Using Beneficial Insects

This week for the first time ever, we released beneficial insects into our fields. Tom and I had been noticing quite a lot of aphids on our kale seed crop (we are growing about 50 pounds of kale seed for a seed company in Maine) and considered our options: apply compost tea to give the plants a boost, spray all 1200 plants with soapy water to get rid of the pests, or cross our fingers and hope that the aphids would not affect seed yield too much. A friend of ours who is a budding entomologist is visiting and suggested we introduce a beneficial insect into the field.
The next day, I visited Natural Pests of the Garden, a store in Medford that sells beneficial insects, and bought 3,000 lacewing eggs. Green lacewing adults are about 1/2 to 3/4 inch long, and are yellowish-green with golden eyes and large, delicate netted wings. The Lacewing lays her eggs on foliage. The eggs are oval, pale green in color, and are attached to the end of a hair-like stem, which hatch just a few days after laying. The tiny larvae that emerges has a voracious appetite and will feed on aphids, small worms, insect eggs, mites, thrips, immature whitefly, and other insects. Our 5 year old son Sam was thrilled to discover the lacewing eggs had hatched yesterday, and now we are reveling in the sight of the larvae feeding on aphids.
Beneficial insects are just one part of an integrated pest management program (IPM) used on organic farms. Here at Wolf Gulch, we rotate the fields in which the same crop is planted, keep all our plants healthy with adequate nutrition and irrigation, manually remove problem insects when necessary, and occasionally use an organic pest control product, like diatomaceous earth, which helps control cucumber beetle populations.
We are excited to observe the impact of the introduced lacewings in our kale crop.