It’s rumored in Italy that they’re good luck, or maybe that was just Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun.
Ten years ago we had one tomato plant out on our back deck. It was being eaten by bugs and we didn’t want to use pesticides. At the local hardware store we found 1,500 ladybugs for a few dollars.
We let about half of them go out back. They cleaned up our tomato plant nicely and flew away after a couple of minutes. What are we going to do with the remainder?
Well, I was charged with taking care of the many plants of our next door neighbor (no, not SK the suspected Serial Killer, the other one who was friendly and nice) and he was not at home so my husband climbed over onto his balcony and released the remainder of the ladybugs.
We haven’t seen that neighbor in ten years and never told him about the ladybugs! He’s coming for dinner tomorrow night and it will be good to catch up with each others’ lives.
Many neighbors were probably helped that day and they had no idea where the ladybugs came from. Now, if they read this, they’ll know.
I was the self-appointed dog and cat rescuer in our neighborhood. Find an owned dog or cat, see if it has a collar, if none take it to the local shelter and have it scanned for one of three kinds of microchip and call the owner.
Another neighbor took care of birds, snakes and once, an iguana. We had each other on speed dial. He’d call about the cat, I’d call about the pet bird. It worked great.
The ladybugs were a one-time thing so far. If we do a lot of planting in the future (winter is coming) I’ll remember our lovely bugs. Cheers! Dee
Cooking with Dee 