Lady Bug Larva Don't actually look cute

A few weeks ago I bought some lady bugs over the Internet and released them into my garden. Since then I have noticed that the lady bugs went from eating at the buffet to wanting to make my garden their home. Everyday I see lady Bugs in the garden and more importantly I see their larva. Lady bugs for all they are worth are very popular in children's books. But most children books do not advocate the voracious appetite these creatures have and their use. I am absolutely fascinated with the predator prey mentality. Just yesterday my wife and I were watching Great whites chase seals and as the seal was jumping and escaping the Great white she was yelling yes!! We both were yelling 'Yes' with each lunge, until Ole Great White lunged straight up and caught the seal in mid air, She yelled, "Oh No!"" and I yelled "Yeessssss!!" If any body was listening to that conversation it probably would have sounded like an orgasm gone wrong. She looked at me in horror that I had the audacity to cheer for the Great White. What can I say seals wouldn't be seals if there was no presence of the Great White. But anyway back to the lady Bug Larva... They are not cute, even though Lady bugs have the representation of being the Child's Bug. But for all their worth, they are extremely helpful. The fat joker pictured is full of Aphids. I have seen his kin on other plants throughout the garden and they are feeding heavily. Only time will tell if this war of the bugs will prove beneficial.

Share your Beer with the Garden

The past few weeks I have been extremely busy at work, working day and night. Most of the time right before I leave I turn on the sprinkler system to water the garden before Bob makes his appearance. But as busy as I have been, there has been something a lot busier in my garden eating up all my leafy green vegetables.

Obviously you wont see any of the characters in play during the day, but on one cool morning I walked outside to see a slug crawling along on my cabbage plants. I wondered why my cabbage had holes in the center of them. I also noticed that all my leafy greens were affected by this. As bob came out and the flying insects started to wake, I also noticed a wasp fly to the cabbage plant where the slug was and it crawled in the cabbage. I thought this was weird because too, because first, I didn't know what the ole wasp was up to. But watching a little further I wondered if the wasp was preying on the slugs. I don't have any confirmation of this but it's very likely the wasp was hunting.

As I soaked all this in I realized that my garden was under assault. This is the type of creepy assault that's not noticeable. Its in your face everyday, but it's not alarming until it's to late. I have heard of the use of beer being used in the garden as a way to keep the slugs down but I really never bothered with giving this the attention I should; until now. Because as work has picked up I am not around to pick every slug off my plants and feed them to my chickens. So I decided to share some of my beer with my garden to see what happened. To my surprise this stuff works lethally well and even though I have cut down drinking beer sue to training for my next ultra-marathon, I will definitely continue to make beer runs for my garden .

How it works.... The yeast from the beer is to irresistible for the slugs to leave alone. They will come far and near from anywhere to the smell of beer and as they crawl slowly toward the smell of the beer, they literally dive right in and sink to the bottom and literally drowning in a drunken stooper. Beer is an easy, cheap, and effective way to control these beast that will damage your leafy greens in short time. At the first sign of holes in the middle of your plants, get a confirmation that you have slugs or snails and make a beer run. Thank God Georgia just passed legislation to buy Beer on Sundays. 

Release the Hounds!!!

My long awaited, highly anticipated little warriors have arrived. I'm a military man; war, strategy, opposing sides, you name it, I'm all over it. So when those little buggers (aphids) picked a fight with me by chomping down on my succulent new growth for this growing season. I was torn between using chemicals and using nature to fight back. I conceded from the chemicals and went with mother nature. I received 1500 lady bugs today from Hirts on Amazon today. The lady bugs came in excellent health. I watered my plants before I set them out so they will have some water. As the sun set I released the hounds and they began to relish on the delicate but highly destructive aphids. The aphids knew something was amidst. For the first time I saw the aphids retreating from their intoxicated cover and scatter about the branches to escape the perils of the Lady Bug. This was very interesting because as soon as I released the ladies at the base of the plant, they instantly knew to climb higher. It almost seemed like they knew this was going to be a one sided battle and the males stopped eating and started mating. When lady bugs feel like they have found a place that can provide an abundance of food they start to mate. Well, let me rephrase this. The Males started to mate; the females who are bigger than the males just wanted to eat. Lady bugs can live up to three years and the bigger their spots typically depicts that they are older.

 As the ladies ate, gorged and hooked up with horney males they began to prepare for the next generation of lady bugs. One lady bug can eat up to 50 aphids a day. There larva which resemble small little crocodiles are also notorious for eating aphids and other scaly bugs. I feel like a General of the Garden Wars. More to follow........................................

Give Mother Nature a chance to fight your garden wars.

My overwintering project has been very successful. Nevertheless, I have found that I have had a serious problem with aphids in my sun room that I have not paid attention to and they have went viral. So much so that they have destroyed some plants that I have overwintered for the past couple of years. Now that the weather has warmed up a bit I'm at odds with trying to quelch the rise of the aphids. The other day I went and bought all kinds of bug killers; at that moment I had enough. The hell with organic gardening, if I was going to enjoy the fruits of my hard labor I needed to kill every goo sapping green, red, brown squiggly, crawly thing on my plants. So I bought this concentrated stuff and put it into my spray bottle and started spraying away. With every spray I felt a devilish satisfaction knowing that I was causing the death of all these bugs that were causing heartache to my plants. This stuff had to be bad; as I was standing down wind and taking slight whiffs gettin very nausea's. As I turned the leaves over to search for intruders and jumping from plant to plant I lifted the leaf of one plant and saw movement and low and behold was an anole lizard gorging himself on aphids. On a plant above from him was a lady bug chomping down on some delicious aphid belly and in that moment, I said, "What am I doing?" so I stopped spraying. I walked 

inside of the sun room and placed the spray bottle on the shelf. I couldn't help but to look into that lizards eye to see how happy he was after just awakening from his winter nap and finding a smorgus borg of tender bodies just waiting to be eaten. Mother Nature for all she is worth can take care of herself. Im not a tree hugger by any means, but as an Urban Homesteader, Farmer, Gardener or whatever I feel like that day; I owe it to all my garden buddies, to not poison them. Simply using products that are not destructive to the dynamics of your garden is important. Instead of setting out the nuke; assist, play a supporting a role. What I should have done was keep the pigs at bay by applying products that make them hard to take root, until I could let the Dawgs out. When beneficial bugs make your garden their home, you have an obligation to be a good host. I will certainly do a better job.

Squirrel Control

When I lived in Pennsylvania I had to protect my garden from groundhogs. It got so bad, that I took off from work so I can sit at home and watch when the groundhogs attacked my garden. And I developed a plan to take them out. That is a bit to censored for this blog, but it was a necessary evil to save my first ever garden. When I moved to Georgia, these first few years have been great. I have never had any issues with large pests. I understand the bugs and other insects that will eat up my garden every year. But I never had to deal with Squirrels until this winter. The squirrels in my area are everywhere. I live around several oak trees and pecan trees and the squirrels hang around the area when the trees are in full bloom. But these squirrels have went above and beyond the norm. Squirrels visit my garden all the time but I noticed one day that my lettuce were devoured and ripped apart. I didn't know what happened until one morning I walked outside and saw several squirrels dart away with lettuce in their mouths. I couldn't believe it. I noticed the squirrels stuck to one green leafed veggie at a time, first the lettuce, then the broccoli, then the kale and so on. So enough was enough. I employed the only method I know that works and that's shooting these guys one by one. It has become apparent to e that the word in the tree house is that the urban self-sufficientist has all the goodies. I have watched squirrels run from down the street in a file on power lines headed toward y home. This is not a house party. But they think so. Until they had a run in with my new Remington Crossman vantage.177. This is a pellet gun with a break barrel that absolutely puts the smack down on squirrels. Even though it's a pellet gun this is not a toy, you can seriously hurt somebody with this pellet gun. At 1200fps Squirrels don't have a chance anywhere near my garden. I currently killing at least one a day and my hawk is loving me for it. Shoot responsibly.

Look underneath your leaves for Pests.

While Hunting the other day I happened to notice a female house wren flying from tree to tree looking underneath every leaf. It seemed like an efficient way to hunt because she knew bugs would just love to hang out underneath leaves to protect themselves from the elements and and avoid being eaten. This got me thinking about my garden and after an uneventful day of hunting I came home and started looking underneath the leaves of my vegetable plants and I was surprised. There were many mosquito's, I guess due to the cold weather setting in the mosquito's are lethargic but nonetheless, they were there hiding underneath the leaves. I killed about ten. yessssss!! To my surprise I also saw these little buggers. I am doing research on them. They look like aphids but Im not sure. I noticed that many small holes were on my eggplant leaves and when I looked underneath them I noticed that there was an infestation of these leaf suckers. Going forward I plan to use insecticidal soaps and stronger applications as needed if beneficial bugs can't keep these vampires at bay. But at least I know where these guys love to hang out now and be ready for war as I plan for next years garden