Bugs and Beasties

One of the joys of our first spring in France was walking out into the garden and spotting new insects, bugs and beasties.  There seemed to be thousands and I saw something new almost every day.  It was only later that I realised how many of them had designs on my vegetables!  And I'm still not sure who are the good guys amongst this lot.
 

Brassica beetle and two flea beetles

Oh well, live and let live.  Apart from the slugs.  And the moles.  And especially the flea beetles, which as anyone in this part of the world will tell you are completely impossible to defeat.  Most of my vegetable growing books advocate walking along the line of brassicas with a sticky sheet of cardboard catching the insects as they jump for safety.  Yeah, ok.  The cardboard would be covered within a third of the row and I'd only collected a miniscule percentage of the population.

Often on the chard and raspberries

By June it was proving impossible to raise anything from the brassica family.  First thing in the morning I would see a row of newborn radishes and by midday the seedling leaves would be nothing but a frilly mess.  The babies quickly succumbed to the onslaught.
  
Another remedy was to keep the environment humid with regular watering.  With daytime temperatures in the mid twenties and little rain that was a lot of watering.  And proved fruitless.  Loads of flea beetles.  No brassicas. Empty waterbutts.

One of the brassica beetles

While we can manage without radishes, I was getting alarmed for the winter cabbages, broccoli and calabrese.  It took two attempts at in-situ sowing before I accepted that this just wasn't going to work and made the third sowing of Savoy cabbages in modules away from the vegetable garden.  Finally success.  I planted out my little cabbages and invested in some mesh to wrap them up.  In theory the beetles were vanquished.

The next morning, the cabbages had all been eaten by slugs, enjoying the relative safety and shelter of the mesh blanket.  

Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillar

The fourth sowing did make it to adulthood and fed us through the winter.  But the victory was hollow as I'd resorted to a pesticide from the garden centre.  So much for my plan to be organic.  I'd hoped so much to start with a clean garden, even more so when I realised all the topsoil had been removed during the ground works for the self-build.  And there I was, six months in, poison in hand.

One of the good guys!

We would spend the winter plotting against the wretched things.  The only saving grace of a cool and wet summer in 2012 was the reduced impact of the flea beetles.  But the vast number of slugs relished the condition and more than made up for it.
 

Carpenter bee

Love those PJs!