Bugs and the Squeamish Gardener

It’s getting cool outside, and the bugs want in.  For the past week, they’ve been clinging to the screen door, hoping to sneak in when I’m not looking.  Yesterday I was face to face with one such clinger, a gray-black fellow with a pointy head.  I had seen him a hundred times in my garden, but could not for the life of me tell you what he was.  I am a disaster at entomology.  

All gardeners know that there are good bugs and bad bugs.  The problem is that I still have trouble telling which is which.  Science was never my subject.  I barely remember high school biology.  Geology 101, which I took only to fulfill my college science requirement, was perhaps the most humbling experience of my academic career.  It’s a mystery how I wound up gardening.  

What is even stranger is that I am not half bad at plants.   I can identify scads of them by their leaves alone.  Nuances in size, shape, shade, and serration are no problem.  But ask me if it’s a soldier beetle (good) or a cucumber beetle (bad), and I have no idea.

Some kind of spider. They're generally good guys.

Since bug identification is essential to successful gardening, I tried to remedy my ignorance.  I purchased Cranshaw’s Garden Insects of North America and perused Bugguide.net and other internet sites.  Unfortunately, many bugs look disgusting.   It is quite unpleasant studying their photos for any length of time.  Furthermore, in some cases the physical differences between the good guys and the bad guys are slight.  Mastering those differences would require a long, stomach-turning course of study. 

As a result, my mental storehouse has not progressed much beyond the ladybug.  I will stare intently at a creepy crawler in my garden, trying to memorize every detail of its anatomy and markings.  But by the time I get to the book or computer, the details are getting a little hazy.  Was the body hairy or smooth?  Did the beetle have three lines or two?  Were the stripes on the caterpillar horizontal or vertical?  I would make a terrible witness.  

Caterpillars with vertical stripes invaded my pyracantha in August. Were they the dreaded azalea caterpillars? I'm still not sure. I picked them off and sprayed the plant with BT.

So what’s a squeamish gardener to do?  Usually I do nothing, which works better than you might expect, thanks to the birds, bats, frogs, salamanders, box turtles, and good bugs that keep the evil doers under control.  And while I may have failed entomology, I do know what a sick plant looks like, and what the most likely victims are.  Tomatoes get aphids.  Turtleheads get mealybugs.  The red lily beetle attacks oriental lilies, and the Achilles’ heel of my Rubeckia “Goldstrum” is a still-unidentified minuscule beetle that shows up every May.  A daily squirt of soapy water works fine for aphids and mealybugs, and even for lily beetles if you get them at the egg stage.  Those pesky Rudbeckia beetles are another story.

As gardeners, we are supposed to respect the ecosystem.  I always feel guilty when I reach for the spray bottle, especially when it’s filled with something besides soapy water.  But sometimes a little human intervention is in order.  That’s why they call it "gardening,” right?