Thu Jun 12, 2008
Lady Bugs, Attack!
We’ve been having a pretty serious aphid problem in our vegetable garden. Those dew sucking bastards love the tomato plants, which I have a problem with because I want me some tomatoes!! With the exception of fire ant poison sprinkled along the outside of the garden, we are not using any chemicals. Many organic methods of dealing with pests involve beneficial bugs. For aphids, we chose lady bugs. We bought ~100 that were packaged in the same containers used for trader joe’s salsa. I wonder how they would taste with chips.
The lady bugs were partially hibernating due to being stored in a fridge. I can related to the “it’s cold, so I’m staying in bed.” The deployment instructions are to wet the leaves of the plants, so they have something to drink and open the container near the plant around dusk. Releasing earlier means that more of them would likely fly away. Dusk was several hours away, so naturally I waited about 30 minutes and decided to release “a few.” Lets just say, everything didn’t go according to plan. I opened up the lid just a little bit and then all tried to make a run for it. I couldn’t completely close the lid without crushing a bunch of lady bugs. I closed it as much as I could, but they were able to slowly wiggle their way out. As they liberated themselves from the salsa container, they began to run laps around the lid. Better that than flying away. I kept positioning the container so that the lid touched a tomato plant. After a few climbed on to the plant, I moved it to the next one.
A few of the lady bugs were smart enough to realize that we were dropping them right on top of an aphid buffet, but not all of them. Some would climb up the tomato cages and then attempt to fly away. Alissa and I did our best to convince them to stay, but swatting small moving targets down on to a plant is a lot harder than you would think. Especially when you are trying not to kill them. After a while, we had our fill of herding lady bugs and decided to fully open the container.
Comment
Fail.
— alissa · 06/13/08 02:58 PM · #
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