Amazing discovery reveals to us nature's balance...

I had noticed that our small sweet pepper plants were missing some leaves.  Being that it is very accessible to little hands, and we have a new batch of 66 pre-k kids using this playground, I figured that the leaves were getting picked off by the kids.  We also had very heavy rain from tropical storm Lee.  Most of the plants have slowed in production, which is fine as we are about to switch to fall veggies.

During our outside time yesterday, L. and I were doing our usual garden inspection.  L. is one of my kids that consistently checks the garden as soon as we get outside, gotta love it!  With his handy bucket, L proceeded to fill it with a large harvest of green beans.  As I inspected our pepper plants, I stumbled upon something awesome that I had learned about when researching beneficial and harmful garden insects.  I find this subject particularly fascinating, as I have learned that certain types of plants can be planted to attract insects that will combat the bad guys. This falls into a category referred to as companion planting, I will get into more details in a future post, but this is definitely a HUGE part of our future gardening plans.  A great example of a balanced ecosystem.  A great way to draw in the kids attention, keep them interested, and encourage them to look more closely, more often.

Anyway, here it is, finding this guy in our garden actually makes me feels like I have achieved something, like I am moving up my personal, (imaginary) levels of 'gardener status,' lol.

Horn worm, with parasitic wasp cocoons!

Cool!  This guy was on a stem of one of our pepper plants.  Horn worms are known to do some serious damage in gardens.  They can quickly eat through many leaves before one even realizes there is a problem.  Their markings are beautiful, and they camouflage easily on plants.  They turn into a large moth, the sphinx moth I believe, though there may easily be wider range of varieties.  At this point, I am happy to have known it was a 'horn worm with parasitic wasps!'

Now, about parasitic wasps.  These guys are AWESOME!  We spotted a small wasp over the summer KILLING a caterpillar, and then flying off with it.  The boys LOVED that!  The other more incredible thing about whatever type of parasitic wasp this is, is that they lay their eggs inside horn worms!  The worm becomes the 'host' for the eggs, when the eggs hatch, they eat the insides of the horn worm, then chew out of it and create a cocoon on the horn worm's body!  Ewww, right!?  Gotta love mother nature's pest control methods! :)  After showing this guy to the pre-k kids, I stayed later to show the after-school kids, since many of them were with me over the summer.  We were all fascinated.  I explained that if we find horn worms, we would remove them from the garden.  But, because this one has eggs on it, we want to keep it in our garden.  This will allow the population of good guys to thrive and protect our plants!