There Aint No Bugs On Me!

A couple months ago the kids and I bought some seedling strawberry plants and potted them at home for the window atrium in our kitchen.  We also started some tomatoes and herbs.  The best way to start seedlings is to spray them with a fine mist every day until they get to be a couple inches tall.  Then you can start watering them.

We’re excited to have our second season of fresh tomatoes this summer.  Last year our strawberry plant didn’t make it.  I put it outside where I thought it would get more sun and a ferocious wind came through and bye bye strawberries. 

So this year we’ve been using the herbs in our spaghetti sauce already and have been waiting and waiting for the strawberries and tomatoes to catch up.  I’ve cut back the watering to every other day because the leaves were turning a brownish yellow color.  Which I thought was weird since yellow was too much water and brown was too little water.  I mean way to confuse a girl, seriously.

Yesterday morning I went to water them and to my horror, I found this…





Are those spider webs??  On my strawberries?  Okay don’t laugh at me if you are a seasoned gardener and have seen this before because I was freaking out.  I do lot’s of things in my life, spiders aren’t one them!  Let me reiterate… I DON’T DO SPIDERS.  Any size, shape, color.  Nope, nadda, zilch.
This is when I called in reinforcements (aka… Mr Garden).  So we searched the web and searched the web and pulled up aphids and other little berry bugs but I knew only bugs of the spider variety could make webs.  So we finally came across the name for these little buggers.  They are Spider Mites.  Not technically of the arachnid family but can spin webs and kill your plants.  They spin the webs to get from one leaf to another, it’s like their crawly little highway system.



Aww..  See my first little berry hanging there all tangled in the webs?  Little bastards.  They had to go!  So once again this is where Mr Garden came into play cause no matter how small they were there was no way I was touching those things.  Sadly I would sacrifice the berry before I would save it from the microscopic monsters.

We found out that you can rinse the plant really well clearing it from the webs and several hundreds of these bugs and then use a homemade pesticide mixed with equal parts of Isopropyl and water.  Also add a few drops of dish soap. 



Then spray generously all over.  Concentrating on the under side of the leaves where they especially like to hide.  I pretty much ended up using half a bottle of this stuff, just for good measure ;P



So I will have to do this about every three days for a few weeks and hopefully we’ll be good to go.  I will be scrubbing the strawberries very well and inspecting before we eat them though!  I also had aphids on the herbs so we gave them the same treatment along with the tomatoes which look safe so far.

Okay so on with the show…  We have more winners to announce!  I wanted to get to this yesterday but I came down sick over the weekend. 

Winner of the Paper Flower Magnet from Always Springtime Flowers is…

silverroses2 said...

I am following your blog!
April 30, 2011 10:58 AM

True Random Number Generator Min: Max: Result: 3

Congratulations!

And the winner of the $25 shop credit to Trina Rose Boutique is…

Kelli said...

I'm a follower

April 28, 2011 11:06

True Random Number Generator Min: Max: Result: 7

Congratulations!

Don’t forget to go enter for the $35 shop credit at Ginger Jewels!  Drawling is tomorrow!

~Sommer