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Garden

Backyard cuttings

Briefs and news of note for the gardener.

By JUDY STARK
Published November 18, 2006

Simple fall decor

This couldn't be much easier, and it will look nice on a hall table or side table. Find wrapping paper with an old-world map design. Fold a sheet in half, twist it into a cone and tape the seam. Fill with shredded paper, a few ears of dried Indian corn, apples, maybe nuts and mini-pumpkins.

Shoo, woodpecker

Woodpeckers are beautiful, but not when they're drilling holes in your home and making noise while you're trying to sleep. The Woodpecker PRO is an electric- or battery-powered device that emits the sound of woodpecker distress calls and the natural calls of four predators to discourage woodpeckers, flickers, yellow-bellied sapsuckers and others. It's $239, available at www.bird-x. com/woodpecker (where you can hear those distress calls).

Put a cap on it

Use an empty plastic milk jug to start seedlings, This Old House magazine suggests. Cut the bottom off the jug and stand it over the seedling to serve as a cloche. You can remove the cap to regulate the temperature in your mini-greenhouse.

Soothing flowers

People feel more compassionate toward others, are less worried and anxious, and feel less depressed when they have cut flowers at home, a psychologist at Harvard University reports. The "control" home decor items, a candle and a hurricane vase, were not nearly as effective at raising the mood or generating positive emotions as were flowers. People were more likely to be energetic, enthusiastic and happy at work when they had flowers at home.

Profitable planting

Sales in Florida's nursery and landscape industry soared to $15.2-billion last year, up from $9.9-billion in 2000, a state economic impact study reports. That, despite - or perhaps because of - the hurricanes of 2005. The industry employs 294,000 people, paying $5.2-billion in wages and salaries.

Compiled by Homes and Garden editor Judy Stark.

[Last modified November 16, 2006, 11:42:01]