My pest-eating army: praying mantids hatch!

I love coming home to my garden after a week away. Especially when that week away was a sunny one and the previous three were wet. That means the tomatoes had grown up to my shoulders - and I'm not a short woman.






and the zucchini leaves were bigger than my head!


The best part though was my three praying mantid egg cases hatched sometime while I was gone. I ordered these back in early June along with 4,500 ladybugs, their job was to eat the
aphids infesting my "Monsanto sucks, Michelle Obama Rocks Organic Garden". Well, the lady bugs mostly took off after a few days, but the praying mantids are still hanging out nearly a week after being released. This is one of my little mantid soldiers a few days after hatching:


I opened the jar they hatched in, placed it under the bean plants and they crawled out on their own. I bet there were at least one hundred in there!

They can jump surprisingly far and they really do hunt in that jerky style you see on the nature shows. And, the best part is, when they see prey they turn their head very slowly and deliberately then move those little saw-like arms so fast you barely even notice until you see them devouring their prey. I shall try to catch it on video.

It will be fun seeing them grow to full size. I admit though, that when harvesting my first crop of organic green beans last night in the near-darkness I was really afraid of squishing one. I seem to have evolved an attachment to these alien-like creatures in a way that I didn't with the ladybugs. Perhaps because they've stuck around and didn't take off. Perhaps because they seem to have personality (can an insect have personality?) They accepted their marching orders and really are doing their jobs.

Next spring I'll order them a month sooner!