Bugs

Next to the bamboo pot of the previous post, BH has a number of lily pots. Lilies which, from what looks like a standing start, put on a huge amount of growth at this time of year, flowering in a few weeks time.

The bane of her life is something called the lily beetle which eat large amounts of lily leaf and which need to be destroyed. Or cracked, their having a fairly hard shell. Stepping on them seems to work.

Not a good snap as it was sunny and I could not see what I was doing, but there are two green blobs at the bottom, blobs which we now think are egg cases, as busy black heads and feelers seem to be emerging from them. Now stepped on.

A quick read of reference 1 is not conclusive, but it seems that the busy black heads are the heads of feeding larvae.

I associate to a former colleague, whose parents ran an asparagus farm, and in the Spring it was all hands to the pump to remove some kind of similarly voracious beetle from the asparagus plants. A tedious and not very pleasant job which had, at that time anyway, to be done by hand. Perhaps since you were intending to sell the surviving asparagus for human consumption, tricky chemical sprays were not quite the thing.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_lily_beetle.