How does my garden grow? Well...

Here's a gardening update:

The basil was growing blissfully. And the mint was minty fresh. When one day, I began to notice some tiny holes in the leaves. Hm. As if something was munching on them a little bit. But not too bad. Literally overnight, the holes became gaping and the leaves looked positively chewed-on! Little black spots peppered the plant here and there. I began to google furiously to find out what bug was marring my herbs and what organic (human tummy safe) pesticide I could use to make sure it kept its little mandibles off my crop!

I tried a homemade organic pesticide made of hot pepper, ginger, garlic, and a good dash of cayenne pepper. (Put these in a pot and boil like a tea, then cool and spray onto plants.) This spray must have just made the plants a little spicier, maybe even tastier, because the bugs were not deterred. Chomping and more chomping occurred. Finally, the telltale black spots (turns out that's bug poo poo) helped reveal the identity of...

the greedy Cabbage Looper caterpillar!!

These little critters hatch from eggs laid by moths on the underneath side of the leaves. They start out so small you can't see them at first but eat so fast they double in size practically daily. They were the exact same green color as my plants and held absolutely still when they were eating so were very camoflaged. You need to examine the underside of your leaves to find them. When I tried to pluck one off a leaf, he reared up and swung his head and forelegs around surprisingly quick for a caterpillar and tried to grab onto my fingers as if to scare me off. Which he did. Then he kind of hung in the air like a stallion pawing, challenging me to just dare to try that again. Lively little guys these. Not your amiable slow moving little caterpillar.

Moving on from hot pepper garlic ginger spray, I came across diatomaceous earth next. This stuff is gleaned from the bottom of the ocean and is made from tiny plant matter whose atomic structure is in the shape of a diatom. Because of the diatom shape, this dust has sharp corners which cut a juicy bug's exoskeleton and basically cause it to bleed to death over a period of about 48 hours. I bought some of this and discovered it's rather labor-intensive to apply and also started to feel bad for the little caterpillars I began to see suffering and limping along due to coming in contact with it. Not the most humane way to kill something..akin to being killed by being slashed thousands of times with a razor blade. I began to mercy-kill the little things by plucking and smushing underfoot.

A more effective organic pesticide was identified..BT or Bacillus thuringiensis, a "bacteria that infects the gut of soft bodied caterpillars" and causes them to die 3-5 days after eating leaves that have been sprayed with it. Three to five days is the catch. Until they finally get sick and die, they can dessimate your plants in the meantime (as you can see from the picture below.) So keep plucking and smushing underfoot as your firstline method of pest control. And when you spray, BE SURE to spray the underneath side of leaves, where caterpillars eat. Best way to do this is to tilt the pot sideways to make the underside of the leaves more accessible while you spray from the side.

As you can see, the mint plant has made a full recovery after treatment with BT and is growing nicely. The basil is pretty much back to normal, too, with only a little bit of chewed-on-ness from some other bug I can't identify but who isn't eating a whole lot.

However, in the meantime, one of my pots of lemon basil has been all but wiped out by another kind of caterpillar which is brown and slower moving than the cabbage looper. I collected about five or six of them one night and put them in a jar with a lid so I could try to identify them when I had time. And..I haven't had time yet. But these caterpillars seemed to not be very affected by the BT since this pot was sprayed several times with BT....(?) Another weird thing..three other pots of lemon basil weren't touched by these brown caterpillars. So, the score so far is: Bugs 1, Winnow 1.

Labor Day's Labors of Love

On Labor Day I planted some lemon basil seeds--some from a package and some I extracted from the dried blossoms of the lemon basil I bought at the Farmer's Market (so I may get two varieties growing.) This is the "how-to" video I used to educate myself on how to plant basil seeds. For the topsoil, I used a layer of compost made from my kitchen veggie trimmings + sawdust in my Nature Mill composter. Fast forward 2 weeks, and here is a photo of the little sprouts coming up out of the soil. My babies! Aren't they cute?

Also on Labor Day weekend, I planted some trailing herbs in hanging wall planters (trailing rosemary, oregano, and lemon thyme) and some potted herbs (chives, flat-leaf parsley, cilantro, Italian basil, "spicy" basil, and mint.) For some color interspersed with the herbs, I put a yellow Gazania in one of my wall planters and an orange Gazania along with some trailing purple verbena in another wall planter. Actually the Gazania I put in with the verbena is from three cuttings off the mother orange Gazania I planted with a red Gerber daisy. Here's the weird setup I rigged up to get the cuttings to root before hanging it on the wall in full sun:

You can learn how to take cuttings from a plant to propagate another one online. Here is everything I planted on Labor Day weekend:

The next weekend I wanted to try my hand at doing some more cuttings so I did some basil cuttings and a couple of mint cuttings. Here they are:

If you know me, you know I have to do things the *exact, exact, right, proper* way so these cuttings were planted in a mix of sterlized sand (I sterlized it myself by wetting and baking in oven at 220 degrees for 1 hr.) and soilless potting mix in a plastic planter that was sterlized with a 10% bleach solution. As is often recommended, I dipped the ends of the cuttings in rooting hormone to promote root growth before sticking them in their holes and covering them up to root. If I sound like I have acquired just enough gardening knowledge to be dangerous, we can thank Google and the internet for that!

Here's my cute-slash-expensive little cactus garden I put together about a year ago. Only $115 for all the plants and materials! When I start thinking I'm a thrifty person, reality smacks me in the face with the fact that thrifty people don't plant $115 cactus bowls. The barrel cactus only blooms once a year in late summer for a little while. A neat thing I've learned about cacti is that if you've got a chunk (big or small) that falls off the cactus for one reason or another (overwatering will cause leaves to get waterlogged and fall off), you leave it where it lies or just tuck the end into the soil a little and in about six months or so, you'll find that it's rooted and is growing itself into a new plant. Isn't that just amazing? Nature is so joyous and fascinating! You just can't keep nature down!

Here's my palm with Baby's Tears growing in the base, my polka-dot plant, and my fern. They love their lives on the porch. Thank heavens for my large, un-LosAngeles-like porch to give me some greenery and dirt in my life!

But, wait! Tune in for the next post when I talk about...COMPOST IN THE CITY!