The vine crops — mostly squashes — are doing well in the fall garden, but some of the vines look as if they’ve been hit by birdshot. The leaves are not so much a latticework as museums of pinprick holes.
If you look, you’ll see the vines are covered with bristly little bugs. If you snipped off small bits of a pipe cleaner and scattered them through the vines, you’d recognize the picture.
The problem with poisons is not so much a problem of chemistry as a problem of thought. We connect the damage to something we value, the squash vine, with something we can see, the visible bugs.
If we made a more serious effort, we’d find that the damage is caused by aphids, which are tiny and hard to see. The bugs we can see are the larvae of ladybugs. Each might eat 400 aphids before it becomes an adult.
Everyone seems to know that ladybugs are beneficial in the garden in some way. Most people don’t seem to know what that looks like. Ironically, some gardeners reach for poisons at the first sight of beneficial insects.
There might be a lesson in this garden story about how we Americans, especially, are trained to reach for solutions to all the problems that confront us.
