One problem with growing plants indoors is you don’t always get the benefits of beneficial insects, but as you can see above it doesn’t always have to be that way. At least one little lady bug snuck into the grow box and seems to have found some snacks on a basil plant. If anyone is curious I also have one of my jalapeno pepper plants in the grow box…
We normally would have already had our annual ladybug release for aphid control, though this year it has been a little colder than normal so we have to postpone until this evening. You want to release your ladybugs at sunset since they do not like to fly at night and gives you the best odds of keeping them in your garden. For fun and a little carnage we decided…
With a piece of cedar fence board and a few nails you can make your own ladybug house to give your army of aphid eaters I nice comfortable place to take shelter between battles This project started with my youngest daughter (5 years old) has been asking every weekend, “Can we build something with wood?” Finally I came up with this project which we had a great time building….
It is fairly uncommon for me to see these little green bugs on my peas. In case you didn’t guess these are pea aphids, which suck juices from the plant leaves ad spread disease between plants. This is a rare occurrence because normally it is warmer and drier this time of year and we would have our annual ladybug release to take care of these little pests. If the…
It can be difficult getting rid of aphids on plants in your garden. Fortunately you can get rid of those aphids with materials you have in your kitchen. First of all I am a little embarrassed that I let the infestation get this bad before noticing. I unfortunately set the grow box to have the sunrise at 1:00am and the lights always were off by the time I got…
In case you missed the first and second annual lady bug release, you can follow those posts. We have never had a serious aphid or spider mite problem and I like to feel our annual release of lady bugs is the reason why. Either way, great entertainment for the girls for a couple hours for a $6.00 bag of lady bugs. Lady bugs sometimes naturally choose to wander from…
The girls finally noticed the ladybugs had arrived at Home Depot, so today we had our second annual garden ladybug release. I did a bit of research and followed some advice of commenters on my previous post by spraying the garden with sugar water to give them a little extra reason to stick around after being released. The conditions today were perfect for the release, cool, overcast evening with…
When we started my garden at my our current house my daughters and I noticed we didn’t have any ladybugs roaming around the leaves. Now I would like to think that aphids and mites feared me so much to dare to step foot in my garden, but the reality is I live in a newer neighborhood with vegetation in its early stages and with the lush forest around me…