Pests of the garden I photographed recently

Plants grow and things eat plants.  It's a natural order.  It can also be annoying when those things compete with your own interests.  Such is the burden of the gardener.  We work hard and pay a lot of money to start and maintain a garden.  Flowers, vegetables, fruit, ground cover, and shade are usually the desired outcomes, yet our efforts are not without problems.

Soil, space, sun, fertilizer, water, and time enough are just the beginning of the issues.  Then there is the weeding; something that you could do every day and it still wouldn't be enough.  Undesirable plants competing for light, water, and nutrients try to push choice vegetation to the brink of destruction.  I have filled many buckets with the remnants of weeds.

Once the crops start to come you have macro-consumers such as deer, rabbits, quail, rats, and a host of other vertebrates that would compete for the bounty of your toil.  As if that wasn't enough, there is the microfauna such as what I photographed above.  These are just four of the hundreds of species that would wreak havoc upon my garden.  Other include aphids, true bugs like the stinkbug, earwigs, tree and frog hoppers, grasshoppers, caterpillars, certain flies and gall wasps, and many others not listed here.

As a rule of thumb, I don't use herbicides or pesticides.  And the truth is that I don't mind nature sharing the bounty that comes from my garden.  I work the earth with my hands because I enjoy it.  I grow food to eat and share with others.  I plant flowers because it attracts creatures I like to photograph.  Fences and covers keep wildlife out, insects cause some grief but nothing I haven't been able to handle.  The one thing I do try to actively destroy is rats as they do cause considerable damage and can spread disease.

This year I have already enjoyed rhubarb, peas, straw and raspberries, and potatoes.  Still to come are tomatoes, peppers, carrots, beets, apples, plums, beans, zucchini, squash, cantaloupe, and sunflowers.  And there will be more insects, which I hope to photograph with my camera.  Sharing my garden with them seems like a small price to pay for the rewards of getting some cool shots.

What can I say?  I like bugs.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com
 

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