go on a vacation and then what....

so i took the remaining days of vacation i had left before i lost them. i was gone 8 work days. i came back to my ivy house plant just HANGING ON WITH THE BARE SKIN OF THE TEETH. i tell you, leave for a bit, and it all goes to poo. well, at least the plants.

it suffered a great deal of damage from a very large spidermite infestation. look, you can see one of the tiny web (the white specks). which probably would not have been bad if i had been there and got it in the beginning. the mites have taken over all but a few leaves. and it's sorta creepy when you turn the leaf over and you find little black dots crawling around .....

so i have taken it home to try to nurse it back to health. it looks so wiry and spindly now! the leaves were so weak that half of them fell off when i sprayed the plant with a stream of water. then i attacked it with some homemade insecticidal soap, and will plan on spraying it again until they all DIE SPIDER MITES DIE! i just hope that the soap is strong enough to get rid of the population (they have taken over).


so wish me luck (or i guess wish my plant luck) to save this office plant. i do have to say though, that the other office plant (schefflera) is flourishing and continually shoots out new babies daily, and the MEMORIAL GARDEN of dianthus and gerber daisies is doing quite well.