The Patchwork Kitchen Garden: The Tenth Week
“The Battle of the Bugs”—that’s all I can really say about this week.
It was a very warm and humid week in the garden. With that came the bugs, lots and lots of bugs, specifically the dreaded aphid. Yes, the vampire of the gardening world and my garden was unfortunately full of them. The plant that had them the worst was my precious Foxglove.
In the beginning of the week my first foxglove was starting to get new buds and looked like it was on the verge of having a second bloom. So, of course I start getting excited and literally the next day I see some of the buds turning brown and shriveling. Of course I investigate and see a couple of aphids. But my garden has had a very healthy Ladybug population so I decided to let nature take its course and wait to see if the issue corrected itself. This was a horrible, horrible mistake. Apparently the Ladybugs were no match for the sheer amount of aphids that were to plague my poor defenseless garden. Two days later my Foxglove had been completely overwhelmed and I saw even more on the second Foxglove as well as in my vegetable garden. This meant war against the tiny green vampires, so I had to intervene.
I don’t usually like to use unnatural intervention but this year I had to. However, I do tend to stick with organic methods of pest control. Initially I sprayed my plants with an organic insecticide that contains Neem oil to try to quell the infestation. That however didn’t work! It killed some of the population but not all and it just seemed like every hour there were even more aphids. It was absolutely traumatizing to scrap an inch thick of aphids off my poor Foxglove stalks after I sprayed a good amount of this spray, absolutely disgusting.
Since the store bought solution didn’t work, I decided to resort to an old tried and true organic bug spray, a 50/50 solution of vinegar and water. This homemade spray has always worked in the past. The only problem is that it can damage the leaves on the plants as well as kill some helpful garden insects. At this point I was willing to risk it, it was getting really out of hand by the middle of the week. So I made my solution and went to town on my plants. I tried to get into the nooks and crannies of the leaves because that’s where the majority of the aphids were clustering. With the Foxglove, it was very difficult because the whole plant has plenty of places for the aphids to hide and of course they did. The next day I had plenty of dead aphids but I would pull back the leaves of the buds and there were still so many still alive. I literally would shake the stalk and the apids would just pour off, it makes me itchy just writing this. On top of it, I still had dying buds on the Foxglove and had to strip the stalk of the buds to really get rid of the aphids and any decaying flower matter. Now the one Foxglove just looks naked and sad but I have saved the second one. It’s doing much better now and the second stalk is finally blooming again. I’m just thankful I was able to turn it around and I hope that the first Foxglove will improve again with a little time.
My Dill unfortunately wasn’t as lucky as the Foxglove and it fully succumbed to the attack. I have a few survivors but for the most part it’s pretty much gone. It’s really sad that it went so fast I didn’t even have time to save it. Honestly, the Dill properly had them before but they just went unnoticed. I feel like there’s something I could have done if I’d noticed sooner but I can’t dwell on the things I can not change. I unfortunately just have to move forward and keep going.
The rest of the vegetable garden seems to be ok and it seems that the vinegar solution is helping. Some of the leaves on some of the plants got damaged from the acid in the vinegar but the aphids at the moment seem to be under control. I will be keeping a very close eye on the garden for any more destructive critters. Especially, on this new growth of lettuce. As it is there’s still a caterpillar at large that’s been munching on my greens. However, I will take a hungry caterpillar any day. One or two caterpillars are still better than hundreds of tiny green sap suckers.
That’s all I got for this week. I’m sorry it had to be all doom and gloom but it happens, that’s life. It can’t always be sunshine and rainbows. If it were we wouldn’t appreciate the good times when they’re around and take them for granted. Hopefully next week I’ll have a more happy story to tell and give you a better update on the garden.
For now you can check out the garden gallery below to see all the plants that survived The Battle of the Bugs and even get to see my precious little peas growing. Well until next week, Happy Gardening!
