Rubbing calamine on my ankles this morning. Guess I found some chiggers yesterday when I walked the path where I’ll be pulling the travel trailer out. Didn’t really need to because I ended up driving that path to mow it, but at the time, I didn’t know I’d be mowing 2 foot grass with the tractor.
Got a few more trees laying out there that I cut down before putting film on the tunnel. Gonna pull them out this morning while it’s 68 degrees and finish mowing that field where the tunnel is. The chiggers must die or move on to somewhere else because I am a chigger magnet and they affect me bad. I’ll be scratching these ankles for 2-3 weeks.
BREAKFAST POPOVER MUFFINS / makes 8 muffins fast
Ing 1 c flour 1/2 tsp salt 3 tsp b/pwder 4 tbl sugar 3 tbl melted butter 1/2 c milk 1 egg, lightly beaten
Sift flour, salt, b/powder, sugar. Mix in milk, butter. Add egg;
mix well. Bake in greased muffin pans 450 deg about 7 min.
Serve w/ butter, jam, maple syrup
You have my sympathy on those chigger bites - I hate them! I have gotten them really bad before - up the legs, on my back, from sitting on pine logs while eating lunch on a hike. My brother & I got our worst cases sitting on straw bales playing with kittens. I couldn’t sleep for about 3 nights the itching was so bad. Calamine lotion never worked for me - I had better luck with Benadryl anti- itch lotion.
Arbico might have something to help.
This might be a better investment, Rynoskin that you wear when you work in chigger infested areas. (Marines wear something like this to protect themselves from Sand fleas.) Maybe A great gift for someone with tracking dogs who thrashes through black fly and mosquito infested northern forests and bogs!
Rynoskin wearable protection against biting insects
(Cheaper than multiple bottles of calamine??)
Chiggers affect my wife very badly too. Sometimes she has a little dark “splotch” from one for over a month, tho’ thankfully the itching goes away sooner. Luckily, our chickens get most of them. “Most” — I have an itch just below my ankle bone, right now...
Worse for us, I had to be away again for a day, and I didn’t find all the tomato hornworms early yesterday: One plant has ONE leaf remaining, stems chewed down a bit, and two forming tomatoes (they would have been about 2” diameter today, I would say, are 1/3 to 1/2 eaten.) No hornworm could be found on that plant (should be easy to spot now!), but an adjacent plant had light damage a big hornworm on it. Another nearby plant had more considerable damage (about 1/2 of foliage gone) and a hornworm “only” about 2-1/2” long on it. (I’m a male with very slightly below average size fingers - still bigger than most women’s fingers.)
To heck with trying to find the dang caterpillars, esp. since I’ll have no chance to use some for fishing bait:
I’ve declared war, WMD style. All nearby tomato plants got a good spraying with Sevin. I’ll hit the rest of the plants early tomorrow morning, when it’s cooler out there.
On a good note, my 3 rescue operation impatiens (12”[?] pots on clearance from Menards for $1 ea.) are all doing well. The best one is, in fact, fantastic now: The plants are deep green and strong, with many vivid flowers (mostly white and a sort of magenta). It seemed dicey when I bought it if it would even survive, but I’m so proud of it, I’ve put it right by the front porch! (North exposure) Hopefully this 97 deg. weather this weekend will not drag it down.