Ladybirds, Blackfly and Ants

With the lighter evenings, and especially in this weather, I tend to pop to the allotment of an evening after getting home from work to water the plants.

The Artichokes are now nearly 2 meters high... and covered in Blackfly. Not a pretty sight. But dotted all over the plants are splotches of colour. Red. Now a lot of these are the Ants which act as guardians and herdmasters for the aphids. But some of those red dots are Ladybirds.

So imagine my surprise when a large black dot moved.

It looked like a Ladybird. Ate the aphids like a Ladybird. But appeared to have undergone some kind of colour inversion. But after a bit of Ladybird research I find that they are an invader.

There are plenty of other normal colour Ladybirds on the plants. Of the 2, 7, 10 and (I think) 24 spot variety. So maybe the large amount of Blackfly is preventing those Harlequins from eating the native ones. All together I counted over 30 of them on the plant. And probably a thousand times that number in food sources.

Meanwhile the plants seem to be enjoying themselves. In the greenhouse things are going very well.

We've already had about 12 strawberries off the the new plants. And though small, were very sweet. We made them go further by turning them into a smoothie. (Yoghurt, Banana, Strawberries, honey and ice all blitzed together).

The Beetroot and Red Onions seem to have rocketed away.

And the pumpkins seem to be happy on their little mound.

Courgettes on the big mound seem to have been slugified. They're not looking too good. But then again if we had as many courgettes as we did last year we'd be drowning in them.