Patio Gardening 2010: Week 20 – Red Spider Mites Take Over

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The garden is not doing so hot. Those red spider mites I discovered last week are taking over. They’re affecting all the tomato plants and some of the peppers, and I’ve seen their webs on the squash/zucchini plants, and what’s left on the bean plants.

Some of our tomato plants look absolutely sickly and we’re unsure at this point if they’ll survive.


As far as treating the problem, we really haven’t been that diligent. I’ve tried to keep the plants well watered and spray the plants with water to keep them wet and discourage the mites, but it’s been very hot lately and I’ve had distractions, so this treatment has not been very effective.

We intend to buy some neem oil to fight these little buggers, but haven’t had the time to get it. Hopefully this week… It’s a shame how life gets in the way.

Despite the red spider mites, our tomato plants continue to produce (though obviously less) and the baby peppers are getting bigger.


Our basil is unaffected and unfazed by everything and continues to grow big and beautiful.


Everything else in the garden is sort of at a sickly stand still. It really is a pathetic sight, which I can’t seem to effectively capture with my camera.

No video this week so far. There may be one, there may not. If there is I will post it separately, otherwise we’ll get one up next week.

For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.

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Posted at 11:39 AM, August 31, 2010 by Tiffany


Absolute Chaos

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Well, there was no garden post today and the video is not up. That’s because everything has been pretty chaotic for the past couple of days.

First of all, my fixed camera was supposed to be delivered last Wednesday, but for whatever reason the UPS man decided not to ring to our apartment and thus we missed all 3 of his delivery attempts. So now we have to travel an hour to the UPS distribution center to pick it up.

Secondly, I had some health problems the past couple days that have left me with little energy, which prevented me from completing the third thing.

The third thing is we had to clean and rearrange the whole apartment to prepare for the boyfriend’s parents coming to visit us for a week.

Today as I was preparing the patio garden post our router stopped working unexpectedly so I had no internet access until tonight when we were able to get a new power chord and fix the problem.

As I finished cleaning up the house today, the parents arrived early and I’ve been playing host to them ever since.

Since the parents are in town I don’t know how much time I’ll have for the blog this week. The boyfriend couldn’t take any time off from work, and since I’m unemployed and home all day I get to play tour guide with them, which is fine, but I don’t know how much me time I’ll have.

I will try to get the patio garden post up as soon as I can. The boyfriend lent out his camera for the weekend, so we haven’t filmed a video yet. I don’t know if/when we’ll do a video this week, so I apologize for that.

Like I said, chaos.

Hopefully I can get back to regular posting soon.

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Posted at 8:58 PM, August 30, 2010 by Tiffany


Friday Freebies, Samples, & MP3 Downloads 8-27-10

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First, I want to apologize for the fact that the site was completely inaccessible yesterday. We don’t know why that was, but the boyfriend rebooted the server this morning and everything seems to be fine. Since the site was down, I couldn’t post yesterday, so I apologize for that as well.

But luckily for all of us, this site is back up for the Friday Freebie post, yay!

On the last freebie post, Sylvia commented that since she’s in Canada she cannot sign-up for the majority of the freebies post. I’d like to apologize to Sylvia and any of my non-US readers for that.

Since I live in the US and most of my readers are in the US, I didn’t really think much about it. From now on what I’ll do is try to seek out freebies and samples and such for other countries as well and will indicate them as such. Sylvia also recommends Canadian Free Stuff for those of you north of the border who need a freebie fix.

Okay, no more apologies. Here are the freebies!

Samples & Freebies

Music & MP3 Downloads

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Posted at 12:17 PM, August 27, 2010 by Tiffany


Payment Proof: Knowledge Networks Panel is Not a Scam

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I’m still getting a lot of traffic from people who think Knowledge Panel is a scam, so I just wanted to post some proof that it is a legit panel. It’s one of my favorite panels and I think anyone who’s interested in taking surveys for money and is lucky enough to be invited to join the panel (you can’t just sign up, your household has to be selected) should join it.

This week I received 2 checks from Knowledge Networks.


The amounts are pretty large and here’s why: I participated in a medical study which required an in depth telephone interview, so I was compensated $100 for that. I also took an extended financial survey that paid $20. The rest was just earned through general surveys. I don’t know how typical these earnings are, but the opportunities are there and they do pay.

if you want to learn more about Knowledge Networks, read about the 2 dollar bills they sent me in the mail and my review of the panel.

If you have any questions about Knowledge Panel, please check their FAQ and the FAQ I compiled as well.

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Posted at 9:37 AM, August 25, 2010 by Tiffany


Patio Gardening 2010: Week 19 – Icky Red Spider Mites

Filed under: All, Food, Home, Patio Gardening 
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I’m sorry that I’m a day late on this post, but I was very busy yesterday with some other things and just didn’t get around to taking the pictures. Good news is, my camera will be back from repair tomorrow, so I’ll be able to take decent pictures again!

All right, I have to admit, I’m kind of burnt out on gardening. I’m actually the only one who takes care of the plants (the boyfriend just films the videos), and I’m kind of tired of it. I still water them and everything, I just haven’t been as attentive as I was in the past. I’m letting nature take it’s course.

As far as the squash plants go, they’re still producing flowers and growing, despite the powdery mildew, but I think I’ve given up hope on them producing any fruit. I don’t think we’ll try them again next year. It’s too bad, but I’m guessing our porch just doesn’t get enough sunlight for them.

We’ve had more deaths this week. We lost another cucumber plant and it looks like another pot of bean plants is on it’s way out. One of them seems to be making a comeback…


I think this just may be it for the beans though.

Our cherry tomato plant continue to produce, we harvested over 50 last week alone and we seem to be in a big of a lull again, though there’s more green tomatoes and flowers growing.

We’ve mentioned briefly before that some of the tomato plants were looking a little ick. Some of the leaves were turning yellow and brown and then curling up and dying.


They didn’t match any of the photos of tomato diseases online, so we just chalked it up to super hot and dry weather and inconsistent watering. Well the plants look worse this week, some of them really bad. Then today I noticed some webs on some of the leaves.


As I looked closer, I realized there were little dots on the webbing. Looking even closer, I saw they were moving around. I was then promptly freaked out and came inside to google it.

It looks like we have Red Spider Mites, which apparently thrive in hot dry conditions and can cause the icky appearance of our tomato plants. One of the treatments is to make everything very wet, so I’m going to try spraying the tomato plants frequently with water and see if that helps. If it doesn’t make a difference by this weekend, we’ll invest in some pesticides.

Hopefully this won’t get out of control, but who knows.

There is good news in the garden this week. The pepper plants are doing great, growing tall, and they continue to blossom. There are tiny peppers forming!


Now that we see how well they’re doing, I kind of wish we didn’t plant four of them. The thing is, I do not like peppers. The boyfriend loves peppers. I think one pepper plant would suffice, but considering we had 20 millions seedlings, 4 seemed like a reasonable number. We’ll definitely scale that down for next year.

The basil is still a powerhouse. We made more pesto this weekend and froze the leftovers. Hopefully we can keep that up and stock up on enough frozen pesto to last through the winter.

Here’s the video for this week. It’s short and sweet:


For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.

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Posted at 12:22 PM, August 24, 2010 by Tiffany


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