I got a little braggy on Instagram and posted a picture of my chard recently. My punishment for my garden-bragging is usually the ridicule of my children, who do not particularly enjoy seeing the pictures. They reserve a special disdain for my most favorite hashtag. #IGrewDinner
This week I got a different kind of comeuppance. I noticed the chard was brown and patchy. More watering didn’t help, so I took pictures of the leaves and that night, while sleep eluded me (here we go again), I went down the rabbit hole of my gardening blogs . (As luck would have it I stumbled onto a Seattle Times article, no comment.)
It turns out the brown spots were caused by flies, specifically, beet leaf miners. The little flies lay their eggs on the leaves of the plant, in my case, chard. Then the eggs hatch into green maggots which feed inside the leaves and then poop everywhere. The brown blotches were poop, squeezed inside the leaves. Maggot poop, to be exact.
When the boys were younger and came home with lice, I ran to the drugstore, bought a shaver and sheared their heads down the the scalp. I basically did the same thing with the chard. I chopped the plants down to their nubs, shoved the infested leaves in a bag, and called it a day.
Ok kids. You win.
#IGrewMaggotPoop