The local bee population was having a party among my cucumbers today. There were many more than the three I usually see every morning, and there were a wide variety of different kinds of bees. I even had a bumblebee, and I haven’t seen one of those in years. Thanks to the recent influx of bees, it looks like I will also be having an influx of cucumbers. There are now too many cucumbers on the vines to bother counting. Go bees!

There are also ants on my cucumber vines. They aren’t farming aphids, which I know they do. They just seem to be walking around on the leaves and stems like it’s some sort of ant highway. They don’t seem to be doing anything at all other than walking around. I take that back. When I went outside to move the sprinkler on the lawn, I looked again at my poor ant-highway cucumbers. They are, in fact, farming aphids. I found a bunch of aphids on the back sides of the lower leaves. At first, I thought they were tiny yellow eggs of some other nasty bug out to kill my plants, and came in to look that up online. The next time I went out to move the sprinkler, I took both my camera and my magnifying glass. Not eggs at all, but rather those little yellow specks are Oleander Aphids. Ugh.

I cut off the leaves with the worst of them, since they were old leaves on the bottom and in the shade and not doing a whole lot for the plants anyway. I also poured a gallon on boiling hot salt water down the ants’ nest. I guess tomorrow I will find yet another empty spray bottle and mix up a soap solution to spray the damn aphids with. I swear most of the time I spend with my garden these days is with a spray bottle of some sort in my hand spritzing some concoction or another on the leaves. Growing stuff without chemicals or poisons is a huge amount of work, and there isn’t a natural or organic solution to every problem. I wouldn’t exactly call spraying plants with soapy water to be terribly organic or natural, but at least it isn’t something that’s going to kill 150 kinds of bugs, including the ones I like, as all the bug poisons at Home Depot tout themselves doing.

Though I will be buying some kind of poison to kill ants. Normally, I don’t have a problem with there being ants around, other than fire ants, but there are two nests under the pavement of the driveway, and they are far too close to the porch and house. If I can find the boric acid I know I have somewhere, I’ll use that, but otherwise, there will be some kind of ant poison being applied soon. Maybe the boiling water I plan to pour on them several more times today will give them the idea that moving would be a good idea, but I’m sure they don’t want to move away from their aphid farm. Grrr.

The rest of the garden is looking fine. Better than ever really. There seem to be a number of tomatoes coming out on Mr. Stripy, and all three of the Sugar Snack tomatoes are now supported with yarn off that one hook on the porch roof and look like they will all be getting loads of tomatoes soon. Still lots of blooms on the peppers but no visible peppers yet. All the same, the plants are looking much better in their new flowerbed home, so there’s still hope.

Now that I have spent several hours looking at, reading about, and trying to kill various tiny bugs, I have the sensation of really tiny bugs crawling all over me, even though there isn’t anything there. I’m going to go take a shower to get rid of that awful feeling. It’s driving me crazy!