This is my first year growing Artichokes in my Zone 5b garden. I have read that if you start them early enough and transplant them in the garden when it's still cold enough, you can trick them into producing the first year....
I was super happy to see Artichokes forming on 3 of the 5 plants in the garden, with one exception....
Only one of the plants was completely coated in aphids and ants...the others were sparkly clean!
This plant still looked healthy and I didn't have anything on hand to organically treat and eradicate the aphids. I painfully made the decision to leave this Artichoke to it's unsightly demise as a sacrificial lamb.... In hopes the others would be spared from such an unsightly death.
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| these creepy crawly pictures were taken on July 9th. |
After discussing this with my Garden club gals....One of the girls mentioned that sometimes if left alone the Ants are actually doing some farming of their own.
Well, fast forward to today (12 days from the first photo)
The same Artichoke plant is completely and utterly wiped clean of any trace of aphids and the Artichoke has grown :-)
Looks like the Good Bugs won this round!
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