Lessons I've Learned the Hard Way this Week

A few weeks ago I planted a garden, with peas, spinach, lettuce, carrots and broccoli, and they were doing SO good. In fact, the spinach probably would have been ready to eat next week. Would have.... except that a few days ago I noticed that there were swarms of ants building cities in between my lettuce and broccoli. They had eaten holes in almost all of the lettuce leaves and were swarming all over the broccoli plants. I looked on-line about how to get rid of them and one lady suggested that you spray a mixture of vegetable oil and dish soap on the leaves, to kill the aphids and get rid of the ants. Another suggested to sprinkle baking powder and corn meal on the ground and that would keep the ants away. Excited to be rid of the city of ant on my beautiful lettuce I went out and sprayed ALL the plants (except the carrots and the peas) with the vegetable oil and dish soap stuff and sprinkled baking powder and corn meal all over.

The next morning I went out and I found a MESS! My lettuce had turned brown and all but shriveled up, the leaves on the broccoli had turned yellow and crispy and the spinach had weird white blots all over it! And there were still about a THOUSAND ants happily building away! AGGG! I wanted to cry. My garden was just about ruined, and I'd worked so hard on it!Either there must have been something else hazardous in the bottle I sprayed with, or the people on-line gave me REALLY bad advice.

So here are the lessons I've learned the hard way this week:
1) if you are going to spray something on your plants, test it out on a small part first before you spray the entire garden
2) don't use bottles that you don't know what they had inside of them before
3) ants have a right to live too, and sometimes it might just be better to live with them than try to live without them