A Veritable Bug Zoo

Kevin should have started his drive home from work three minutes ago and I am just sitting down to blog from dishes and bills and laundry, oh my!

I have a question: how do organic farmers deal with bugs?!? Especially in NC, where everything grows like weeds, including both the veggies and the insects? I had just grown accustomed to calmly triple-rinsing my lettuce for slugs and worms when I got my first harvest of broccoli... and it was not pretty. Besides all those skittering (Hi, Heidi) pinchy-bugs/earwigs, there were SO MANY silk worms hiding up in the leafy tops that I wanted to cry. I am a city girl when it comes to bugs. so at one moment I am totally psyched, mentally tallying up the yard-fresh produce and pointing out little baby tomatoes to my husband... even sweating in the sweltering Southern sun as I lift 40 pound bags of dirt and hoe out mulch. Next moment, I am doing something akin to the pee-pee dance but much more vigorous as I poke broccoli stalks around a water-filled sink and watch the worms squirm. I repeat "Eew, eew, eew!" and even do some very girly gasping. My brother-and-law told me today that he has never seen me so squeemish. I am ashamed. I like to think that I can put mind over emotion in many circumstances, and I can buck up for just about anything: my father-in-law calls me a "steel magnolia," and not for nothin'. I realize that silk worms are not going to hurt, and bugs as a whole are good for the ecosystem thing. At any rate, my garden may just defeat me.

Here is my yeild so far:
2 heads romaine lettuce
3 waist-high stalks romaine lettuce
5 heads green-leaf lettuce
1 head red-leaf lettuce
couple pounds broccoli
2 banana peppers
tons of herbs: basil, Thai basil, mint (like crazy), dill, oregano, thyme, rosemary, chives, flat-leaf parsley, curly parsley, etc., which should keep up through the whole summer.

Growing:
several yellow squash
a few zucchini
5 heads red-leaf lettuce
at least 2 more romaine stalks
1 head green-leaf lettuce
lots and lots of tomatoes
more (gasp!) broccoli

Not doing as well:
bell peppers of all kinds
cukes
chilies
eggplant
cauliflower

The truth is, I just made a chili insecticide and sprayed yesterday. Was this too late for the broccoli? And I am trying to find the time to make a soap insecticide as well. Will this help? The beer-on-the-saucer thing seems to be working a little for the slugs and the aphids appear to have disappeared (I like that: "appear to have disappeared") after I put out petroleum jelly on plastic. I feel happy with the choice to garden organically. As for the reality of gardening, I really look forward to nice, smooth veggies that do not hide bugs.