Monday, August 24, 2009

Bug Patrol

As someone who has a garden (albeit a tiny, fledgling one), I feel very lucky that I have a son who loves bugs and tiny creatures to such a great degree that one of his favorite activities is looking for caterpillars and inchworms on my bok choy, peas, etc. In fact, he and his friend have talked of starting a business called Organic Bug Patrol. People will hire them and pay them to look for (and remove) pests in gardens. The conflict comes when the boy's friend wants to keep the bugs to feed to her chickens, whereas the boy wants to put them in a jar to watch them pupate.

4 comments:

heu mihi said...

Oh that is the cutest! We would totally hire him--and we have some wicked huge caterpillars encroaching on the tomatoes....

The Thirty-Something Bride said...

I used to use water mixed with dish soap to keep some of the leaf eaters off my plants. It doesn't kill the bugs and they don't like eating soap. However, you gotta keep spraying for it to work, especially after it rains! :)

This Ro(a)mantic Life said...

Organic Bug Patrol! I love it! He's welcome anytime up here. How is he with spiders? Those are the only things I have trouble handling.

Good Enough Woman said...

I'll tell him that he has gigs in Seattle and somewhere in the midwest/field area.

I've been meaning to get a good spray bottle to make a spray with my dish soap. My tomato plants look great (although I'm not sure if they're going to get enough heat to make good, ripe fruit), but the peas are in desperate need of some bug/worm patrol.

And the boy LOVES spiders. Fortunately, he can recognize a black widow. Unfortunately, the reason he can recognize them is because we have so many of them.