around. Then it chews the petals of dahlias and zinnias, the edges of hosta leaves, lettuce seedlings, ripe strawberries and apricots. Skip the spray. Stuff an upturned flowerpot with straw and set it upside down on a stake among the dahlias; the earwigs crowd into it by dawn, and in the morning you hang the pot in the apple tree, where they go on working, away from the strawberries. A rolled, dampened newspaper on the ground does the same.

Lift a stone this fall and find a female hunched over a pile of white eggs, and put the stone back gently. She cleans the eggs for weeks to keep mold off them and feeds the young when they hatch, a kind of mothering few insects manage 🪲

10/13/2026

Get the winter squash in before the first frost, which is this week across the northern tier and any night now through the Midwest, cut with 2 inches of stem, and cure them ten days somewhere warm and dry, a sunny porch or the garage at 75 to 85°F, so the skins harden and they keep until February. Then the bulbs go in. That's the garden's to-do list for October; the rest of this one is for pleasure.

Fall might be the best season in the garden. The light goes golden, the evenings cool off, the squash are in and the house smells of baked apples 🍂

Sixteen small pleasures to pick from, depending on the mood and the weather:

In the garden
- Harvest the last pumpkins and winter squash, as above
- Plant the spring bulbs once the soil is under 55°F: tulips, daffodils, crocus, grape hyacinth. Mid-October to November up north, November into December in the South, where tulips want six weeks in the fridge first
- Pot up pansies and violas with ornamental kale for the steps: winter color from the Mason-Dixon line south, and color until the ground freezes up north, with the pansies back in bloom in March
- Read among the plants, after bringing the tender ones indoors before the nights drop under 50°F

Outdoors
- Go leaf peeping while the maples, oaks and hickories turn; New England is at peak now, the mid-Atlantic in late October, the Southern Appalachians in early November
- Pick apples at a u-pick orchard, and come home with the c***r doughnuts
- Do the pumpkin patch, the hayride and the corn maze
- Photograph the colors in the yard or down your own street

At home
- Hot c***r, a flannel blanket, a few candles and a movie
- An apple pie, a pot of butternut squash soup
- Sweaters and flannel out of the closet
- Decorate the porch with pumpkins, mums, cornstalks and a few branches of bittersweet

The garden slows down on its own. It's the time to enjoy it before the cold of December 🎃

10/13/2026

Put the two plants in one pot that has a drainage hole and about 2 inches of room around both root balls, and nothing at the bottom but potting mix. Skip the layer of gravel: water doesn't drain through a change of texture, it perches on top of it, so the stones raise the waterline into the roots instead of lowering it. Two plants in one pot give a fuller look without multiplying the containers, as long as they want the same light and the same watering rhythm, which means the right duo depends on the room.

☀️ Bright room, no direct sun (an east window, or a few feet back from a south one): pothos and spider plant, two easy plants that forgive a missed week, the pothos trailing over the rim and the spider plant arching above it.

🌵 Waterings that get forgotten (the office, the dorm, the guest room): snake plant and ZZ plant, which handle dry mix without complaint and would rather wait for it to dry than sit wet. Water both when the mix is dry to the bottom, which in winter can mean once a month.

🛁 Bright bathroom or a humid kitchen: peace lily and calathea, which want mix kept lightly moist and air with some humidity in it. The peace lily wilts to tell you it's thirsty; let it be the gauge for both.

Two cautions. Pair for pace as well as thirst: the spider plant and the ZZ fill a pot faster than their partners, so lift and divide the pair each spring before one swallows the other. And the water: calathea and spider plant both brown at the leaf tips from the fluoride in most city tap water, and letting the water sit overnight doesn't remove it; use filtered, distilled or rain for those two. Pothos, ZZ, snake plant and peace lily are on the ASPCA's toxic list for cats and dogs, spider plant and calathea aren't, so the first two duos go up on a shelf in a pet household. This is general safety information, not veterinary advice.

One pot, twice the green 🌿

10/13/2026

Cut through both skins on the rounded side, and peel them while they're still too hot to hold comfortably. Those two steps are the method; everything else is detail. The cut has to go through the brown shell and the thin beige skin under it, because that inner skin is the tannic, bitter one, and it comes off with the shell when the nut is hot and glues itself to the meat once the nut cools.

🍂 1. The pick. Big ones, and if they came off your own tree, the ones that fell on their own. Drop them in a bowl of water: keep the ones that sink, and toss the floaters, which are empty or have a worm in them. The chestnuts in the store in October are mostly Italian; the ones under a tree in an American yard are almost always Chinese chestnuts or the 'Dunstan' hybrids, since the native American chestnut, four billion trees strong until the blight arrived in 1904, is gone from the canopy and only now being bred back. Fresh chestnuts are perishable, not a shelf nut: a paper bag in the fridge, a week or two at most. And one thing to be sure of first: a buckeye or horse chestnut is not a chestnut. The edible one comes in a spiny burr, two or three to a burr, with a flat side and a pointed tassel; the buckeye comes in a smooth, leathery husk, one round glossy nut with no point, and it's toxic. This is general safety information, not medical advice.

2. The cut, no exceptions. One deep slash across the rounded face, not the flat one, through both skins. An unscored chestnut bursts in the oven, and the one that bursts is the one that was looking at you.

🔥 3. The roasting. In the oven: 425°F, top rack, 20 to 25 minutes, until the shell splits and curls back from the cut. Over the fire: the holed chestnut pan on the grill grate, the fire pit or the fireplace coals is the real tradition, 15 to 20 minutes, shaken and turned every 3, and the flame coming up through the holes toasts the shell and gives the smoky flavor the oven can't. The trick, either way: at the end, add 3 tablespoons of water and cover the pan at once, or dump the nuts into a kitchen towel and wrap them for five minutes. The steam loosens the inner skin.

4. Peel at once, hot. Both skins come away together while the nut is hot. Let them cool and the inner skin sets to the meat and stays there.

Two secrets, then: the cut that goes through both skins, and the peeling that doesn't wait 🌰

10/12/2026

Put a few sticky traps down tonight, behind the fridge, under the sink and beside the floor drain in the basement, and look at what you catch before you buy anything. 🔍 The species tells you where it's living and which product works, and the fogger works on none of them; it scatters the roaches into the walls and leaves the eggs untouched.

🏠 The four that live in American houses:

1. Oriental cockroach (Blatta orientalis), the "water bug." Glossy black, 1 to 1.25 inches, broad and flat. Slow, can't climb smooth walls, doesn't fly. It wants cool and damp: basements, crawl spaces, floor drains, under the porch, in the mulch against the foundation. It comes in through the drain and the gap under the garage door, and October is its month, as the nights cool and it moves inside. Night active, hates light.

2. German cockroach (Blattella germanica). The worst infester and the most common one indoors across the country. Small, 1/2 to 5/8 inch, tan with two dark stripes running down behind the head. Breeds at an alarming rate: the female carries an egg case of 30 to 40 eggs until it hatches. Lives in the kitchen, behind the fridge, in the stove clock, under the sink, in the warm damp cracks, and arrives in cardboard boxes, grocery bags and used appliances. In an apartment building it's a building problem, not a unit problem.

3. American cockroach (Periplaneta americana), the "palmetto bug" of the South. The biggest, 1.5 to 2 inches, reddish-brown and shiny with a pale band behind the head. Can fly, or glide at you off the porch ceiling. Lives in sewers, storm drains, steam tunnels and sump pits, and comes up through a floor drain whose trap has gone dry, on the warm nights of summer and the first cold ones of fall.

4. Brown-banded cockroach (Supella longipalpa). Small, brown, with pale bands across the wings. The opposite of the others: it wants warm and dry, and it lives high, behind picture frames, inside the TV and the router, in the electrical box, on the closet shelf, in the bedroom as readily as the kitchen.

🪵 Two that aren't a problem: the wood cockroach that flies to the porch light in late spring and rides in on the firewood, and the smokybrown of the Southeast that lives in the attic and the tree hole. Neither breeds in a clean, dry house. Shake the firewood on the way in and leave the stack outside until it's needed.

What works: gel bait in pea-sized dots where the German hides, and no spraying near it, since spray repels them from the bait; a door sweep, a cup of water poured into each unused drain once a month, and the leak fixed for the Oriental and the American; bait placed high for the brown-banded; boric acid dusted into the wall voids and under the appliances; and a professional for a German infestation in a building with shared walls. One reason to take it seriously beyond the disgust: cockroach allergen is one of the main asthma triggers in city apartments. This is general safety information, not medical advice.

Different species, different habitat, different treatment. Identify first, act second 🪳

10/12/2026

Buy it from inside the store, not from the rack by the automatic doors, have it sleeved in paper or a bag for the walk to the car, and don't leave it in the car while you finish the errands. The poinsettia that drops its leaves ten days after Christmas was usually killed in the parking lot, at 30°F between the sliding doors and the trunk, and nothing done at home afterward would have saved it.

Each year the same story: bought red and glorious the first week of December, limp, yellow and bare by the fifteenth. Here's the truth that lets you off the hook: it's rarely your fault. The poinsettia is a tropical shrub from the Pacific slopes of Mexico, 10 to 12 feet tall where it grows wild, that we buy in the dead of winter and treat as a disposable decoration. Around 35 million sell in the US each year, most of them in the six weeks before Christmas and most of them in the trash by Valentine's Day. Understand where it's from and you stop killing it. The six mistakes:

1️⃣ COLD, and it starts before you buy. Below 50°F it begins dropping leaves; a draft, a cold car ride or a windowsill where the leaves touch the glass will do it. It often comes home already stressed from the garden-center rack at the entrance, which gets a blast of cold air with each customer. Buy one kept inside and warm, sleeve it for the trip, and keep it at 65 to 70°F at home, away from drafts and away from the heat vent.

2️⃣ TOO MUCH WATER. Soggy mix, roots in trouble, yellow leaves on the floor. Water thoroughly when the top inch is dry, then let it all drain. ⚠️ The holiday trap: the foil pot cover holds the water at the bottom and rots the roots. Poke holes in the foil or take it off, and set the pot on a saucer.

3️⃣ THE WRONG LIGHT. Bright but filtered: an east window, or a south window behind a sheer. Not the direct midday sun that scorches the bracts, and not the dark corner by the tree where the color fades in a week. Six hours of good light, none of it harsh.

4️⃣ DRY HEAT (and the fruit bowl). Forced-air heat drops the humidity to desert levels; set the pot on a tray of pebbles and water and keep it off the vent. And keep it away from ripe fruit: the ethylene that apples and bananas give off ages the bracts fast.

5️⃣ THROWING IT OUT AFTER THE HOLIDAYS. The most important one, and a mistake of the head, not the hands. By March the bracts fade and drop and the plant goes to rest. It isn't dying; that's its cycle, like a tree in November. In April cut the stems back to 4 to 6 inches, water less, keep it in the light, and it leafs out again by May. Outside after the last frost in a bright, shaded spot, pinched back through the summer, back in before the nights drop under 55°F in late September. From a one-month decoration to a plant for years.

6️⃣ EXPECTING IT TO TURN RED ON ITS OWN. It's a short-day plant: the bracts color up when, from October 1, it gets 14 hours of total, uninterrupted dark each night for 8 to 10 weeks, in a closet or under a box from 5 pm to 7 am, with full light by day. A lamp left on, a TV in the room, a streetlight through the blinds, and the clock resets. Do it and it lights up by Thanksgiving on its own, as if it had just come from the store. Anyone who kept last year's plant: this started two weeks ago, so start tonight.

🎨 TWO THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW
- The red flowers aren't flowers. They're bracts, modified leaves colored to draw pollinators; the real flowers are the small yellow buttons in the center, modest to the point of invisible.
- Where it's from. The Aztecs called it cuetlaxochitl and used it for dye. Joel Poinsett, the first US minister to Mexico, sent cuttings home to his greenhouse in Charleston in 1828, and December 12, the day he died, is National Poinsettia Day. The Ecke family of Encinitas, California, then spent a century turning it into the Christmas plant. The Mexican legend of Pepita, the poor girl whose bunch of roadside weeds bloomed red on the altar, is why Mexico calls it the Flower of the Holy Night.

⚠️ AN HONEST NOTE ON "THE POISONOUS PLANT"
The deadly poinsettia is a myth that traces to a 1919 rumor out of Hawaii; a child would have to eat hundreds of bracts to get sick. It is a Euphorbia, though, and the white sap from a cut stem irritates skin and eyes and upsets a dog's or cat's stomach. No panic: keep it away from the pets that chew, wash your hands after pruning, and call Poison Control at 1-800-222-1222 or the vet if something does get eaten. This is general safety information, not medical or veterinary advice.

It doesn't die of your failings. It dies of being treated as a decoration when it's a tropical on a winter road trip. Warmth, soft light, less water and some respect for its cycle, and the one-month gift becomes the plant that comes back for Christmas after Christmas 🌿

10/12/2026

Look up at the hood over your stove and find out where the air goes. If the grille on top of the over-the-range microwave blows back into the room, it's a recirculating hood, and it's doing nothing about steam, smoke or the gas burners' exhaust; it's a grease filter with a light. Most of those microwaves can be switched to vent outside by turning the blower and running a 6-inch duct through the wall or the roof to a capped outlet, a few hundred dollars with the cap, and the rest of this is about which way that duct goes.

Kitchen ventilation isn't a luxury. In a kitchen where bacon fries, peppers get charred on the burner and the turkey roasts for five hours, the steam, grease and smoke need a way out. If they don't get one, they coat the cabinets, feed mold on the ceiling and leave the plants on the windowsill yellow and sticky.

Three ways to do it, from the simplest to the best:

Type 1 — Wall exhaust. The hood connects to a short duct straight through the exterior wall to a cap with a damper. The simplest and the most common, and it works when the range sits on or near an outside wall. Rigid metal duct, as short and straight as it can be; the flexible foil kind collects grease and is against code.

Type 2 — Downdraft. The vent sits behind or beside the cooktop, pulls the air down through the floor and out the rim joist. It's the fix for an island, and it's the weakest of the three, because it's pulling against heat that wants to rise; tall pots beat it. A ceiling-mounted island hood with a duct through the attic does better when there's room for one.

Type 3 — Roof exhaust. The hood ducts straight up through the attic to a roof cap. The best capture, since hot air rises into it, and the answer when the range is on an interior wall. Insulate the duct in the attic so condensation doesn't drip back, and make sure it ends at a cap on the roof, not in the attic, which is both a code violation and a mold factory.

In all three, the duct ends outdoors. Code asks for 100 CFM at the least; 300 to 400 covers most ranges, and above 400 CFM the house needs a make-up air damper so the hood doesn't pull the water heater's exhaust back down the flue. For a gas stove, the EPA's advice is a hood vented outdoors, run whenever a burner is on, cooking on the back burners where the capture is best. This is general safety information, not medical advice.

For the plants near the kitchen: steady cooking steam with no ventilation yellows leaves and invites fungus, and a grease film on the foliage blocks the light. A vented hood fixes the first two; a damp cloth on the leaves handles the third 🌬️

10/11/2026

The one in the bathtub didn't come in from the cold. House spiders live indoors year-round, and the big brown one crossing the floor this month is a male out looking for a female; the fall rush is the house population wandering, not the yard moving in. If you'd rather it wasn't in the tub, put a glass over it, slide a card underneath and let it go in the garage, the basement or the shed, where it can still make a living; the lawn in October is a bad place for a spider built for the indoors 🍂

Ten you'll meet, house and yard, and none of them a problem: the wolf spider, hunting on foot along the baseboard; the yellow garden spider and her zigzag in the tomatoes; the American house spider in the cobweb in the window corner; the marbled orbweaver, the orange pumpkin spider that turns up on the porch rail the week of Halloween; the bold jumping spider with the green fangs, watching you from the sill; the grass spider, whose dew-covered sheets cover the lawn on a fall morning; the barn funnel weaver in the basement window well; the cellar spider, whose venom-too-strong, fangs-too-short story is a myth with no truth in it; the barn spider, which is Charlotte; and the woodlouse spider, orange with big jaws, under the flowerpot where the pill bugs are.

They work for the house:
- They take flies, mosquitoes, pantry moths and clothes moths before you see them
- The cellar spider hunts the other spiders, house spiders included
- The woodlouse spider works the pill bugs under the pots and in the damp corner of the basement
- The orbweavers and the garden spider pull gnats, leafhoppers and stink bugs out of the air by the hundred

All ten are harmless; a bite is rare and at worst like a bee sting. The two that aren't on the card are the ones to know: the black widow, glossy black with a red hourglass underneath, in woodpiles, meter boxes and under patio furniture across the South and West; and the brown recluse, which lives in the south-central states from Texas to Georgia and north to southern Iowa and is close to absent outside that range. A bite from either is a call to Poison Control, 1-800-222-1222. This is general safety information, not medical advice.

A few webs left in the quiet corners are the cheapest pest control the house will get 🕷️

10/11/2026

Read the genus on the tag before the bamboo goes in the cart: Fargesia and Bambusa stay in a clump, Phyllostachys, Pleioblastus, Sasa and Pseudosasa run, and a runner goes in the ground with a barrier the day it's planted or not at all 🎋

Running means the rhizomes travel, a foot or two down and 15 to 20 feet a year in good soil, under the driveway, through the lawn, up through the neighbor's patio. The pretty ones at the nursery are mostly runners: golden bamboo, yellow-groove, black bamboo, the dwarf groundcover bamboos, arrow bamboo. The clumpers widen a few inches a year from the base and stop there: Fargesia for zones 5 to 7, which dislikes humid summer heat, and the Bambusa hedge bamboos ('Alphonse Karr', 'Golden Goddess', slender weaver's) from zone 8 south and across the warm West. The one native bamboo, river cane, is a runner too, a plant for the creek bank and a restoration project, not for 10 feet from the lot line.

A rhizome barrier works when it's installed right, and the US specs run heavier than most tags suggest:
🌱 HDPE at 40 mil at the least, 60 mil better, 24 to 30 inches deep, the top edge 2 inches above grade and leaning slightly outward so a rhizome that hits it turns up, not down
🌱 one continuous ring with the seam clamped in a stainless-steel joining strip, because the seams and the corners are where the rhizomes get through
🌱 a walk around the edge each fall, trowel in hand, to cut the rhizomes trying to climb over the lip

A runner already in the ground without a barrier can still be caught: trench around the clump a spade deep, cut and pull the rhizomes heading out, then set the barrier in the trench. For a grove that's been going ten years, rent a trencher. Where it's coming up unwanted, mow or snap off each spring shoot as it appears; the rhizome starves in two or three seasons, and no spray does it in one pass.

Do it before the shoots come up on the other side of the fence. Connecticut makes whoever plants a runner liable for the neighbor's removal bill and requires a barrier or a 100-foot setback; New York prohibits the sale of golden and yellow-groove bamboo outright; towns from New Jersey to Maryland have passed their own ordinances with fines. The rhizomes are still moving this month, which makes October the right time for the walk around the edge.

Clumper, no barrier. Runner, barrier from day one 🎋

Grow It Right

10/13/2026

10/13/2026

10/13/2026

10/13/2026

10/13/2026

10/12/2026

10/12/2026

10/12/2026

10/11/2026

10/11/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Listing takedown request