This weekend we went to the most amazing garden shop : Lukas Nursery . This is a shop that really embraces nature and eco friendly gardening. They even have a Butterfly Encounter exhibit where you can walk through enclosed butterfly gardens full of many different species of butterflies. Of course I did end up finding some incredible plant specimens for my garden, and as I was purchasing I saw packages of live ladybugs being sold.
Last spring my garden was LOADED with ladybugs but this spring they've been very scarce, unlike the whiteflies and aphids which have been plenty. If you didn't know, ladybugs are an amazing natural pest control. They are voracious eaters and a treasure to any wildlife gardener. A few years ago I bought ladybugs through the mail, and it was wonderful to let them go, but we did have many casualties. It was great to find some that were obviously thriving in their package.
When you open the package, be ready. They are ready to get OUT! They come streaming out of the bag and up your arms, up your sleeves, into your bra. They are extremely thirsty and will try to drink the sweat right off your skin (ewww gross, I know). In the absence of sweat, they will even nibble, I joked that they were after blood, but it isn't that bad, unless you have several hundred doing it at once and then it's a little uncomfortable in kind of an itchy way. So if you decide to release ladybugs into your garden, make sure to spray the plants you intend to put them on with some water. It keeps them on the plant longer and they definitely will appreciate it.
A lot of them seemed so excited to be released they actually started mating so I am really hoping they will lay plenty of eggs in my garden so I will see ladybugs all summer.
I was so inspired by these beautiful red lady bugs that I decided to create my own Etsy Treasury Collection including teammates from EliteSixteen and TeamXtreme:
