Garden Visitors

Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver, the other gold. Old friends, I'm assuming, are golden, new ones silvery.

We've had both kinds in the yard in recent months: recurring visitors I expect to see each year and would worry about if they did not show up, as well as unexpected sightings of life forms I may have heard about -- or not -- but haven't personally encountered in our garden.

One old friend, seen last April, was truly golden:

The golden tortoise beetle makes infrequent appearances; only once or twice before have I come upon one. Evidently they like to chew on members of the morning glory family, such as the ubiquitous and ineradicable bindweed, so be assured that this year's little fellow is finding plenty to eat. It's said they will change color when disturbed, shifting from shiny metallic gold to a flat orange with spots to fool predators who know how tasty they are but will avoid unpalatable but similarly shaped lady bugs. I guess this bug trusted me, as he stayed shiny on my palm.

I don't think I would worry if the golden tortoise beetle did not appear one year; but I would greatly miss his cousin, the lady bug, scourge of aphids and other bothersome guests. Fortunately, lady bugs seem to like our garden and are regular patrons. I've heard that they are attracted by brassicas and it's true that in the spring of 2015, when we had an especially abundant crop of broccoli, two beds worth, plus another bed of kale nearby, we also saw an explosion of the lady bug population. They were everywhere; I had to brush myself off before coming into the house. This year is back to normal with fewer brassicas and only occasional bug sightings, such as, in early July, a lone lady resting on some lady-like Queen Anne's Lace.

Another strikingly patterned orange and black visitor, the notorious harlequin beetle, has been appearing in the last couple of years in early spring. It also seems drawn by brassicas, especially the cover crop mustards I started planting in the same time period. Although it has a bad reputation for sipping juices out of a wide range of garden plants, dining on stems and leaves as well as fruit, weakening and discoloring plant tissues as it goes, I haven't noticed a lot of damage beyond a few holes in the mustard leaves.

What to say about a new bug found this year in the dried up, two-year-old fava bean pods, saved for cover cropping? In late March, when I dug into the bag of old pods and started shelling out the beans, I noticed some little beetles scurrying for cover. I also noticed lots of little holes dug into the fat tawny seeds.

One of the pods yielded up a pale, translucent, tiny worm, no doubt the larval form of this new insect.

It did not take much searching online to identify these bugs as broad bean weevils, a type of beetle and member of a family of weevily critters who feed on dried legumes and grains. The adults lay their eggs on the surface of pods or seeds, then the larva burrows down into the seed and consumes what it needs before pupating in place. The hatched adult crawls out of the little seed tunnel hollowed out by the larva and the beat goes on.

The bugs were indeed feasting on my fava bean seeds, but as everything I planted sprouted and grew without problems, I nonetheless count them as new and interesting friends.

Old or new, silver or gold, it's always a treat to encounter the many varieties of life forms that abound in our backyard abundance.

Ladybug, Ladybug . . . . . .

A ladybug pupa: something I've never seen before "in the wild!"

On June 7, the morning inspection tour led to this tiny surprise on one of the Poblano pepper leaves. It looked very much like a ladybug larvae, with a rough, corrugated black surface and red markings, but more rounded and compact, without visible legs or mouth parts.

When I gently touched it with my finger, this strange little being reared up from the spot where it had attached itself to the leaf -- a protective mechanism, no doubt. Inside this shell, the mysterious process of metamorphosis was going on. If the process is the same as for butterflies, the larval worm was dissolving into a cellular soup and reassembling itself into the next stage of its life, in this case as a cheerful little red bug.








Voila! A week later, on the morning of June 14, the bug had emerged, pale and as yet immobile, clinging to the wreckage of its pupation shell. By the end of the day it had wandered to the top of the leaf.






This morning, June 15, the ladybug had disappeared from the pepper leaf. I don't know its fate for sure, but hope that this little critter on an aphid-infested stalk of Siberian kale, only a few feet away, is the same bug. If so, it managed to size up and acquire its characteristic flashy red sheen in about 24 hours.







The ladybug pictured above was photographed earlier this year, March 5, on an arugula plant. I see them everywhere in the garden and am glad for their presence, of course, because I also see the pests they feed on: aphids, white flies, spider mites, etc.

I have occasionally found the larvae, the black alligator-like creatures that are even more voracious. They appear mostly on the tall fennel fronds. I have searched on the undersides of the feathery fennel leaves for evidence of the tiny, elongated golden eggs, without luck. But the eggs are around here somewhere.

There are generations of ladybugs living and dying in the garden, playing their role in the grand scheme of things.

From a gardener's perspective, their role is to eat as many pests as possible. They are so good at this task -- the average ladybug adult consumes perhaps 5000 aphids in its lifetime of one year -- that they are sold in quantity and released by hopeful cultivators. I used to do this, but have learned that they show up on their own eventually if you can manage to wait out a season of infestation. If you want the ladybugs, you have to tolerate some aphids. That's part of the deal. But usually you want the ladybugs because you have the aphids, so it's hard to know which comes first!

I guess what I want is a front row seat on the natural processes going on in my habitat garden, and that requires both pests and predators of pests in reasonable balance.