Somebody snuck into my garden last night and ate my delicious basil! Here's the proof:
Can you believe it? Does anyone recognize who might have made those bite marks? My only guess is that it's probably slugs. Slugs! Eating my basil! Since Jessi is too far away to come harvest slugs tonight, and since I don't have a bag of eggshells, I came up with an alternate solution. This website suggested putting down sandpaper, because slugs hate scratchy things. And after experimenting with 100 different ways to refinish our walls, boy have we got a lot of sandpaper.
I got some drywall sandpaper from the basement, cut it into strips, and set them around my basil plants. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I hope it does!
I also found just a few aphids hanging out on my strawberry plant. The same website said to wash them off with a spray bottle of dilluted dishsoap, so I did that too. Look! one of the flowers is looking like it might become an actual strawberry:
Oh, I have a moral dilemma, one of greed and desire. My garden book *claims* that I should pinch off all of my strawberries the first year, in order to let the strawberry plants focus on growing & getting strong, or some crap like that. Doesn't that sound like the worst thing ever? To kill baby strawberries? Jim says he'll buy me strawberries from the farmer's market all season. But it still seems terrible to have the potential for strawberries in my backyard and to voluntarily not take advantage of them! .... What would you do?
And one more photo for you. Here's Chester in the backyard, worn out from running around like a freakdog:
