2011 is the Chinese year of the rabbit, but in Durango, it must be the year of the aphid. Every farmer/gardener I’ve talked to has aphids this year. Adobe House Farm has their share of them too. The good news is that there are a lot of lady bugs in the garden as well. The average lady bug eats 6 aphids an hour which doesn’t seem like enough given that one aphid produces 70 offspring a week. When factoring in exponential growth along with their short life cycle, one aphid can end up producing 24 million aphids a month later. Makes me want to go out to the garden and squish as many as I can find right now!

Praying mantis and lacewings also eat aphids, but I haven’t seen these guys around yet. I don’t feel like the aphid population is out of control just yet thanks to those lady bugs. The beneficial bug population is always affected more from sprays because they don’t reproduce as quickly and all it takes is for one little aphid to escape the spray and we’d be infested with 24 million a month later! And aphids do a much better job at escaping sprays than their predators since they feed in the curled up sections of the undersides of leaves.

This gives me a wonderful opportunity to promote how I farm. The US uses a lot of systemic insecticides. These are chemicals that are taken up by the plant and spread throughout the plant tissue through the vascular system (as opposed to contact insecticides which just coat the surface of the plant). In other words, wash all you want, when you eat it, you will still injest it! For example, the US uses 4-5 million pounds of acephate a year for aphids. This lovely chemical, in small doses, is known to disrupt the navigation of songbirds. One of the most widely used insecticides worldwide is imidacloprid, and like most insecticides, it is highly toxic to honey bees. If you have the time and you are curious, one way to get to know these chemicals is to read the environmental protection agency’s pesticide fact sheet (it is 63 pages for the systemic insecticide dinotefuran, good luck with that one!).This information will hopefully help you feel good about eating the food from our farm – even if it does include an aphid or two! Hopefully the diversity of the farm will keep things in balance and if not, let’s hope they prefer the radishes over the tomatoes!