It was not a good sight.  The second I laid eyes on it, I knew I was in for a battle.  Small, green, hanging on the underside of a pea plant leaf – yup, it was an aphid.  List of things you never have just one of:

1. Pringles
2. Aphids

That’s it.  Don’t come at with me Cheetos or Doritos – I’ve had just one of those in a sitting, and I’m no snack food superman.  I would include roaches on that list, but they’re pretty gross.  I didn’t want to muck up the list – or the joke – with their presence.

Anyway, that first aphid always elicits a visceral, “get off my plant” smashing reaction.  Once it was sufficiently smashed, I started doing the same to the pockets of other aphid families – not my finest hour.

Obviously, crushing all the aphids was never a plausible solution.  That’s a little like throwing water on a mogwai.  Somehow, they just seem to start multiplying out of spite.

So, I started mulling my other options.  I actually own some neem oil which apparently can be used to eliminate aphids.  However, whenever I research applications, the answer to “is neem oil harmful to humans” is never a resounding “no.”  It’s always bucketed as “low toxicity.”  Even low toxicity is a little too much toxicity for this gardener.  So, I decided to keep the neem oil in the garage.

Soap and water is also supposed to repel aphids.  So, as I’m thinking through the best way to sponge bathe my spring peas, I realize that I’ve never really seen any food stuffs flavored as ‘soap and water.”  I mean you get salt and vinegar, sour cream and onion, etc.  But, really nothing in that soap and water genre.  Pulling fresh veggies straight from the garden and eating them is one of the big perks of all this gardening effort, so I wasn’t really looking to combine that with “curse word punishment.”  I decided to pass on the soap and water.

After smashing a few more aphids, I left without a solution. 

Some people might stew on that for days – tortured by the knowledge that little critters are sucking nutrients from their plants.  I didn’t do that.  In fact, I pretty much forgot about it right away.  I mean, it wasn’t an outlandish amount of aphids (trust me, I’ve seen an outlandish amount of aphids), and I had some other stuff to do.

After doing that other stuff, I found myself at the checkout counter of the local nursery.  Lo and behold, sitting right there in front of me was a small plastic tub full of ladybugs.  Now, having clashed with aphids before, I knew that ladybugs are their natural predators. 

It was as if the heavens opened up and dropped a mongrel hoard in the lap of Ghengis Khan.  It was a tacit sanctioning of biological warfare.  Of course, I bought the ladybugs (retail $10 for about 300 bugs; how can you put a price on life, indeed).

Now in possession of this band of marauders, I had a bit of a problem.  I still had to run to the beer store and the liquor store.  Can you leave ladybugs in a sealed, hot car?  Are they like babies and dogs where that’s generally frowned upon?  I guess I could have looked up the average cubic inches of oxygen required to support around 300 ladybugs, but I didn’t have time for that.  Nor did I know the volume of air in my car.  I settled on cracking the windows.  It made me feel like a responsible ladybug owner.

It also worked.  We all got home safely – neither scorched nor suffocated.  But, oddly enough, I didn’t really know what to do next.

For any non-entomologists out there, ladybugs can fly.  It seems weird to think they’d just go (or stay) where I tell them to.  They are still mercenaries, and I had no idea how much trust the cracked car window built up.

So, I found myself watching a video of an old man releasing ladybugs into his garden.  Turns out you just have to put them in the refrigerator which puts them to sleep (easy enough), water the garden (in case they’re parched) and wait until night (they don’t fly at night). All of that seemed just fine.

Then, you release them about a third at a time over the course of three days.

I think that’s just absurd.  This was shaping up to be the battle of the month in the family garden.  There’s no way I was going to send my squad in short-handed and under-resourced.  The kids and I dumped the whole bucket of ladybugs at the base of the pea plants.  We were also going out of town and I’m a bit lazy – you pick which was the most likely driving force there.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t have high hopes for the ragtag army’s success.  I thought I’d come outside in the morning to no ladybugs.  But I was wrong.

Not only were they still here, but they had spread out into attack formation.  They’d created a perimeter with a fortified base while sending out scouts to climb ahead and render destruction on any and all aphids in their way. 

This precision and execution led me to name them Bug Team 6.  It was truly a sight to behold.

I’m not going to lie, I could have watched them for a while.  It was like all my old GI Joe combat setups had come to life.  Hudson and I even joined in the battle – smashing aphids and feeding the bloodthirsty predators.  Truly a team effort.

I’m not sure how many aphids were taken out – I’ve read a ladybug will eat 50 a day – but after a while, Bug Team 6 started to lose focus.  They were just walking right past aphids and starting to cluster in a way that certainly seemed intended to refortify their ranks rather than take down the enemy.

But, I didn’t mind.  After a few days, there were still a few members wandering through the pea plants.  There were even some egg clusters on the support netting – likely a result of the earlier barracks shenanigans.  And, the aphid population was decidedly smaller than when Bug Team 6 first came onto the scene.

That seems like a job well done to me – with no soap flavor or toxicity.