Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Garden Bugs and my Great Visiting Teacher

My visiting teacher, Monica P., came over today and we were looking at my garden.  I have the equivalent of four  4'x4' garden plots in my side yard and back yard.  This is only my third summer to do a garden so I am still a beginner on most things.

I was showing her my new discovery:  I know how to kill squash beetles!  I saw a bunch of them on my squash leaves, so I googled "squash bugs" and learned from a YouTube video a few days ago to make homemade insecticide.  For this particular bug, all you have to do is put some liquid dish detergent in a bottle with water, and squirt it directly on the bugs.

It is great! They drop dead in about 30 seconds.  Something about the soap interacts with their hard crunchy exoskeleton and they croak.  Killing them is my new hobby,   I go out there several times a day just to squirt gun the little bugs and watch them fall off the leaves.  I have turned into a mass murderer.

After I showed her how to kill squash bugs, she taught me how to know when tomatoes are ready to pick.  (I don't like tomatoes, I grow them for Wayne.)  She said if you pull on them and they come off easily they are ready.

Then she saw one of those disgusting tomato horn worm caterpillars crawling on my tomato plant.  I said, "Gross!" and she said, "I'll pick that off for you."

So she pulled at the caterpillar, and she either popped it or it peed all over, because liquid sprayed all over her hand and almost onto me.  SICK!

She was so good natured about it and kept pulling at the caterpillar until she got it off the plant, and we threw it in a bucket of water to drown and she went inside to wash her hands.

What a woman!

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