Teaching Garden Update: Garden Friends

🕷 Seeing some helpers including a yellow garden spider. The main benefit of spiders is that they eat insects. Spiders can help control flies, mosquitoes, moths, beetles, wasps and other insects, keeping their populations down. This helps protect you from being bitten or stung while you're working in your garden, and it can help your plants by reducing the number of hungry insects in the area.

🦎 Catch a cute moment with a small anole in the melon patch. Male anoles have a pink colored throat fan (called a dewlap), which is used in both territorial and courtship displays. They eat insects like grasshoppers, moths, grubs, and beetles.

 ⻌ Walking sticks are herbivores. They have chewing mouthparts and eat the leaves from the tress, shrubs and other plants on which they hide. Walking sticks are generally not considered to be a pest, though large populations may defoliate plants to a noticeable degree.

🍅 Many of our Cherokee purple tomatoes were being eaten by wildlife because of the drought. Be sure to leave water for birds and wildlife so they don't find the water in your juicy vegetables.

🐟 We continue weekly foliar sprays of seaweed and insecticidal soap. We're starting to see more aphids and mealy bugs on some of the cucumbers that are fading out with the heat.