...Getting by with a little help from my (10 million) friends....

Of course I do not have 10 million friends, seriously with this chronic grimace and pre disposition to sarcasm I'm lucky to have any friends, but Nematodes - I've got Nematodes.... lots of 'em.

As with all good friends however I really wish that the Nematodes and I had met sooner... like last April would have been good. Who are these fellas anyway and what is she talking about?? Beneficial Nematodes, microscopic ring worms that attack the dreaded Western Flower Thrips larva in the soil and heroically destroy the pest population just by doing what they do best - seeking and destroying them. I missed the boat by, oh, about three weeks. Had I introduced the aforementioned killers to the soil in my 'third from the left' flower bed I could have prevented a huge mess of tiny little larva having a big ole party in my beautiful snapdragons and then making their wiggly annoying way over to the Rudbeckia and the lilies.

I really wish that this was one of those "low key brag" blog posts where I brag about how cool I am for using "biocontrols" and "integrated pest management" to control an infestation of what really look like (frankly) "flower lice." I wish that we could have all bonded over a latte and a cupcake at the farm market while I bragged about how we cut the dreaded thrips off at the pass by releasing Minute Pirate bugs and mixing up ten million Steinernema feltiae Nematodes with about fifteen or so gallons of water and drenching the soil with them at precisely the right time so they could inject themselves into every orifice of the adult thrips body and then they would feed on the carcass and there would be no eggs (!) and no larve (!) and, annnd and .... And that isn't what happened y'all. Instead there were thrips larva and there were beautiful flowers that smelled amazing and lasted for weeks in the vase, but they weren't sellable. They both brightened my day and soured my resolve from their perch in my house (far, far away from any valuable houseplants). And let's not overlook the fact that we were not at the farm market to sip on that latte because we were home ordering 10 million nematodes to fix this mess and drinking a plain old cup of (really-good-pour-over) coffee (...because my better half makes really good coffee and is always up long before me.)

On the home page of this website we invite you to share in our journey. Well, here it is, the good, the bad... and the down right creepy crawly ugly. We have weeds, we (do not currently) have a thrips problem (but inevitably will again some day) and some weeks we have to skip the market because we're still learning....

Up next- Holly versus the Japanese Beetle, we go way back...