The current solution

I ended up spraying down the entire garden with Eight in order to avoid anymore pests chewing away my plants. The pain-in-the-butt part about it is that they only sold Eight in the hose bottle.

As I might have mentioned before, my landlord has a hose near the front of the house, but it doesn't reach all the way to the backyard. Therefore, I still haul my watering can from inside, back and forth. What I ended up having to do for the Eight is to set up the hose and spray the diluted Eight into the water can, then drag that back over to the garden.

The main problem with this method is that I can't "spray" on the underside of the plants. I can try to drench them and splash it up underside the leaves, but overall, there are definitely places for pests to hide. I'm not going to take the effort to put it in a spray bottle and go leaf by leaf.

Anyway, I hope this will hold off any arrival of horned worms also. I still have visions of my mother getting so frustrated that she plucked each worm off at a time and cut off their heads. Until I had a conversation with my dad the other day about it, I was convinced for years that that was the only way you could kill them. Ha-ha.

I also picked up some Garden Safe, an organic pesticide, to spray down my basil with. It's generally not a great idea to use pesticides on herbs, since the leaves are the part that we consume. However, the woman at the garden center assured me that it would be safe. I'll just have to scrub everything down really well before I use it.

Disaster Stikes!!

My worst fears have come true it seems.

I came home this evening to find that my cauliflower has been eaten alive. Like within a 24-48hour period nearly entire leaves are gone on some of the plants. The leaves have more holes than swiss cheese!



I can't find any actual pests, however. I checked the undersides of the leaves and they're vacant. The only thing that looks remotely like it might be a problem are clusters of black things at the base of all the leaves. It's definitely not dirt, but it shows no sign of being a bug-like critter either. I'm not sure what to make of it, to be honest. I'm going to spray down the entire garden with Eight.



So that's my first problem. Then I went inside.

I'd brought my basil plant a week before due to trouble with keeping the soil moist. The container was small enough that I had to water it twice a day. So instead I brought it indoors to let it soak in a deep underdish.

I came upon it this evening and it had the strangest growth on the stalks of two of the basil stems. They're like brown, rock hard eggs almost. They're almost layered upon each other and it looks like they've grown out of the stalk itself, or is deeply attached. The only way I can remove them is with a sharp kitchen knife, basically filleting the surface.





Several of the leaves appear to be growing or have been implanted with the same egg-like sacks, but they're green on the leaves rather than brown. They also lay more flat and are settled into the veins of the leaves rather than creating a shell-like cover. Some of the uninfected leaves are drying out and turning brown.





There is no sign of pests. No little aphids along the stems. Only one lone green spider that I manage to kill. But I can't imagine that he's the perpetrator of this strangeness.

If anyone has any clue about what either of these problems are, please leave a comment and let me know what you think.