Bugs in my garden!

 Well, it's June and I've got BUGS in my garden - yeah!   For our *one* warm day this month, I got to chill outside doing garden chores (like weeding, feeding n transplanting) - and finally my perennial garden is in full swing.   Now that the salvia (left) and yarrow are blooming - along with the neighbor's cilantro (herbs flower - who knew?) - there are a delicious number of things flying around the front garden.   When I first started gardening, I kinda feared bugs - because I worried that they all were pests  coming to infest my plants.   And true, some are (I'll put up some pictures of my poor cabbage soon- I hate you, cabbage loopers).   But for me to have abundant creepy, crawly flying things is a sign of health and balance.   The bees (can you see it, left?) pollinate the squash, peas and tomatoes.   Spiders, ladybugs and lacewings (which I've seen in past  years) snack on aphids and other pests - but need the yarrow and blooming cilantro to tank up between insect meals.   And a lot of those little, tiny flying things are (I hope) parasitic wasps.   They lay their eggs in caterpillars (including cabbage loopers), who get EATEN when they hatch.   (ha ha!)  Pretty cool, huh?   Free pest control, and all I have to do is plant flowers.

 I'm slowly coming to terms with the idea that balance is a thing we work towards in the garden...even slugs, who I hate for all the holes (and slime) they leave in my lettuce, are key in chewing up dead plants in the compost.   Migrating chickadees, who try their best to munch on our strawberries, eat caterpillars all spring long.  I put out suet and water, which they seem to like.  So far I've never had a major outbreak of aphids or other pests ( knock on wood).   I also try to grow stuff with a ton of compost, plus good sun and water to build up their natural resistance to pests and diseases.  (Plants, just like us, are more likely to get sick if they are malnourished or overstressed.   In a good soil they can produce their own defenses and recover fast from infection).   So far, they seem to have been able to balance themselves out without major interventions from me.   (except for one major round of slug killing...If slugs ever take over the world, I'll be tried for war crimes for sure). 

Some kind of crazy wasp/fly on the cilantro...I think this one had a blue back.  Blown away by the number of weird insects living in the garden!

This year I'm tempted to try a round of Bt, a biological agent, on my cabbages for the loopers - this is the first year I've had so many cabbages, but I've noticed the little white butterflies for years - and now I definitely have caterpillars happily dining on my future sauerkraut.   Sometimes the chickadees don't work fast enough.

Strawberries, Late June Thai-style stir fry and one tough flower garden

It's been ten days since my last post, and there are plenty of updates.

1) Strawberry season has flown by - Dawn and I went strawberry picking at Land Sakes farm in Weston to get a couple of quarts of the extra-sweet June-bearing strawberries for jam. We pretty much ate all of our fruit as soon as it came in, and so we bought a few quarts at the you-pick-it operation. Land Sakes isn't certified organic, but it used to be, and they say they haven't changed their practices since they stopped getting certified. I wanted to find somewhere organic because strawberries are supposed to soak up chemicals like a sponge - and we were not disappointed. The strawberries were at an orgasmic peak of ripeness. More pictures posted when we actually get our jam on.

(Dawn is very excited about the strawberries!)

2) We went to the Cape last weekend, and over the summer solstice, apparently summer happened. We came back to a million snap peas, big tufts of lettuce, some carrots, big radishes, etc.  Now the work of the garden is mulching, weeding, harvesting and cooking - the trick now is to actually use the stuff I grew while its in season.    Tonight I got to make my first all-garden dinner.
I wanted to make a stir-fry from this magical period when my ichiban eggplants overlap with the peas, bok choi, and garlic scapes. Recipe below.

 Stir-fry satisfaction.   Squishy eggplants with crunchy peas and delicious, fried garlic scapes - Seriously delicious. 

3) Last, I put in a sweet perennial garden at a rental house on Cape Cod. Since no one will take care of these plants all summer, I wanted to make sure they were hardy. I split up my wild yarrow, moonshine coreopsis and some unkillable groundcover, transplanted some lillies and some yellow coreopsis that were growing nearby, and put in an echinacia I bought. Here's a picture of it at the beginning of the summer - we'll see how it looks by the end, after the deer have had plenty of time to feast.

Late-June Thai-style stir-fry w/brown rice and fried tofu.

Ingredients:
One package firm tofu