My eggplant plants are just lovely. They look so healthy...and the eggplants themselves are shiny and lustrous looking. And there are lots of them growing on the plants, so I am looking forward to delicious, fresh eggplant for weeks to come.
Except, I'm a little worried about the "for weeks to come" statement. As I was recently cutting a ready-to-be picked eggplant I wanted to serve for dinner that night, I bumped a few leaves of the plant and noticed yellow bumps with black spikes coming out of them...about the size of a pea. YUCK! I'm pretty sure these weren't beneficial insects...so, like the good organic gardener I am, I hand picked...YEP...hand picked (with gloves on) the creatures off the backs of each leaf. And, I drowned them in an empty Vitamin Water bottle filled with insecticidal soap. It was probably a slow, painful death...but they were threatening my eggplant! Then, I sprayed the leaves down with the insecticidal soap just to make sure if there were any eggs hatching in the next day or two, they wouldn't have a chance of reaching maturity. These larvae could have been striped or spotted squash beetles or maybe another "nasty" I have yet to identify. I've had to pick some bugs off my acorn and butternut squash plants, too...maybe, they've migrated...
Needless to say, my goal is to utilize hygenic gardening practices to help discourage damaging insects from raiding my garden. By "hygenic", I mean, I clean up decaying or dead plant matter and remove it from the garden (I don't let it rot where it dropped), I gather and remove fruit and vegetables I "missed" from harvesting that are literally "rotting on the vine", and most importantly, I rotate my crops (I plant them in a different spot in the garden each year) so that insects don't set up camp for very long in any one spot.
And, I'm learning to not have such a queasy stomach when it comes to waging war on the uninvited and destructive visitors to my garden.
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