Nature red in tooth and claw

My broad beans have aphids.

Judging by my social media, everyone else’s broadbeans have aphids too. This warm, wet spring is about as good as life gets for aphids. But we’re still feasting on broadbeans every day – broad beans with preserved lemon, feta and herbs, or fresh broad bean felafel, or broad bean ful medames, or just broad beans added to soups and stir fries and pasta sauces. Do I need to do anything about the aphids? Will they breed up and destroy the crop? Will they spread diseases, or spread to everything else? Should I get in early?

One of my all time favourite books is Stephanie Dowrick’s ‘Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love’, and the chapter in it that keeps resurfacing for me is the one about restraint. Restraint is about being proactive, not reactive. It is about making sure that what you are doing is aligned with what you actually want, that you aren’t just being triggered. Of course the chapter is aimed at targets much bigger and more important than aphids, but it works for aphids too.

The trigger with little insects stealing my food is they must die! But must they? What I want is a garden that is good, good and good – quality food, food security, creative play, real return for effort, no pollutants, and most of the ways of waging war on aphids involve either pollutants or a lot of effort.

The aphids on my broadbeans look like Megoura crassicauda. If they are, they feed only on Vicia genus of plants, which includes faba beans, broad beans, and vetch – and I only have broad beans to worry about. This looks likely because they don’t seem to be spreading at all to any other plants. They can spread mosaic virus, but it doesn’t look like I have mosaic virus to spread, and the broad bean season will be finished soon. They’re likely to disappear with the end of the broad bean season anyhow. Is there a reason to hasten their end?

If I look closely, the ladybeetles are starting to move in on them. Leaving them alone will help breed up ladybeetles, and when the broadbeans are finished, the ladybeetles will need to go looking for other kinds of sap suckers. I spotted this hoverfly too, feeding on a broccolini flower nearby. It’s little, but its larvae are so tiny they’re nearly invisible, and their primary food source is aphids. I bet there are hoverfly larvae feasts going on on those broadbeans too. I have a couple of dill plants flowering in the garden now too, and dill is a good nectar source for all sorts of aphid predators.

I have three patches of broad beans in my garden. One of them has lots of aphids, the other two very few. Different varieties? The Coles Dwarf are doing the best for me, and Aquadulce are the ones getting hammered. Note to self: save some seed from the Coles Dwarf for next year, and remember to notice if they get aphids next year. I topped the Aquadulce bed up with quite a lot of compost before I planted them. Maybe the nitrogen levels were too high, making them grow soft, green sugary tips.

Most of my strategy for less aphids next year has to do with observing, and taking notes so I remember, (because I know otherwise I won’t). Meanwhile, this year, I’ve been tapping the tips with all the aphids on the palm of my hand and rubbing hands together to squish them, or brush them into a bucket and feed them to the chooks. It doesn’t get all of them, which means there’s still food to attract predators, and it doesn’t harm other insects, soil, or plants. My 4 year old granddaughter has become a dedicated aphid hunter, and is very good at it. But I’m holding her back from being too avid, and encouraging her to sit and watch the ladybeetle, and share its enjoyment of such a lovely lot of fat juicy aphids.