Preparing for winter means gradually tearing down a lot of the things we've spent all summer building. The gardens are stripped and removed and the flowers loose their blooms. The tools will soon be cleaned and put up for the season, until nest year. Some of plants though will make a short journey indoors for overwintering in hopes that they will last until the mild weather comes again.
This is my hope for my herbs. At the beginning of spring I made the conscious decision to plant them in pots to make it easy to bring them in come fall. I had done this before with success, well kind of. The plants survived but so did all of the bugs that were living inside the plants. I spent time looking at garden pages and books and found that soaking a plant is the best way to prevent the drove of pests that hitch a ride indoors with my herbs. Hold on. I have to soak my plants? Wait submerge them completely? This is crazy talk. All summer long I been trying to keep them from being over water and now I'm going to put them in a bucket a water, on purpose?
First, I was a poor planner as usual. The weather turned much colder than I expected, much faster than I expected so I grabbed my herbs and tucked them away in the garage overnight to buy me a bit of time while keeping them from the frost. Then I did my soaking indoors, like a goob instead of outside like planned because.. well it was cold.
So I took my laundry room utility sink and placed a bucket inside it. I filled it most of the way with water a few drops of castile soap and set my plant in the water. I was so nervous so I took the plant out after a couple of minutes even though everything I've read said to leave it for 15 minutes. When I pulled the plant out I could see the bugs crawling on the surface of the dirt. That was it back into the water it went and this time for a whole 15 minutes leaves and everything. I removed the plant from the water and let it drain thoroughly. I repeated the process with a couple more plants. One plant was too tall to be submerged completely so I applied a castile soap mixed with water and orange and tea tree essential oils to the leaves let it sit for a couple of minutes and then rinsed the leaves.
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| Filling of the bucket, I am starting to get nervous. |
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| First plant added to the bucket. |
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| I used a strainer to scoop debris off the top of the water. |
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| I chickened out and did not put the plants in enough water for long enough so bugs remained. |
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I finally got brave and sunk them suckers in deep for 15 minutes.
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| Castile soap and essential oils for cleaning leaves. |
As nerve wracking as the process was the plants appear fine actually they look great. I hope they survive the winter. I have plans to put them in the sunroom in our sun room under a sky light once I find a shelf. This is all part of the DIY home and garden adventure though.
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| These are the plants the day after. They are still alive! |
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