Remnants of Katrina

When the hurricane finally got to Vermont, it was definitely weakened. It still managed to dump 4 inches of rain on us within a couple of hours and the dark clouds that blew in were amazing. The sky would turn dark as night in the middle of the day and suddenly rain would dump on us. Twenty minutes later it would be bright and sunny for a while, then it would start all over. The water damaged our ceiling inside our living room! It also killed a few of my citrus seedlings because my husband left them under the eaves of the house the other day without telling me and the amount of water coming down from the edge of the roof was ridiculous (no gutters). I have 3 left. My apple tree survived, my avocado survived although the second pit I planted rotted from all the moisture. My Hibiscus lived although with a few less leaves and my rubber tree that I had thrown out there also is fine. I can not even begin to imagine the magnitude of that storm down south if it was still as strong as it was up here (we don't get a lot of storms).

Spider Mites :(

My beautiful banana was looking droopy the other day and yellowish on the edges. I hadn't had time to pay a lot of close attention to it lately with all the madness going on in my life. When I looked closely, I noticed all these little webs and MILLIONS of tiny white spider mites!!!! I almost dropped the watering can. I sprayed it vigorously with poison and then read the label on the bottle. I am dumb like that sometimes. When I read it, it said that it would kill all sorts of bugs but not Spider Mites! I guess the eggs are impervious to the oil in the spray. So I took the damn thing outside and hit it with a high pressure hose and blasted the little bastards. The tree looked a hundred times better, but the leaves are all pock-marked from where they were sucking the life out of it. I hit it with water every day for a week and now I am doing spot maintenance. It is so hard to control those mites, they just seem to keep coming and coming but the tree looks good again. I had to cut off about 5 leaves on the bottom that were just done. It has put out another leaf since then and is still nice and green so I think it has hope. I think it got the mites from a rubber tree I bought at Hannaford's. I didn't check it as well as I should have and I had it setting on the same table as the banana so it could get a good light and I have never had a single mite before. Luckily all the plants nearby the two trees seem ok...I dunked them anyway just in case! Soon I should have some pics of my plants to post here...just have to scan them since I am so behind the times and don't have a digi camera!