Revenge of the Ladybugs has Arrived!

Blogging away since today!

I'm just another existentially-crisised girl living in the foggy city who's trying to return to her pre-suburban roots with an urban backyard farm. I'll throw in some humour, narcissism, and short sentences for all you short attention span generation readers.

My roommate and I recently planted a vegetable garden in our sizable-for-San Francisco backyard, and it's nothing short of awesome. I guess I didn't read the fine print, though, because I was down there the other afternoon and our teenager-sized chard was covered in hundreds of tiny little black spots!

I did some renegade, caffeine-aided googling and discovered that my plants had been inhabited with leaf miners. Jumped on the bike and rode down to the garden store in search of some hippie-eco-organic-rubbed with tea tree oil and massaged with sage-remedy.
That's when I saw her: pink hair, bad tattoos, and armed with a walkie talkie. The store employee listened to my sad story, opened a magic cooler, and handed me a bucket of 100 lively and lovely ladybugs.

"You've got aphids," she said.
"Release the ladybugs tonight, after dark, at the root of the plants. They'll sleep there tonight and the morning they'll start eating up all the aphids. As long as the aphids are there, the ladybugs will stay."

A bucket full of good luck! Who knew it only costs $5.99?

Revenge of the ladybugs began that night, and by morning they were crawling all over the chard, the (healthy) kale, and taking a tour of the anti-slug copper wall lining the bed.

I was so stoked - my first attempt at farming going so well with few impossible hurdles.

Five days later (as in today), the aphids are still around and a colony of ants is feasting on dozens of dead ladybugs.

Now what?