For two weeks the broccoli heads stood like princes of the garden, waiting for a kitchen coronation. The wait was too long.
Hordes of aphids stormed the cedar-plank box from which the broccoli grew and blanketed anything green. The heads looked cloaked in a lumpy white soot. Ruined.
The only consolation to a lost crop was loosing store-bought ladybugs upon the invaders. Gluttony ensued.
A day later no lady bugs in sight. The aphids remained, though their ranks appeared depleted.
Next season will bring garden security rules.
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Should I not tell you that the ladybugs you buy at the store are most likely not our native ladybugs? And that they tend to just fly away?
Aphids die once they hit the ground. If you spray your broccoli with a hard blast of water and knock the aphids off, you might have better luck.
I guess we’ve fallen, once again, to a false marketing narrative. In another incident last year, Suzame doused store-bought ladybugs with a soft drink as suggested by the package to deter them from immediately flying away. The next day we discovered that many had been sucked dry and killed by spiders. Lessons learned.
So many things to consider when working in the garden!