Isn’t this a beautiful wall of green, these are asparagus beans and they are very delicious. It’s an Asian type bean and I’ll tell you when people visit the garden they see this long, long, long asparagus like beans hanging from this tree lose as the always comment on them.
Now, I’ve had very few problems with these beans except for some aphids. You tend to find them on the new growth and tips and since we are all organic here I try to use beneficial insects in the defense against the bad bugs and so what I have here is a bag of Ladybugs. This is a half of pint which is sufficient for a greenhouse or a garden up to 2500 square feet.
Now, if you have a little more room you need to cover like 5,000 square feet you would need a full pint. If you have 15,000 square feet you might want to get a quart of these little guys.
Now, what’s wonderful about this is that you can order them thru the mail. Yes, you can get Ladybugs shipped to your home an entire army of them that take on pests in the garden. You see they love soft bodied insects particularly aphids so any little small soft bodied insect they tend to munch on.
Now, I don’t have a huge infestation here, so what I’m going to do is just let a few of these out at a time. It’s best to let them out at night but it’s a little hard to do a television show at night in the garden, so I’m just showing you how, open the bag and the few crawl out. And we’ll release these over the course of two weeks. That’s about how long you can keep them in the refrigerator. When they are ripe just take them and put them in the fridge that keeps them inactive and you don’t want the refrigerator to be so cooled that it would freeze them because they are alive.
Now, if you want to keep a few beneficial insects around it’s important to learn little bit about their life cycle. You want to learn to identify them. For instance, we have a healthy population of Ladybugs here already and you can see that I’ve got little larva walking along here I can see them. They look like little red alligators that is a young Lady Beetle.
Whether it’s Lady Beetle or Ladybug it’s the same and one of the things you want to keep in mind is you don’t want to spray pesticides in your garden because they will kill not only the bad bugs but good bugs such as these.
Keep this in mind, a Ladybug in its brief lifetime will eat up to 5,000 aphids. Now, just think about that.
If you’d like more information on this topic or any other gardening topic, just check out my website, PAllenSmith.com.
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