My Knights in Spotted Armor

So its been a little over a week since I separated the plants and they seemed to be doing well. Then I noticed their leaves were turning a little yellow. Of course I have no effin idea what yellow leaves mean but in an attempt to feel like I have a clue what I'm doing I began inspecting the plants. I found that there were some little green bugs under the leaves and on the stems. (I still have no effin clue if that's why my leaves turned yellow). Since I have done extensive reading on such things (8 chapters in Organic Gardening for dummies ;) I knew these little creatures were aphids. After actually checking a few places I found out that indeed that is what they are. Well it just so happened that we bought my son a Venus Fly Trap that day, so we decided that it might be hungry for a baby aphid. Now I know this may seem a little cruel but anyone who knows me knows that I am an insect lover. But these are trying to take over my plants and I cant have that. And so... we fed one to the fly trap. It took some tickling with a stem of grass to get the trap to close because the aphid was too small

But with a little coaxing it finally closed. Now I did feel a little vindicated but not much and so I decided it probably wouldnt be such a great idea to attempt to feed all the aphids to the fly trap.

Apparently aphids are common little pests for gardeners like myself (hey this is the internet I can pretend to be whoever I wanna be), but one of the better known enemies is the ladybug. Since I am trying to grow my veggies using organic methods I decided that buying some ladybugs would be the perfect answer. So off to the garden supply store I went and came home with a plastic bowl of live ladybugs.

Now since I dont have a REAL garden at the moment, I only let some of the bugs go. The directions said to wait until it was evening since the ladybugs would be less likely to fly away during that time. So that is what I did, it was really hard to keep them contained because they were all trying to come out at once and tragically i squished a few trying to get the lid back on (oops!). So i let them go last night and most of them didn't fly away at that time.

Unfortunately one of my knights met its end with the fly trap (sorry about that I didn't mean to drop you THERE) R.I.P ladybug....yea there was no glory in that one ;(

(If you look real close at the closed one on the bottom left u'll see a little orange spot inside thats her)

This morning I got up and checked to see how my little soldiers were doing and whether or not they decided to stick around and to my surprise quite a few were still out there roaming around. Although they must not have been hungry because after minutes of close inspection I found that they werent even hanging out on the plants with the evil aphids and to my disappointment I only got to see one get devoured (the ladybug in the picture at top is the one who I saw eat an aphid, but then she flew away). Either way they are hanging out and  that is a good thing. Hopefully the aphid population can be controlled now before they each have 6.9 million offspring (I actually read that they can have that many in as little as 6 weeks!!) As for the fly trap it is my hope that only aphids will venture in for a peek but I have a feeling I will lose a few more good soldiers. 

On a side note about aphids in 2007 when I still lived in Florida I took a photo of an ant and another bug on a plant. At the time I just thought the ant was laying the smackdown and I had no clue that the other bug was an aphid but apparently it is. It seems that aphids have an evolutionary advantage in that they produce sweet honeydew that attracts ants and in exchange for letting the ants have this sweetness they have some protectors hanging out on their leaves. I did read that there are often casualties as the ants need protein too but I suppose this is a small price to pay for the protection and also with millions of offspring who the hell's gonna miss a few?

Last but not least one of my sunflowers are sprouting (I planted two seeds), I have no clue if a sunflower can live in a pot but I guess I will know soon enough....