Ok, I don't know if you have any problems with your garden, but I do! Here recently I have been having the largest problem with
cucumber beetles, which means that I was pulling my hair out by the hands full...I eventually stopped since I was afraid I might go prematurely bald! Cucumber beetles are about 1/4 in. long with three black stripes on there backs filled with yellow in between. I had dueled with these menacing creatures before when I had planted green beens, lets just say I have never planted them since, I lost! The cucumber beetles had just come and eaten then all the leaves and all of the green beens where wasted since they could not be eaten due to the fact that they had little brown dots all over them from where they had bitten them. To this day green beens have not graced my garden since. Maybe someday I will be brave enough to plant them again.
Thank God that I have a mother who knows so many things that it would blow the mind of any person on the face of this earth, and she had read that
NEEM OIL is the cure all fo
r ant critter, bug, or anything that you do not in your garden to live. Since I am an organic gardener I was not going to use
Seven on my plants, so instead I mixed some neem oil into a container with some water, and into that I added some tobacco (this is the only reason it is in our house to begin with!) WOW! If that wont kill something I don't know what will! At first I didn't think anything would happen to those beetles since I was seeing their eggs all over the leaves of the squash!
You see I had planted some squash, some spaghetti squash, and I just love home made spaghetti squash spaghetti...YUM!!! I was really looking forward to eating that spaghetti and knowing that it came right form the garden; I had even gone so far as to start my seeds from scratch, nurturing them all the way, and now come to find out that they were infested with these tiny beetles! Eventually ( 2 weeks) later I start to notice that there are not as many of them on my squash blossoms! I was ecstatic, all my dreams and aspirations had come true, it was a miracle!
After my battle with the be
etles, I had come to find out that the reason not a single squash was growing was because my plants were not producing any female flowers, only male flowers were being produced! So all this time I was pollinating my plants was for nothing! I was considering buying a toupe so that I could resume pulling my hair out.
I had decided to go to canoing camp and leave all my troubles behind for the moment, ignorance is bliss, right! Well, it was until I came back, when I returned all of my spaghetti squash had wilt! I was so upset that I pulled out ever squash plant that even had a name that sounded like Italian cuisine.
When all of this was said and done I took some scrap plant material (not from the squash mind you) and threw it into the compost pile, only to find a squash plant growing, no, flourishing from a tiny seed that had been thrown away last year to be composted! On this miracle of a plant was once little baby female flower! So at least all my time and effort has not been wasted for nothing. Maybe next year I will just throw all of my seeds into the compost pile and see if they grow instead, well you cant blame me for thinking about it!
