Upcoming frosty night (maybe)

Since I've been away the past few days, I spent a bit of time in the vegie garden harvesting and looking things over. Weather report says we're supposed to get down to the low 30's tonight, so I've covered the tomatoes. I decided to skip covering the rest of the stuff, mostly due to laziness and the time of season. Figured I can always go to the Farmer's Market.......

Tonight I harvested oodles of green beans, quite a few cherry tomatoes, two eight-ball zucchini squash, and a couple green peppers.

I rescued two large grasshoppers that had leaped into my water containers but were still alive. Wonder how long they can hang out in the water; I have yet to pull a dead one out.

I have several silver buffaloberry (Shepherdia argentea & canadensis) serving as a windbreak for my vegie garden. They seem sort of prone to some bug infestations, but usually recover over the winter when most or all of the insects die. Well, one of the more recently-planted buffaloberries had suddenly started looking terrible - most leaves drying up & falling off, like it was on its last legs. Looking closely at the shrub tonight, I discovered these alarming looking bugs, along with some aphids, scale (I think), and then quite a few ladybugs. I put some of the scary-looking bugs in a jar to take inside the house to identify - upon looking through Whitney Cranshaw's "Garden Insects of North America", I really quickly found the "scary" bug: it was the larval form of the ladybug!!!! This is soo cool, I don't think I've ever seen this guy before! See picture, or page 545 of Whitney's book. The larvae are described as "active hunters that can crawl rapidly over plants, searching for food." They can consume many prey, reportedly several dozen.

You go, guys!!!! Eat those aphids & scale!!!!