lettuce, flea beetles, worms

We're being eaten out by Flea Beetles. They eat huge holes in the plants and turn them into skeletons. They particularly like eggplant and potato leaves. We're going organic, so we're faced with some pretty mediocre choices in getting rid of them. They've decimated the eggplant already, but the potatoes should be okay, they're much hardier than the baby eggplants. We're combating with diatomaceous earth and yellow sticky cards. Over the weekend we'll add some neem oil to the ground to suffocate the eggs. The diatomaceous earth is a very fine powder that acts like glass to tiny bugs and cuts them and they lose water and dry up.

In other garden news, we harvested a round of lettuce and spinach. Here was tonight's dinner:

Last weekend Roger harvested the compost from the worm bin. It yielded maybe 20 pounds of good worm compost. He then moved the worms and their eggs into a fresh bin.

Dia had surgery

Poor Dia already had surgery. We took her for a well visit to meet the vet and the vet aspirated these lumps on her head that we had been told were ingrown hairs. Well, the liquid pulled from the lumps was not a clear or even a pus but a dark brown sludge. It looked like dirty oil. The vet also noted the skin was lumpy and abnormal looking. She thinks best case scenario it's an old wound (maybe a bite) that got infected and wasn't treated. Worse case, of course, is some kind of tumor. We had it removed the next day. Poor Dia.



We also discovered she had an eye infection in both eyes (rather obvious, as her eyes were blood red and had green discharge), and tape worms and hook worms.

As you can imagine, we're pretty pissed she was so neglected at a so-called "rescue".

She's been treated for the tape worm already, but we have to wait another two weeks to treat the hookworms. We also have to hold her down every twelve hours and smear goo in her eyes, which is particularly awesome when she's wet and we're in our work clothes.

In other news, we're working on getting the garden planted. Today we went to the Farmer's Market and bought starts. We planted lettuce, spinach, peas, beans, cucumbers, yellow cherry tomatoes, big pink tomatoes, better boy tomatoes, yellow peppers, red peppers, sweet bananas, chili peppers, corn, zucchini, eggplant, red potatoes, blue potatoes, and russet potatoes. We also bought some cool looking flowers to plant in the front.


Last weekend Roger finished the pallet compost bin.