Ladybugs

Originally posted on 7/12/12
Yesterday I was showing off my garden to a neighbor and talking about how dismally poor my zucchini plants are doing.  When she looked at them she told me that it looked like I had aphids and low and behold I do.  YUCK!  We also looked in the greenhouse and you could see them starting there too.  As you can imagine I went straight to the computer and started looking up information about how to rid myself of aphids.  Now I am trying to grow an organic garden so I needed an organic method. 
Entereing the word "aphid" into the search engine brought all kinds of great websites back.  I will let you do your own searching for that.  After all that searching here is what I decided to do.  I used Safer Soap on the plants and then picked off as many of the bugs as I could.  Once I did that I rinced them off.  I learned that  you can simply mix a little detergent in water and add some canola oil or olive oil.  The mixture stops their ability to breath.  The oil helps it to stick and the detergent makes water "wetter" so that it penetrates their lungs. 
The other thing that I found useful was that you should back off on the fertilizer.  Too much nitrogen in the soil makes the plants more appetizing to the little buggers.
The other thing I decided to do was get some aphid eating bugs for the greenhouse.  Fred Meyer normally has some Lady Bugs for sale this time of year so I checked there but they didn't have any.  I ended up ordering some on line which was expensive but something I wanted to try.  When you do something like this you need to really make sure that the bugs you are introducing are not invasive and there are some species of lady bugs that are so double check that.

Posted on 7/23/12
My package of lady.  I ordered the smallest package they had and there were 1,500 bugs in there.  The instructions were to release a few of them daily in the cool of the evening so that is what I did.  I placed some in the greenhouse and some in the outside garden beds over a week period.  They seem to be doing the job.  When I visit the greenhouse I see them on several of the plants which must mean there is stuff for them to eat!  I have been looking for aphids but haven't seen any.  I like using beneficial bugs to rid myself of the harmful ones :)