Today and yesterday, Jeromey sprayed the garden with two products from Earth’s Ally (links below) to try to rid our garden of chiggers, squash bugs, and the adorable but terrible harlequin bugs. We’re avoiding using any chemicals that we don’t have to so these products are made with ingredients like rosemary and peppermint oil. Their support people say the sprays should kill these bugs. We’re going to find out and let you know!

Squash bugs are horrible little buggers that kill the leaves and fruit of squash plants. They start out like this:

And grow into this:

And eventually look like this:

Lots of people call them stink bugs but they really aren’t. They’re squash murderers and deserve to die. We’re just trying to fulfill our karmic destiny here by ridding our plot of these heinous vegetation thieves.

Jeromey attempted to follow the instructions on the bottle by spraying the entire plant including the tops and bottoms of the leaves. With all of the plants we now have and how big they already are, it took hours to do this for our garden. He followed this treatment by spending several more hours spraying the ground to try to get rid of the chiggers and harlequin bugs. The chiggers have been completely horrible in a way that would steal our love from gardening if we can’t eradicate them, so we’re on a crusade to KILL THEM ALL (or at least get them away from our plant babies so we can care for them).

I mean, seriously, if you had plants that you raised from seeds that you cared for by hand like this, wouldn’t you do the same?

Wish us luck in our attempted bug massacre!

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• https://www.lowes.com/pd/Earth-s-Ally-Insect-Control-32oz-Concentrate/5005506545
• https://www.lowes.com/pd/Earth-s-Ally-3-in-1-Plant-Spray-32oz-Concentrate/5005521997