BUGS

One of my greatest concerns in the vineyard is BUGS. One has to develop a BUG eye, the ability to see bugs. Unfortunately I treat bugs like commercials: if they aren't crawling on me I ignore them.

Karen has a great bug eye. From across the room I can tell when she's spotted something crawling around in the corner ten feet from her with no lights on. She has this certain expression that is a combination of disgust and why haven't I disposed of this creature yet. This habit is extraordinarily effective with her roses and orchids. She will notice immediately if there is something crawling underneath a leaf that shouldn't be there.

But I'm a big picture sort of person.

So with a vineyard it will be imperative for me to focus on a level of life that I am not accustomed. Early and often.

It is estimated that there are approximately 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive. There are 1,017,018 species of insects in the world with some experts estimating that there just might be as many as 10 million species out there.

And they are hungry.

Our objective is to develop an organic, sustainable vineyard. So management of insects that are interested in dining on grape vines is rather important.

Oregon has a sustainable, organic program certifying vineyards for good agricultural practices. They offer assistance in attaining this certification and helpful hints about good practices.

The state of California provides all kinds of information about insects, plant diseases, recognition and methods for combating problems. There are descriptions of which bugs are good and of the good bugs which ones will eat other good bugs. Praying mantis eat other bugs. But they do no discriminate. So they will eat any other bug that comes along including other praying mantis. So it is important to know which bugs have a taste for the bugs that can do the damage.


An Adult Spined Assassin Bug: sensitive, likes moonlit walks and poetry and eats aphids and leafhoppers.