Man, I used to think slugs were so cute. Our backyard in Brooklyn was full of them, many of them longer and fatter than a (long fat) man’s thumb, and they were bold as hell. We had a big gap between the kitchen door and the floor that we never did get around to weatherstripping. In winter we’d shove a towel against it. In summer, it was wide open. Every so often one of the bolder slugs would ooze on in across the kitchen floor, those antennae or antlers or eyes on sticks or whatever those protrusions are on their heads sticking way up like they were dazzled by this strange new land of incandescent lights and laminate flooring they’d wandered into. I’d coo over them and then escort them back outside. When Billy would accidentally step on one on the deck I’d get pissed.

Obviously I wasn’t a vegetable gardener yet. Slugs in the front yard, or in other people’s yards? Still totally cute. Slugs in the backyard, where my food grows? Evil slimy very very bad things. Also, doomed. All slug interlopers will be squished on sight. And I use Sluggo. No, I’m not sorry.

Now that we’re well into summer (not that you can tell by the weather recently. The peas, just about done-for last week, think it’s April and have started cropping again. The tomatoes and cucumbers? The squash and eggplants? They’re just pissed off. And forget about the peppers. They’re thinking about packing it in entirely. Moving to Florida or something. But today was warm and sunnyish and tomorrow promises the same, and so I’m holding out hope that my heat-lovers WILL crop this year.)..whew…such a long parenthetical I’ve kind of lost the thread here, yeah? Sorry. So now that it’s allegedly summer, the slugs are (were) slowing down, but the next pest in line has stepped up. Aphids. We’ve got ’em. They’re gross. We’ve taken strong countermeasures.

Ladybugs. That’s right. We called in the ladybug army:

Kiddo unleashing our army

Wouldn't it have been nice if I'd thought to take a photo of the bag before it was almost empty?

Can you see the hardworking, aphid-chomping darlings?

We released a bag full of ladybugs last week. We even sprayed them with diluted root beer to stick their wings together so they wouldn’t be able to fly away for a few days. This is supposed to guarantee they’re in your garden long enough to mate and lay eggs.

A week later? There are a few ladybugs still in attendance, but the aphid population has somehow ballooned. The cabbages are totally encrusted and the one remaining spring collard plant was so gross I just pulled the damn thing. So much for the ladybugs.

We had a bad aphid problem two summers ago (that carried over into our fall and winter plantings), and released ladybugs and it seemed to work…sort of. Even after the ladybugs eat the aphids you’re left with the dry gray shells or husks or whatever those things are and you have to wash each bunch of kale like six times to get all that crap off. Last summer I had a new baby and didn’t want to deal with such involved vegetable washing before each meal, so I decided to simply save the brassicas for fall and winter. See, the aphids only seem to settle on the cole crops like kale, cabbage, brussels sprouts, etc. I didn’t plant any of those last summer, and we had zero aphids. And when it came time to plant the fall and winter crops in mid-July, those remained aphid-free because there weren’t aphids in the yard already. This summer? Didn’t follow that rule. Next summer I’m going back to it. No brassicas in summer. Ever.