Happy Saturday! A big thanks to Natalie of Natalie the Explorer for hosting WeekendCoffeeShare.

Is it strange that even though it’s Saturday, it feels like a Sunday? Maybe it’s because it’s a long weekend. 😄 It was the 4th of July on Friday and America’s 249th birthday. I hope my blogger friends in the US are enjoying the long weekend. It’ll be a while until the next one.

For the 4th, there’s always a big parade in the city I live in. My mom wanted to see it and I, well, I wanted to go into the mountains as I did last year. I’ve seen the parade multiple times and even participated in it. I’m not into standing beneath the sun for a prolong period of time.

I told my mom what I wanted but, as always, who cares what I want. I know she has no interest of seeing natural places because she has continuously emphasized that. All she’s interested in these days are lying down on the couch all day, go shopping at Costco, and walk on the treadmill, which is insanely loud, to the point I can hear it from outside. She said she wanted to tag along, or she needed to?. I can’t tell. Do I really have a choice?

Ha! Like I’ve ever had a choice before.

Anyway, on the garden-front, the squash and beans I planted shortly after the summer solstice have germinated but some of them got cut down by cutworm. I had to Google cutworm and it turned out they are a type of caterpillar that cuts the stem of seedlings and they had chosen my vegetables and beans. I want to show you what they look like but I fear you might vomit. They are absolutely gross.

I spent an evening earlier in the week picking squash bug eggs from my kabocha squash plants. There was a lot of bug eggs. I hope I caught it early, before it became an infestation. For some reason, the presence of squash bugs are only in the front yard. Also thankfully, squash vine borers don’t exist in my parts, those are much worse than the squash bugs I deal with or so I’ve heard.

I ended up scattering spinosad pellets all over the cutworm areas – the same stuff I used on the earwig problems last year. Hopefully that will help with the problem. Meanwhile, there’s no fixing the squash bug problem. I’ll just have to inspect the plant each day and pick off the eggs.

My aunt next door had a cutworm problem in June. I’ve never had cutworm in my garden before. I’ve had aphids, gnats, pillbugs, earwigs, and grasshoppers but cutworm? that’s new. I wonder what else is in store for me this year.

These nasty little buggers in my garden is making me start my fall garden in another way. Because of them, I now have to start my fall garden the same way as I started my spring garden – by transplants. I started a tray of 72 plants a few nights ago and thought I could do with a shade cloth but discovered the next day that the soil was heating up too much. So it looks like I might just have to bring it inside to start the seeds. Hopefully it’s enough with the light from the window.

I still hope to make that day trip up to the spot I want to see. Hopefully, it’ll work out. 🤞Thanks for stopping by!