Aphids!

* not my hand...

So, yesterday I made a trip down to the garden to grab a tasty snack, and was a shocked to discover my kohlrabi has been infested with aphids. I apparently can't even go out of town for a few days without the bugs taking over! I was forced to spend the better part of 2 hours washing them off with the hose. Needless to say, the water running out from under the plants was coated with a thick layer of drowned aphids - of course I made sure to pick the ladybugs and assassin bugs so they didn't meet the same fate. As irritating as the thousands of aphids were, I did notice that the plants directly touching the dill plants were aphid free....once again proving my theory that dill has magical powers.

On the upside, my asparagus beans are blooming! I am hopeful that we will be enjoying a long season of these amazing beans! These particular ones were ordered from an "Asian food seeds" website that I can no longer locate, which is a bummer since their soybeans seemed to be very high quality.

On the downside, I finally discovered why a bed of my potatoes were doing poorly - slugs! There were huge white and tan slugs eating the new growth off of the bottoms of the plants. In the heat of the moment, I was overcome with a killing blood (or slime in this case) lust and soundly squished a few dozen of them this morning. After adding a healthy dose of coffee grounds around the plants, I found a few more trying to escape - so, I will be making the rounds with the flashlight tonight to get the ones running from the grounds. It appears that a fun filled evening of slime covered chemical gloves is waiting for me!

Garden goodies: Kohlrabi (sans the bugs)