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The Milkweed Ecosystem
These are some pictures taken by one of our Master Gardeners, Lisa LaRue, back in mid-August. We always love our butterfly and pollinator bed because it is beautiful and beneficial to the environment of our garden. These pictures take a closer look at everything that is going on in that garden.
Of course, this is one of the things we are hoping to see when we plant milkweed in our garden. Lots of happy, monarch caterpillars munching their way through life.
What many people planting milkweed don’t realize is that you can get a whole bunch of other insects as part of the bargain. It is very common – and completely normal – for milkweed to be just coated with bright orange aphids during the summer. They also will often get milkweed bugs (the black and orange bugs pictured). So…what to do? The thing is that you can’t spray anything without causing harm to the caterpillars you are trying to encourage. The good news is that the aphids and milkweed bugs are really not causing any harm to the milkweed, or anything else in the garden. By this point (a month later), the aphids are completely gone and no harm was done.
The other benefit of leaving those aphids where they are is that they provide a food source for hungry ladybugs. The hoards of aphids are a feast for ladybugs, and by letting the aphids stay on a plant that isn’t being hurt and that really doesn’t matter for anything other than looking nice and feeding caterpillars/butterflies, you are actually “farming” more ladybugs for the rest of your garden. This picture shows two ladybug pupa (the stage between the larvae and the adults) on the milkweed.
This is how ecological gardening is supposed to work, and a great example of how lots of diversity in your garden is beneficial. We certainly aren’t eating the milkweed, and if you were strictly focused on what you could harvest from the garden to eat, it would seem like a waste of space. But by growing something that benefits our beneficial insects, we now have a higher population of ladybugs in the garden for when there are aphids on something we DO want to eat.
This has nothing to do with the rest of the post, but I wanted to show the swallowtail chrysalis just for fun. We have had a great time this fall finding all the places that both the swallowtail and monarch caterpillars go to make their chrysalis!
Video Wednesday: Harvesting after Spraying Pesticides
We are getting to the time of year when you may need to start spraying to control insects or diseases. After you have used a pesticide, you need to be sure to wait to harvest until it is safe to do so. Learn more from this video.
Video Wednesday: Check Your Garden for Insects
One of the keys to keeping insects at bay in your garden is regular scouting! This video discusses how you go about that.
Friday PhotoEssay
Wow! The eggplant and tomatoes are sure kicking it into high gear this week! So are the spider mites and stinkbugs… Let’s take a tour of the garden!
The top end of the garden is finally starting to look like something, with the sweet potatoes growing fast and the sunflowers and vegetable arbor also looking great. You can just see the green haze of the buckwheat.
Here’s the view from the other end. I wasn’t going to show this picture because I’ve got so many this week, but I wanted you to have a better sense of just how crazy those tomato plants are getting. The one on the end is the ‘Limmony’ heirloom.
The ‘Taxi’ tomato plant continues to produce like crazy. After a couple of larger initial fruit, they have settled down into very consistent 4-5 oz fruit, which is what they are supposed to be. No signs of cracking so far, but I picked a LOT of tomatoes this morning.
We uncovered the squash in the Pizza Garden this week because it was starting to bust out from under the row cover. It had several broken leaves from being under a too-low row cover. It seems to be bouncing back just fine! It also looks to have some buds starting, and so far there is no sign of squash vine borers. Read the rest of this entry
On the Hunt
Yesterday afternoon when I was out in the garden, this is what I saw:
I know it’s kind of difficult to see, because it’s so bright, but there are several branches on this tomato plant that have been reduced to sticks. Something is eating the leaves right off this plant! I spent several minutes searching for the culprit, but couldn’t find anything.
This morning we took up the hunt again, and started finding lots of these black piles of caterpillar frass. We must be getting closer!
Ah ha! Gotcha! We found this guy hanging out on one of the plants.
Isn’t he a cool looking caterpillar? He is definitely some type of Sphinx Moth Caterpillar, although he doesn’t look like a typical Tomato Hornworm, which is green with yellow stripes and a red tail rather than brown with creamy stripes and a black tail. Just one of these caterpillars can be very destructive, but I still think we have another one or two out there somewhere, because we found this one on the south end of the bed, and the other damage is on the north end. The hunt continues!
The Demo Garden Blog 