My Garden Journal : Pests & Unwanted Growths

Previously on my garden journal...

The basil leaves have also become significantly bigger/wider than they were when they were still potted individually. The pots were still small and could not sustain the nutrient needs of the plants.

Hopefully, I will have a positive update to share in the coming weeks regarding the progress of these lettuce plants.

Above was my April garden update and all in all, everything is thriving well despite the scorching summer here.

The Basil Problem

I had noticed of late that some leaves of my basil look wilted. Initially, I thought it was just the extreme heat of the sun that makes the leaves wilted, but I also thought it was odd because only a few leaves (in different places) had this condition.

Looking more closely, I finally saw the cause of the problem.

Some small black insects are on the affected leaves.

_{Infected leaves.}

I have no idea what kind of insects these are, but just a single one of these pests can really turn a leaf bad. They do not seem to eat the leaves. There are no holes on the leaves, but instead, the infected leaves look wilted.

We now regularly spray the basil with garlic-infused water that would hopefully ward off these pests.

The pests up close

I have mentioned in my past blogs that we bought a digital microscope. The resolution of the photos are not superb, but the microscope can still give decent magnified images. The kids and I now use it a lot even in our homeschool.

We tried to put the infected leaves under the digital microscope and these are what we saw. They have hairy spikes on their body and looking at them actually gave me goosebumps.

You can click on each photo to view larger image.

Thankfully, the basil plants are still healthy despite these pests. I really appreciate the resilience of these plants. They also got infected with another pest a few months ago that some of them had died. I only got to salvage these remaining ones by transferring them to another location that was far from the infected plants.

Romaine Lettuce

In the last update, I have already transplanted my romaine lettuce and hoped to give positive feedback on it. Oh well, the plants on the bigger pot died. The soil was not ready apparently. Sad. :(

Anyway, there were a few that I put in a smaller pot that I made from a water gallon. I actually thought they'd survive there while I was waiting for the soil in the big pot to be ready.

Unfortunately, the pot got overrun by other seedlings that grew on it. Since the soil that we use are from composted kitchen wastes, there are lots of seeds in it and they just sprout everywhere.

The pots that are supposed to have romaine lettuce have mostly tomatoes in them. 🤦‍♀ I was pulling them out at first until they really became persistent so I gave in.

To avoid this to happen in the future, I am now separating the seeds from the wastes that would go to the compost. Hopefully we won't see a lot of guest seedlings in the pots later on.