Lovely photo, huh? These colorful orange and black bugs, I recently discovered, are called milkweed bugs. And what do they eat exclusively? Plants in the milkweed family. And that means my butterfly weed has its very own bug. I bought my butterfly weed for the gorgeous orange flowers and for the fact that it attracts butterflies and feeds monarch butterfly caterpillars. The giant family of milkweed bugs now feeding on the seed pods was a surprise. Apparently, they don’t damage the plant. They just control the spreading of the seeds. Nature’s little control against excessively spreading milkweeds.
August is the buggiest month of the gardening season. Not only are the mosquitoes eating us alive, we have to deal with angry wasps, giant grasshoppers, hungry Japanese beetles, and all kinds of unexpected new bits of grossness like the milkweed bug. A few times I’ve even come across a praying mantis. (That is one scary bug, especially when it tilts its head to look at you.) I try to appreciate all facets of nature. I really do. And I can get behind a lot of bugs in terms of appreciation for their usefulness to the ecosystem. I’ve even come to terms with those hairy brown ground spiders that run away from you when you garden. I’m arachnophobic, big time, but as long as the spider is running AWAY from me, I can deal. And I made my peace long ago with the slimy but beneficial worm (you can’t garden if you don’t learn to appreciate worms). But the major convergence of all bugs in August has me staying indoors as much as possible and leaving my garden to fend for itself. Otherwise, the amount of screaming I do when a huge grasshopper lands on me tends to spook the neighbors.
The one good thing about the excessive amount of creepy crawlies in August? It gives me a reason to look forward to the first frost!
Cait's Garden 
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