The Growing Challenge-Aphids

(plus weird aphid information you've always wanted to know!)

Everything is truly busting out of winter sleep. Bulbs are lighting up the PNW landscape like multi-colored Christmas lights and bare trees are breaking bud scales and everywhere I look is evidence of what died in the cold and what has simply been hiding in the strange underground world of garden soil.

The Growing Challenge is really about starting food from seeds. So I went through my seeds to see what I'm growing this year that I've never grown before (there's always something) and I found a nice little bunch of them. I've never grown shelling beans (the kind you dry for storage) and I couldn't help but get several varieties to try. Strangely, I've never grown kale or spinach before either. I say strange because they seem like such obvious things to grow. So here are the specific varieties I'm going to do:

Red Russian, Kale
Viroflay, spinach
Yin Yang, dry shelling bean
Tiger's eye, dry shelling bean
Hidatsa Shield Figure, dry shelling bean
Jacob's Cattle Gasless, dry shelling bean

This is a blueberry plant. It isn't a great picture, and I almost deleted it until I noticed what I failed to notice in person...a hitch hiker. Do you see the bug? How did I miss it yesterday? I might have to take a break from work today to see if there are more of them.

Bread-seed poppy volunteers. I love these poppies. They make their own little shaker full of poppy seeds when you dry the seed heads.

French Sorrel not only wintered well (stayed green and gave me a couple of harvests) it is now getting larger and even more filled out with leaves. Must grow more of this this year.

I couldn't keep the Angelica alive last year because the bugs apparently found it's sweetness to be dessert quality goodness. It must be a strong little guy because it's back!!

Look who else is running around looking for food? I want to tell you that often times in gardening you hear about how the beneficials will help control the pests in your yard and everyone knows that ladybugs are an important hunter of aphids but you don't always get to see nature when she's thorough because you might be too busy watching the slugs parade across your toes. In my last garden I had about thirty roses. So naturally we got aphids, especially in early spring which is still moist, sometimes not too hot, and all the roses are busting out with their tender aphid salad suppers.

I remember being out in the garden spraying aphids off the roses with hose water and wondering where the hell all the "marvelous" lady bugs were when there was such a feast to be had in my yard. I could barely keep up with them by just spraying them off with the hose.

(Well, now I know that baby aphids can be born ready to give birth to more live aphids*. I know now the weird fact that during certain times of the year the girlie aphids don't need any boys to make other aphids...so how weird is that? But what I'm saying is that in the aphid world a colony can multiply itself exponentially overnight because each baby born can then give birth immediately. Dudes, the earth would not exist anymore if humans were capable of such a feat!)

Anyway, just as I started feeling desperate and tempted to find some kind of non-toxic pesticide to spray the roses with, the ladybird beetles arrived en masse with the soldier beetles following and completely cleaned my roses of aphids. I mean, in about one day my garden went from aphid infested to almost clean of them. I saw so many ladybugs and soldier beetles licking their chops and I just stood there as I saw this and marveled at the efficiency of nature when you let her do what she does better than us.

I've taken over two gardens now that were devoid of any signs of beneficial insect life when I arrived and left them both in better balance than I found them. I don't say that with any kind of arrogance. I say that if you don't see this kind of natural balance in your own garden, if you don't have the good wasps, bees, butterflies, lacewings, ladybugs, or earthworms...you must invite them to your house. The best way to invite them is to not use chemical compounds that kill them. Round Up and other weed killers like that are not only really bad for your soil (ignore anyone who claims otherwise) they KILL whatever is living in your soil.

Plant a ton of things they love. You must plant flowers, have some places where they can all hide from the sun and little areas where they can always find little droplets of water (not an issue in PNW) and amend your soil repeatedly with compost. It takes time to establish a garden and for word to get out that you have great flowers for butterflies and aphids for the ladybugs to eat. Be patient. In my first garden, one in which Round Up was used generously and often, there was almost nothing living in my garden besides gravel and cement. The dirt was hard packed and depleted of good organic matter. It was a chemical wasteland. It took two years before the yard filled with butterflies. But think about it: that's merely two full growing seasons. Then we moved.

I felt good though because I transformed this quite small barren landscape into something full of life and health and variety and food for both us and the bugs we needed to help maintain balance in the garden.

If you plant nothing else to cater to bugs, plant cosmos and bachelor buttons. Everywhere I've ever been these two attract everyone who's anyone in the garden insect scene.

*Weird and weirder...during certain times of the year they lay eggs that need to be fertilized by the boys and when the boys are all gone at other times of the year the girls give birth to live babies. Just like people. I wonder if they have their own version of epidurals?