Kara & Michael’s Blog

Michael and I have been infested by those little ants that like to eat sweet things. My aunt had some of these suckers every year, and they never went away until she redid her entire kitchen. No joke. They got everywhere, they somehow managed their way into Tupperware containers of sugar. These suckers do not play.

After attempting to encourage Inari to play with and kill them (she sees them, but is mostly uninterested- the interwebz says ants release a chemical that cats don’t like), Michael took to vacuuming them up and coated the floor with some sort of orange oil solution. They’re still hanging around.

The lame part is that most conventional ant traps aren’t really safe to use with curious pets around (and those ant traps are pretty effective). There are instructions all over the internet for making your own traps with borax that ants can get into but pets can’t, which I will look into more today. But the first problem is I can’t figure out where the ants are coming from or how they’re getting into our apartment. They don’t appear to be coming through the front door. They actually seem to come from the floor.

I’m currently blaming Gardeners.com for shipping us these ants. They appeared, suspiciously enough, after we moved the box with the potting soil into our kitchen. But I’m just looking for reasons to be mad at Gardeners.com because their faulty self-watering planter killed our pepper plants and our newest basil plant.

The self-watering planter has a reservoir of water in the bottom and a specially designed plastic cover over the water but below the soil that draws water into the soil. The problem we had was with a floater that is supposed to signal when the reservoir is full. It didn’t. It still doesn’t.

Michael checked the floater before he assembled the planter, exactly as the directions said. Then, after wetting the 20 pounds of soil very lightly and planting our plants, he set about filling the reservoir. Many minutes later, the floater still wasn’t working, and the soil was gurgling with water.

Yesterday we pulled out our pepper plants which had, previous to being transplanted into the self-watering reservoir, seemed to be doing well. Each plant had several flower buds and we were excited. As Michael pulled them, they dripped water from their very dead roots. It’s tragic, truly. The more tragic part is the huge empty spot in our bank accounts from trying and mostly failing to set up a successful garden on our balcony.

The surprising part about the planter is how cheaply made it seems to be for the amount of money we spent on it.

Besides the failure of the initial planter, gardeners.com sent us the wrong order, so our second self-watering planter has not arrived. They attempted to argue with Michael about sending back what they sent us mistakenly before they would send us the planter we ordered, but he managed to talk them down, explaining that we needed to transplant our tomatoes asap. As of yesterday, they still hadn’t shipped the new package.

I usually love to complain, but all of these things have me feeling pretty low. I was super excited about our garden, but right now everything depends on these stupid planters. Hopefully the new one arrives soon and we can transplant my lavender into one of the tomato pots and also our mini-meyer lemon tree into the other tomato pot. Michael is confident the lemon tree will be a success, but I suppose we’ll see.

Oh, and squirrels have figured out how to get onto our balcony and eat the fallen seeds from the bird feeder. I tried to take a picture, but the squirrel ran away before I could. Cheeky fellow.

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