But not for long…

I made a nasty discovery today. Well, two of them. The first was that I went to check my plants, as I do every morning, and one of my container gardens now contains a large number of round, bright yellow mushrooms. They’re the kind that seem to grow from a sort of slime along the rim of the container.

Off I went to the garden shop to get a fungicide (and a pot for the new orchid I got today, but that’s another story). I got help from a guy who works there and he went through all the different options before helping me find a sulfur-based fungicide that’s organic and won’t hurt any of my plants. In passing, I asked him if he knew of a yellow and brown striped beetle, as I’d seen one in my house this morning. It’s the second one I’ve seen– the last was a couple of weeks ago in the dishwasher and I smashed it and then ran the washer to clean it. This one was on the cabinet door where I keep my baking sheets and pans and skillets. It also got squished. Bugs are fine outside, but not allowed in my house.

We looked at a chart the guy had and none of the beetles looked right to me. He started describing something and I told him that what he described was exactly what I saw. That’s when he dropped the bomb:

That’s a variety of cockroach.

SHUDDER.

Sooooo the guy helped me buy a pack of really good bait traps and I’ve pulled everything out of that cabinet that had the cockroaches and I’m washing every last thing in there. I’m also checking the rest of the kitchen, but so far there’s no, shall we say, “evidence” of roaches in the other cabinets (small evidence was found in the back of the baking cabinet). At the moment I’m SO grateful that I haven’t baked cookies recently. Or anything else for that matter.