We live inside a medium size city and have a limited amout of space to have a garden but we still try to grow vegetables and fruits and grow them as natural as possible
When we grow our own food we know what has or has not been put on that plant while it has been growing and I prefer to know.
Gardening is hard work and I am constantly learning. The picture above was taken close to my back porch. At first I thought they were spiders but I contacted our county extension and they forwarded my pictures to a university and I found that these are Assassin bugs and they are beneficial to our yard and garden. They eat other bugs. I don't put pesticides on our vegetables or fruits. I wash my plants the best I can with spraying water and rubbing the leaves and then I let the other bugs help me out.
In this picture above, if you look close at the small okra that has black ants coverning the okra you would think that you have a ant problem and the ants are going to eat this okra. But what actually happened here is the ants were eating the aphids off the okra, they did this the entire growing season and we had a great crop of okra this year.
One season I noticed the ants carrying lettuce seed out of our newly seeded lettuce patch. They were so busy coming and going with the seed I thought there would be nothing left to sprout but it did and we still had lettuce.
This is the bed that the ants carried away seed. They actually thinned it out just right.
If we start spraying our plants to kill the things that eat our plants we harm the good insects, reptiles and bugs that we need to eat the bugs off our plants.
Butterflies pollinate our flowers and vegetables
The mighty Bee is so valuable in our garden we simply must not poison our plants or we will be poisoning all of our beneficial insects.
Each year we get more and more interesting bugs in our garden.
Everything does not grow perfect even in a fairly balanced organic garden. But you just keep trying to build the soil where you have a better balance. You share your crop with the bugs.
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