Insects and Other Unwanted Varmits

 I'm very thankful that, at least for now, we don't have to depend on what we grow to survive.

We had several raspberries I've been watching and had planned on picking them today. I went out this morning, birds flew out of the raspberry vines and the almost red raspberries were gone. I've now wrapped that whole trellis area in bird cloth. It was windy and that stuff was blowing everywhere and getting caught on the raspberry vines so I'm sure I haven't outsmarted the birds but we'll see.

Next, until Vince found the base for the compost barrel, I had been digging holes in a bed I wasn't using and burying veggie scraps - except for potato peelings because I learned my lesson about that - potatoes growing in every raised bad! Then when I needed to refresh a bed, I would get the soil out of the bed where the scraps had been composting. 

Yesterday I walked down the pepper bed and . . why is squash growing in the pepper bed? Yep - came from the compost bed.

I try to be so careful not to get ANY seeds in that bed but a few weeks ago I had cooked a butternut squash and had the seeds sitting on a saucer to dry out and clean so I could plant some of them and apparently, they ended up in the compost bucket and got planted in the pepper bed.

I dug up a whole clump of them, divided them into three clumps, planted them in a bed that has all volunteer plants from last year. They should be fine there. 

Last and probably most important - yesterday I asked Vince if we could PLEASE stay home all day today and tomorrow. He said yes - not going anywhere. Then he sent me this video last night We are having a heck of a battle with mosquitoes. I got online and tried to order the mosquito bits from Walmart - out of stock. Can't even be ordered. Home Depot and Tractor Supply both had them and both were the same price and both were cheaper than Walmart. I asked Vince . . Can we please go to Tractor Supply? Thankfully it's on our end of town so we went there and got those. We didn't have any colored buckets so Vince bought 5 buckets. Tractor Supply didn't have red lids so he bought red spray paint and came home and painted them. I have the yard debris and mosquito bits and water in the three buckets and they're set out around the yard. 

I ended up ordering the Barricor from Walmart so it should be here sometime next week. It's all out war on the mosquitoes!

Next up  . . war on the squash bugs!  :)