Aaarrgghh!.... APHIDS!

Although it's early in the gardening season, we've already found aphids in our garden.

One of the biggest reasons the backyard gardener gets aphids is that no one really has enough room to practice proper crop rotation. This involves letting areas lie fallow (unused) for a season or two, planting cover crops that deter pests and replenish soil nutrients. At my house, that would pretty much amount to not gardening for a year or two. So, we vary and rotate our crops as much as we can, and battle the aphids as we go.

If you've got some aphids on indoor plants, it's often really easy to just squish them with your fingers. They look like teeny green specs, almost not big enough to be insects. I had a housemate once who grew orchids and this was her preferred method for dealing with them. She said it relieved her stress too.

Spraying the aphids off of outdoor plants with a strong stream of water is also an organic method of pest control. This works well if you have larger and better established plants, and not just little seedlings or starts. Further down this lens you can also find insecticidal soaps, which are organic for humans and plants, but still lethal to aphids.

There are also beneficial insects that love to eat aphids. Ladybugs and green lacewings are the most common. We're going to release ladybugs into our garden this summer and see how that helps.

You can also plant "trap crops" as a way of dealing with aphids.

Ladybugs love to eat aphids, so they are a nice element to have in the battle against aphids. An adult can eat up to 50 aphids per day. I got some at our local garden center and the woman at their info desk helpfully gave me some tips on releasing them into my garden. Here is a picture I took of the mesh bag with the bugs in it.

Ladybugs are kept in refrigerators by commercial garden centers to keep them in a state of hibernation. When they come out of the cold and go into the garden, their instincts are to fly around, find a mate, get busy and then lay eggs. It's this second generation of bugs from the laid eggs that really are the aphid-eating army the gardener is trying to establish.

She suggested I release the ladybugs in the evening and to spread them around in the garden near where we have our vegetables. She also suggested that I not release them all at once, but instead to put half in the garden, then put the rest back in the fridge, then do a second release several days later. This helps distribute the bugs in the garden and helps insure that some of them stay and make baby bugs before flying off or being eaten by something larger.

The ladybug life cycle goes from egg to larvae to pupa to adult, with each stage taking between one and three weeks each, depending on weather conditions. So if the ladybugs I release successfully mate and lay eggs, we'll get resident lady bugs being born from the end of June through August.

When I was growing up, I always thought of summer as the time when you gardened and never really gave a thought to the rest of the year. Now, as an adult who is interested in gardening, I've learned that there's a lot of gardening that goes on year-round, and this can be useful when fighting that backyard aphid!

Summer is prime aphid time, that's just a fact of weather. However, if you have certain crops that are really being attacked by aphids, you might want to investigate if it would work in your zone to grow some varieties in fall or over-winter. Fall and winter crops are planted late in summer or in the fall, and the vegetables mature during the cooler months or get established, take a few months off and then really get growing during the spring.

You may have to work more to protect plant seedlings that get going during late summer so that they can get a good enough of a headstart against the present insect population, but you'll have a lot less bugs to battle if you explore cool weather gardening! Once the first frost happens, the aphid population goes way down. Look for winter varietals of your summer faves and look into options like cold frames and cloches too.

If you can't beat an aphid, you can try joining it!

The theory behind trap cropping is that since bugs really love certain plants, you can use that love to lure the aphids away from other plants you're trying to grow. Trap crops can be planted right next to the regular crops, or in areas that are a bit away from what you are trying to protect.

Two of the plants that work best for this are nasturtiums and marigolds: they are lovely flowers and aphids go crazy for them. What you want to do is mix these blossoms in with your vegetables or plant them very nearby, and then when the aphids infest the flowers, you pull them up and dispose of them, aphids and all. By disposal, I mean you bag up the infested plants and throw them in the garbage. If you try and compost these bugs, they'll just leave the pile and go back to your garden.

You'll want to have successive plantings of the flowers so that you have grown ones to immediately replace the infested ones that get taken out of the garden.