Help is Everywhere

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home

Your house is on fire, your children are gone.

I have no idea where this well-known children’s nursery rhyme originated, but we love having ladybugs hanging around our garden. They are voracious eaters of aphids and other soft-bodied insect pests. They lay their eggs in yellow egg masses on the bottom of leaves, and their children (larvae) eat aphids as voraciously as their parents.

This morning, Richard noticed a huge colony of aphids on the tips of the mustard stalks. I had been planning to cut out the mustard anyway. It had gone to seed, so it’s flowers no longer served to attract predator insects, and it was shading the small carrots growing beneath. I quickly grabbed my garden scissors, and tossed the aphid-laden stalks into a weak bleach-and-water solution. Aphids gone.

After doing so, I noticed the two lady bugs sitting on the mint and dill leaves nearby. They, too, had found the aphids. Lady beetles can consume hundreds of aphids per day. This makes them a popular biological control, not only in gardens, but in warm, humid greenhouses where aphids can be a particular problem. Growers who prefer not to continuously spray insecticides often purchase and release lady bugs to keep aphids, mealy bugs, mites and other pests under control. It’s not particularly effective to do that in a home garden; they will likely just fly away. Instead, we leave some flowering “weeds” such as Queen Anne’s Lace (wild carrot), dandelions and yarrow, along with the mint the dill, whose pollen-bearing flowers attract them to visit.

Those two lady beetles probably would have finished off the colony before we got home from work. I was sorry to have destroyed their meal, and I hope there are other aphid colonies that we haven’t yet found to keep them around. It was a good reminder that in a healthy ecosystem (like a healthy social system), help is everywhere, if we but think to notice.

Photos from Wikipedia.