My Strawberry update

On a better note, my strawberries are going good. Im getting lots of flowers and they are turning into strawberries. Very cool to watch. My kids love it. Haven't eaten anymore since the last one.
They arent ready to eat yet.
One was ready but it was rotten on the side that was touching the dirt. Ill have to get some mulch coz apparently mulch stops that from happening coz it stops the strawberries touching the dirt and it is the moist dirt that causes them to rot if they are touching it.
Another plant that is still growing is my rocket. I have allowed it to flower and it has these pretty little yellow flowers. Its very nice. My other plant that is still growing is spinach. its not going as well as the rocket though.
Im just letting everything grow. We had a few rainy days a while ago and so i didnt have to water the plants, so i just left them to do their own thing. Then one day i went to check on them and they were covered in caterpillars. I also had an aphid problem too. I squashed as many little aphids as i could and got rid of the catterpillars by hand too, but they just kept coming back.
So i made up my own little concoction that i had been told might work.

• Get a spray bottle
• Crush and chop up some garlic
• put the crushed up garlic into the spray bottle
• fill with wam-hot water
• shake shake shake...
• either leave out in the sun for a day
• or just go and spray on the leaves. 

Seemed to work for me for getting rid of the aphids, or at least controlling the numbers. But it also kept the caterpillars away. Took a week or so of spraying pretty much everyday, but it worked.
Sometimes the bottle would get clogged so i would just shake it and it would loosen whatever was blocking it.
When i ran out of water in the bottle i would just go fill the bottle up again keeping the old garlic in the bottle.
Also sometimes if the bottle would get clogged and i couldn't unclog it, i would just take the spray lid off and just pour the garlic water all over the plants and in the soil. I would even let the old garlic fall out of the bottle and let it sit in the dirt. And then i would make a new batch of garlic water with new garlic.

Whatever it is that i did with the garlic water it seemed to work. I havent had an issue with any caterpillars for a long time. But the aphids are still there. I dont think you can get rid of them completely without using chemical sprays and i didnt want to do that. Also ladybugs eat aphids, but you have to get them to come to your garden, so you would have to either plant certain plants that ladybugs are attracted to, or you can apparently buy them over the internet. I think you can buy them off ebay. Not sure if they sell them in local shops though. Not in any local shops around me anyway.