Earthworms

We have hundreds of strange-looking insects that just appeared inside and outside our home. They are brown in color, nearly an inch long and have back legs like a grasshopper. What are they and should we be concerned?You are describing the adult leaf-footed bug. It feeds on some vegetable-garden plants but otherwise is harmless. The bugs over-winter in sheltered locations and emerge in the spring. This winter they have been stimulated by mild weather to move about with their other insect brethren.

Each year I head for the garden, armed with battle plans to conquer the world -- or at least my corner of it.I carry blueprints of my garden-to-be. The plans are drawn to scale. Every flower bed and vegetable plot is reduced to a few lines on graph paper. I agonize over these drawings for hours, trying to organize plants and outwit the pests that would attack them.The plans never leave my sight. They are my hope for success against the forces of nature that are even now rallying to assault my garden.

Some years ago, when I was living in a garret in Washington, D.C., I had a yen to do a little gardening. So I scratched out a small plot in the parking lot and planted the one vegetable you simply couldn't find in edible form in any grocery store in the District of Columbia -- spinach.Pretty soon, my spinach plants broke ground and unfurled their heavenly leaves, so green and fresh you were tempted to lie down in the garden and eat them on the spot.Well, I didn't eat them, but something else did: loathsome fat white larva.

Most people have some skeleton in the closet, an offbeat pastime, a guilty pleasure, something that, in their most paranoid daydreams, could land them as guest specimens on one of those sleazy TV talk shows.My bad dream goes like this:''Men who compost! On the next 'Geraldo!' ''Or: ''Men who compost, and the women who love them! Next time on 'Sally Jessy!' ''OK, there it is, the complete dirt: I keep a compost bin in my back yard. What can I say? To quote the T-shirt I once received as a gift, ''Compost happens.

Perhaps years of environmental consciousness-raising has had a cumulative effect on the public. Maybe it's the thought of the family pet running through a yard recently sprayed with chemicals and pesticides, then licking its paws. Or a parent's fear of a 2-year-old child playing in chemically treated grass.It is likely that a combination of all of the above is responsible for the upsurge of interest in organic lawn care. And it is no coincidence that the organic approach to lawn management ultimately produces a healthier lawn that requires less work and money to maintain.

PHILADELPIHA - If only there hadn't been an Ice Age, Dennis Burton might not be in such a fix today. But there was, wreaking havoc among the nation's worms. So here Burton was, turning over logs in the woods of the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Roxborough, Pa., and scrabbling in the dirt in search of wigglers. "Oh, yeah," said the director of land restoration, grabbing a little brown worm. Captive in his hand, it flipped and thrashed. "That's a monster!" he said. Just as he suspected, it was also an interloper.

One makes certain compromises living in the city. Instead of the farmer's traditional garbage disposal -- pigs -- we city slickers raise their urban equivalent -- worms.Many of us raise earthworms, unwittingly, in our yards, but I'm talking about a more committed relationship: a worm bin.A worm bin has decided advantages over a pigpen. It needs a fraction of the space. The worms aren't noisy. Nor are they smelly. They won't bite the children. And you can leave town for weeks without having to get a hired hand.

Last spring I received a small azalea plant. I kept it outside in the pot all summer and recently brought it indoors. Should its nut-like nodules (maybe next year's buds or last year's flower remnants) be removed? Any suggestions for wintering the plant? Leave the nut-like nodules. They probably are buds. Keep your azalea in medium to bright light but not direct sunlight, and as cool as possible. Shallow roots might dry out quickly in the heated house. Always keep soil moist. These are acid-loving plants that might not like conditioned water.

The drought has taught many gardeners at least one thing: The hassles of working with clay soil. Rather than despairing, though, there is a fairly painless way to improve the problem -- clay-busting plants.If you're still in doubt about what kind of soil you have, here are some diagnostic clues:* Has your garden soil turned into a brick with the lack of rain? We're talking about that cracked, solid surface in which wilting tomatoes and marigold seedlings are held so tightly they seem cemented in. (This isn't to be confused with the dry crust that forms over good dirt.

Wally Vait has a good eye for such things, so I'm not surprised that during a hike Saturday on the North Central Railroad Trail in Freeland, he spotted an Eastern garter snake on a sun-splashed rock. The question: What was it doing there, after one of the coldest Novembers on record, and with the winter solstice two weeks away? Did a snake aboveground portend doom for us all, as in the purported Mayan prophecy for Dec. 21, 2012? Was this a sign of the Almighty's unhappiness with Maryland's same-sex marriage law?