a little help from our friends: beneficial insects on the farm

Let's travel back in time to 2023. That year, there was a point mid-June when I thought we would lose our cucumber crop on our Fort Wayne farm. It wouldn’t have been a disaster--I have a second round of cucumber planting in midsummer, and they are fast to grow. But there would have been a break in the  cucumber action.
 
It was a particularly bad year for aphids, likely due to the warm winter in combination with a hot and dry spring. Aphids are tiny little green bugs drawn to the sugars in vegetables. They hide on the undersides of leaves and don’t harm the fruit. But left unchecked, they can stunt and ultimately kill the plant.
 

Photo from DJH, pexels.com

There are a couple organic sprays that are mildly effective for aphid control, but they do little in the face of a full-on outbreak. Plus, there's another reason I want to avoid spraying even organic substances. On our Fort Wayne farm, we use bumblebees to pollinate our summer greenhouse crops. They're sensitive little buggers, and I need to be careful not to harm them with sprays.

But just when things were looking grim, I noticed a significant drop in aphid population, with no aphids on the new growth! And it was all thanks to some heroic beneficial insects. 
 

Chris F, pexels.com

We had several insect friends to thank for the decline in our aphid population that summer. I introduced some of them over the years, such as lacewings and praying mantes. Others stuck around due to our plant diversity, including ladybugs and parasitic wasps.

Parasitic wasps are camera shy, but these aphid “mummies” are a sign of their hard work. Ladybug larvae are voracious aphid eaters, and praying mantes have a varied diet. They eat aphids when they are young, and they eat larger pests--like crickets and grasshoppers--when they grow up.

​It sure was encouraging to see nature find an equilibrium after several years of stewarding the land. Today, beneficial insects continue to be a regular occurrence as we prepare to grow crops for our Fort Wayne CSA.