Friend or Foe?

I am a terrible gardener. Not only do I hate gardening, but I am no good at it. I love gardens, I just hate gardening. This is why I almost exclusively plant perennials, because I don't want to have to keep planting things over and over every year. But as far as vegetable gardening goes, I think most things have to be planted every year. I get my husband to do most of the work in the vegetable garden, I confess. But we never really have great success with growing vegetables. We can't even grow zucchini well. Every year I see recipes for what to do with all of your excess zucchini, and I have never had to resort to any extreme zucchini recipes, because we never have enough to begin with, we certainly never have too much. I don't even know why we can't grow zucchini, but there was one year in particular–the only year when this happened–when our zucchini plants were almost completely devoured by beetles and their larvae. You see, I used to know almost nothing about bugs, but one thing that I "knew" was that lady beetles are predatory. I thought that they ate all kinds of bugs (which they don't, they basically eat aphids), and there were some creepy looking, spiky things crawling all over our zucchini plants, but there were also what I thought were large, yellow lady beetles. I figured that the lady beetles were eating the creepy things, so we didn't have to do anything about them. Well, it turns out that the creepy, spiky things were the larvae of squash beetles. And the things I thought were lady beetles that would prey on the creepy, spiky things were actually the squash beetles themselves. They were not protecting the zucchini plants, they were eating them. And I was just letting them do it. By the time I found out what was really going on (and I actually misidentified them as Mexican bean beetles, due to poor reference material. They look very similar, but Mexican bean beetles don't eat zucchini. They eat, well, beans), it was too late to save the zucchini plants. Another garden failure. That was the only year we had an infestation of squash beetles, thank goodness (though we have still failed to produce decent zucchini crops anyway). We have lost the battle against cabbage white caterpillars for the last several years, though. You know that I have a live-and-let-live policy with insects in general, but that doesn't extend to garden pests that are eating my vegetables. However, if I see them outside the garden I pretty much ignore garden pests. And there are some that don't bother me at all, like today's Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Colorado potato beetle. I know a lot of people hate these, but I think they are cute. More to the point, they have never attacked anything in my garden (I have never tried to grow potatoes), and, in fact, they only thing I have ever seen them feeding on is a weed that I refer to as nemesis (it's really a species of nightshade), so in my backyard they are actually a beneficial insect.

This, on the other hand, is NOT beneficial:

I admit, I hate slugs. I think they are gross, and they completely creep me out–although this baby slug, and the other baby slug that was on the same tree, were kind of cute–and they ARE garden pests. The one year we planted cantaloupe we only were able to harvest ONE fruit at the end of the season, because slugs ate all of the rest of them. I was so mad. But again, I don't kill them when they are not actually predating my vegetables. I just think they are gross.

As for things that other people hate...

 A couple of times I have looked up springtails on the internet to read about them, and most of the hits that come up are about killing them. I have no idea why. Even if you read the articles about killing them they usually say they are harmless (and then tell you how to kill them anyway). This is an attitude I find objectionable. They're not hurting anything, just leave them alone! I found one of these on a tree today, and one on the shed. I am surprised that I have not seen many of these lately, and today especially seemed like their kind of weather (cold and wet).

In general it was an unsuccessful day of searching for insects in my backyard. In fact, you have just seen them all.

 In great contrast to yesterday's spiderful bug walk, today I only found one, on the back door as I was going back inside, so that's all I have for Arachnid Appreciation:
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