So, I had a fair amount of maintenance to do today, but not of the easily photographed kind.
Had to water the lettuce well and puzzle over why the outer leaves of one of the red lettuces appeared to be wilted.
The spinach doesn’t look any more eaten than usual, and the new seeds haven’t come up yet, so it was just watering there.
The peppers are looking nice, and I’m maybe only a few days away from picking the baby red bell peppers. (I’ve triple checked the growing peppers for holes after that last eaten one- so far so good.)
No more scale insects on the lovage which is nice- neem oil did the trick there.
Had to do a tie-up of my aging tomato plant. Several of the extra long stalks were falling over since my small tomato cage is now heavily dwarfed by the plant. No biggie- just used some soft ties to tie up the falling stalks and then tie up another stalk to the now tied up stalk… a bit of recursive tying.
Every day more baby tomatoes appear on that plant so I’m happy to baby it. It took some hand killing of nasty red aphids today, but a good days work after all.
The risk came later.
I’m sitting relaxing at my chair, my legs up on my bed- watching some reruns on my iPad. Pretty much the only TV I watch now.
And I feel something on my neck.
Probably just a zit- I get those, so I reach up to pick at it because smart or not that’s what I tend to do with zits…
And my hand comes away with the grossest insect that was chewing at my neck that I’ve ever seen!
It was segmented like an ant or a wasp but it was the size of a botfly!
Much yelling and squishing followed, along with a very hot shower.
I still don’t know what I tracked indoors somehow, but I have a huge welt on my neck from where it was chewing,
Don’t be me! Check yourself after a long time in the garden! Check yourself well!
BLEEEEEECCCCH!!!!!
The Neanderthal Gardens 