Garden Update: Attack of the Spider Mites!!!

Hello :)

It's been a while since I've done a garden update and as you can see from the title... tragedy has stuck!  My cucumber plant had been growing pretty well after I moved it into the bigger pot in May.  It even started blossoming.  There were SO MANY flowers!  So I started feeling really good about the garden.  I was excited to see the little cucumbers growing.

But shortly after the flowers bloomed, I noticed that the plant started drooping.  It looked like it needed water, but I was watering it enough.  Then I noticed the leaves were starting to get more and more discolored.  I was getting more and more worried.

 

One particular day when the poor plant was looking particularly sad, I sat down to see if I could figure out what was going on.  Upon close inspection, I discovered many of the leaves were covered by a fine webbing... and inside that webbing were all these teeny tiny red bugs. WHAAAAT?!?!?!

I ran in the house and grabbed the neem oil bug killer and sprayed the whole cucumber plant and everything else for that matter.  After all my garden was dripping, I did some googling and discovered that the little bugs were spider mites.  Lemme tell you spider mites are a force to be reckoned with!  I thought that after the epic spray down I put on them they would be done for, but nope.  This is what they did despite the neem oil bath...

No matter how much I tried, the spider mites won.  They killed my poor cucumber plant.

So instead of pouting about lost plants, I decided to buy a replacement cucumber plant from the store.  I also picked up a tomato plant and seed pods for romaine lettuce.  Here are the new additions to the garden in their new homes.

Also... Dollar Tree gardening gloves... not so much the business.