Let us talk about the sex life of the aphids in your garden. It's a short talk, because aphids mostly never have one.
Just now there are birds and bees at it all through the hectares that I call "my garden", the possums call "dinner" and the wombats call "home".
The male shrike thrush is pecking at its refection in the window at 6am, in a challenge to the male he sees reflected there. The queen bees, termites and European wasps are preparing for their mating flights. The wind is carrying pollen from pine tree to pine tree, and the bees transferring pollen from one fruit tree to another. Sex is literally in the air.
But not for aphids. Female aphids are just sitting there, sucking sap from your favourite plants and breeding more aphids, with rarely a romantic adventure in their lives. Most aphids in Australia reproduce by pathogenesis i.e the females don't need males to reproduce. Female aphids are born pregnant; they give birth to two or three aphids every day for most of the month of their lives. A single aphid could theoretically be responsible for 600 billion descendants in one year, and all of them feeding and still breeding in your garden.
Thankfully this doesn't happen, because a heck of a lot of creatures think aphids are delicious, from birds to wasps to hoverflies and ladybird larvae.
I'm generalising of course. There are hundreds of different aphid species in Australia. The aphids on your new rose shoots aren't the same kind that have invaded your onion tops or young cabbages.
Aphids become plentiful about now because they breed at a slightly lower temperature than ladybirds et al. I've just seen the first ladybird of spring - the aphid-eating kind of ladybird, not the "munch holes in the potato plant leaves" kind, so fairly soon there won't be any aphids to be seen at our place, except the ones on our indoor plants, which will become outdoor plants and have a holiday for a few weeks before summer's heat kicks in, to get rid of this year's aphids.
If you still have aphids deforming the new shoots on your plants by the end of spring, you have a severe deficiency of ladybirds, hoverflies and small insect-eating birds. Remedy this by letting some parsnips and carrots go to seed, or growing Queen Anne's lace, or white alyssum, all of which the adult form of your pest eaters love. This should work in Canberra, as we are by and large a region of gardeners, but if you have more astro turf and concrete than grass and trees where you live, you may find that a single predator-friendly garden isn't enough to breed a regular supply of pest eaters.
It's then time for a spray I invented about half a century ago - I give out the recipe about once a year, as it is cheap and simple. Mix 1 cup of white flour with 1 cup of boiling water, preferably in a blender. Add enough water till its smooth and the consistency and colour of milk.
You can do this by hand, but the blender is much easier. Put it into a pump garden sprayer, or even a water pistol with a spray setting, and spray the new shoots and under the leaves of your aphid-infected plants. This spray will also kill caterpillars, stink bugs, pear and cherry slugs. The spray dries and flakes off, taking the suffocated pests with it. It's even safer than oil sprays, which can burn foliage if we get a sudden heat spell of over 24 degrees. If it doesn't flake off, and you are expecting the garden club for afternoon tea, give the plants a thorough hosing instead, which will dissolve it. It won't cure the brown splotches left by pear and cherry slug, but nothing will, except a fresh growth of leaves.
So pity the poor aphid, as you hold hands with your beloved over your lattes this spring. An aphid's life is short, and not romantic, and likely to be even shorter as the hoverflies and ladybirds breed.
This week I am:
- Cutting vast bunches of pale blue Louisiana iris, a wild variety that grows about a metre high with massed sky-blue blooms, none of which last long, so pick stems with many unopened flower buds for your vases.
- Still picking as much parsley and new celery shoots as we and the chooks can eat, to stop them going to seed till the new ones are ready.
- Eating the first ripe banana of this season's bunch, safely indoors now to stop the fruit bats from guzzling them all.
- Explaining to many people that the tall thinnish trees almost totally covered in white blossom that line many streets and public areas are probably Himalayan pear: the fruit is small and hard but can be simmered to make a golden jelly - replace crab apples with Himalayan pears in any crab apple jelly recipe.
- Reminding myself that not every blossom on the apricot tree will turn into fruit.
- Weeding, not seeding: nothing more is going in till we have less wind, more rain, and reliable warmth.
