Everything seemed to be going along perfectly in my small vegetable and herb garden. The warm weather, good rains, fresh compost and careful tending were paying off. I saw only perfection and potential.
Closer inspection revealed tiny holes in my bok choi and arugula. No!
I couldn’t seem to find the culprits who’d been doing the nibbling, but something needed to be done. I prefer my greens intact.
Tiny ants scurrying about on various plants caused me to wonder if aphids might be the problem, knowing that ants are attracted to the “honeydew” they create. If that’s what’s going on, the ants actually make the problem worse, because they carry the aphids to and fro, while fending off natural predators.
But, do aphids leave holes in leaves?
That’s as far as my scientific diagnosis progressed; there was no time for delay. In a tiny garden, every lettuce leaf, every arugula leaf and every bok choi leaf counts.
I went shopping for ladybugs, and ladybugs I got: twelve hundred of them. ($9.99 at the local farm store, with free advice at least doubling the value of my purchase.)
Ladybugs primarily feed on aphids, but will eat other small, soft insects and the eggs of other, larger insects like Colorado potato beetles. They eat a lot. They’ll eat 50 to 60 aphids a day and, if no other food is available, will even cannibalize each other. They’re fearless little predators. One adult may eat as many as 5,000 aphids in its lifetime.
Medieval gardeners believed that ladybugs were sent by God—actually, the Virgin Mary—to rid their gardens of pests. In fact, they were called “The Bug of Our Lady,” before the name was shortened to “ladybug.” The French still call them “les betes du bon Dieu”—creatures of the good God.
My ladybugs will fly away if they can’t find food in my garden. The ladybug’s little wings beat at 85 beats per second when it flies, so I’m hoping my brood will relax in my garden, at least for a while. To entice them into staying, I watered the garden well yesterday evening, and released the ladybugs carefully after dark, spreading little clumps of them here and there at the bases of plants. Dozens opted to crawl up my arm, needing to be coaxed down into their new home.
I opted not to try spraying them and my plants with a weak Coca Cola solution to help them to “stick around,” a tip I’d read online. I just couldn’t do it. Mine is a healthy garden, after all.
Today’s downpours worried me. I imagined my ladybugs floating away on little ladybug rivulets, out of my yard and down the road to some other garden. Perhaps where insects are not welcome at all, no matter what their specialty.
Although I’ll never know how many of my 1200 ladybugs are still around, this evening’s inspection found lots of them. It’s hard to tell if a ladybug is happy, but I would say they all looked happy, healthy and content.
Some might have even been mating.
With any luck, some of my lady ladybugs will lay eggs within a week, and I’ll be off to a great start for the summer. There’s no telling for sure how many females I have; although females are noticably larger than males, doing an inventory seems a daunting task. They all look pretty big to me! (At 3/16 of an inch in size, that is.)
And, predators won’t be bothering these fearsome beauties, because they produce a foul-smelling chemical to make sure they’re left alone.
Ladybugs enjoy special status here in New Hampshire. In 1977, the legislature declared the ladybug the state insect, thanks to the efforts of a group of fifth grade students from Concord. I like to think that at least a few of those students are tending organic gardens in the area today.
Our garden friends are not the larger Asian lady beetles that swarm in houses (at least, in New Hampshire) in the fall, looking for nooks and crannies in which to spend the winter. That beetle is, in fact, an invasive species that was introduced in the early 90s as a possible beneficial insect.
There are about 5,000 species of ladybug in the world, and 400 of those species live in North America, so encouraging those already here might have been a better idea.
In the absence of aphids, other small insects or insect eggs, ladybugs enjoy dining on the pollen of plants with umbrella-shaped flowers. In my area, these might include dill, cosmos, cilantro, yarrow and dandelions. More good reasons to plant flowers in my kitchen garden!
I’ll do what I can to keep my new ladybugs content and, maybe attract more to my garden, along with other beneficial insects. And, if the holes in my greens keep multiplying, I’ll work harder on my diagnostic process and try another solution.
I’m hoping the ladybugs do the trick.
Do you think this will work?
