From our primal depths? Our collective un-awareness? For some reason, if there is something crawling or unfamiliar to us in the garden, we quickly assess that it is bad and make moves to kill it.

How many bugs have you squished-or worse-sprayed with "something from the shed"- in the garden because they "were probably bad". Just because it is an insect does not make it bad. The black beetles you find under leaf litter in your garden may very well be ground beetles- who find slugs quite delicious. A lady bug larvae barely resembles a lady bug, but eats twice as many aphids. We had a person once who came in and had mis-identified them as Box Elder Bugs (another completely harmless, albeit en mass kind of bug) and sprayed them all down with Sevin (bad, bad, bad!!), killing a whole generation of insect eating machines. Ever see a tomato hornworm being an incubating tank for beneficial parasitic wasps? Gross and cool at the same time. The parasitic wasps lay their eggs on the back of the hornworm (larvae of the hummingbird moth that seem to be able to eat ½ of a large tomato plant in a single evening). The wasp larvae then eat the hornworm to death. Problem handled by Mother Nature. No help needed from us or our nasty chemical interferences. Know your enemy! Then use the absolute least amount force to deal with it. Which might very well be the decision to do nothing at all but observe. Surprisingly, Mother Nature might have it all figured out, balanced......

One of the "problems" I have seen a few times this week is samples of Lichens. This is a super cool algae/fungus organism that grows on old tree trunks (especially Dogwood), rocks and well, all over the place if the conditions are right. National Geographic did a very extensive article about them years ago-they are so beautiful! Wikipedia has a fabulous picture of them. So in comes my customer with a scraped off lichens wanting something to kill them because ‘obviously’ they are killing her tree. They aren’t. Lichens are just there growing because the culture they need exist on that tree trunk. Sort of like moss. Moss isn’t hurting anything either- I swear it causes me pain when someone wants to buy something to kill the moss growing in their back yard, in the shade, in the moist soil, where they can’t get grass to grow......as if it is the moss’s fault that grass is a plant too.

Be aware, be an observer, interfere only after you have identified and decided your level of tolerance. Let your garden be a garden for all who live there. Bugs, birds, dandelions, you.

Don’t kill things that don’t need to be dead.

~Erica