I have no idea, but it is the same in my garden. Almost no pests bugs and tons of lady bugs, and it has been that way since March. I'm not complaining. How often do we get this kind of a year? I think it happened about 2004 or so, and that was a rainy spring following exceptional drought in 2003 (total rainfall at our house of less than 19" that year, so I can't say flooding in 2003 helped wipe out the bugs for 2004). There's plentiful bees and lady bugs, but I'm not seeing many green lacewings, and not seeing many assassin bugs or wheel bugs yet. However, I'm also not seeing leaf-footed bugs or stink bugs yet either, so maybe I won't see assassin bugs and wheel bugs show up until there's something like stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs for them to eat. The grasshoppers are very late, but there's tons of really tiny ones newly hatched this week. The ones I'm seeing now are only abou 1/16" long. There's not even cucumber beetles, which usually are all over the flowers and other plants from the moment stuff starts sprouting in late winter.

I do wonder if our Nov/Dec 2015 flooding might have wiped out a lot of insects that were already attempting to overwinter in the ground or in debris. Usually when we have floods here they are more of a spring thing (like earlier last year) so I don't know what the effect of Nov/Dec flooding is, except that we just don't have many insects yet so I think that the two might be related.

Songbirds are plentiful and I've never had as many in the garden as I've had this winter and spring, so maybe there's been plenty of birds gobbling up insect pests, but we always have a lot of birds, if not as many as this year, and we still have pests.

I did spend time yesterday trying to get the tall weeds and Johnson grass out of the garden fence line and do believe that chiggers have arrived early. Wish I'd planned ahead for that!

I think I hate chiggers more than SVBs...maybe it's a tie.

I can deal with chiggers, just splash some powdered sulfur on the pant legs, it always works. SVBs... if only there was an easy way to deal with them. I do have a fancy butterfly net, but I cannot guard the garden 24/7.

I saw one assassin bug but he was on a weed, and 2 cucumber beetles which were on a Chinese cabbage plant and flew away as I walked up. I guess they were shopping because my cucumbers have just sprouted. I picked a huge head of Chinese cabbage on Sunday and found a few holes in it and a baby slug. I have a lot of robins in my garden this year and it doesn't seem to bother them that I am only a few feet away.

I usually have Sugar Snap peas all of May, but I am just now picking the first of them this year. I hate those years when you see the leaves starting to die on the bottom of the plant at the same time heavy production begins. My guess would be that they will not produce for long, but they are covered with peas at the moment and I picked a few for our salad on Sunday. We are having cool and rainy weather so maybe that will help a little. I saw a few more onions sending up seed stalks today, but again, it is in the larger transplants that I segregated at planting time knowing they were likely to bolt.

Carol, My peas were doing that and that's one of the reasons I went ahead and yanked them out and replaced them with pole beans. Once the bottoms of the vines start looking like that, it seems like it is all downhill....and we were having too many days where the highs hit the low 90s for the peas to stay happy much longer anyway. If we'd been cooler, I might have been more patient with the peas, but you can't slow down the heat once it kicks into gear. Now the young bean plants are just starting to climb the trellis and I don't miss the snap peas at all. They were good while we had them, but part of keeping my garden in heavy production involves me being willing to move on from an earlier crop to a later one without skipping a beat. Most of the time I can do that with absolutely no regrets.

We finally are getting rain today---almost an inch so far---and we needed it. May had been a huge disappointment in terms of rainfall, so much so that if it hadn't rained today, I guess I would have watered the front garden as parts it were very, very dry. Now it is too wet to do anything outdoors, but I'm still glad we got the rain. We need more, and we seem likely to get more. The downside to rain in May is that it usually really kicks off the tomato disease season, but since most of the diseases that are a problem here---like Early Blight---are airborne, it isn't like we aren't going to have them appear anyway.

At least we only got rain and not hail. Any day in May that you get rain without hail is a really good day.

Dawn

At noon we are 54 degrees and our rain has stopped but it is still cloudy and very wet. The Mesonet doesn't reflect all of the rainfall we have had because it measures south of us. The weather man stood in front of the map last night on the 6 o'clock news and I couldn't see the precip number, but I could see that it started with a 2. LOL Our Mesonet was still showing l.l7 at that time and it rained most of last night and sometimes heavily. We had to be at the hospital at 6:30 this morning and it was still raining. Ditches are running full and puddles everywhere.

I need to rip my peas out but will wait until this weekend. I want to try to get pics of little man hiding in the pea row having his nacks and pea candy balls.

I still feel like my garden is running on ahead of me on its own timetable and I'm just trying to stay caught up with it. It is hard to explain how far ahead of its usual self it is this year. It has to be the early heat that made everything grow unabated because all I did with the cool-season crops was plant them exactly right on time---not early. Some years I hang on to them for a while and don't get them planted as early as I could because I'm waiting for the really cold nights to warm up. The only difference this year is that it was so warm I planted on time and, also, that we got hot early so that they took off and grew quickly from Day 1 instead of sort of pussyfooting around while waiting for the cold nights to go away. We just weren't even having those cold nights.

I'm about to harvest the last of the cabbage, and that normally doesn't happen until mid-June. Most everything has been a month ahead harvest-wise, and that has been consistent from the moment the first asparagus spears popped up out of the ground well over a month early. We may believe we are in control of our gardens, but I'm here to tell you that my garden has a mind of its own this year and it is doing whatever it wants whenever it wants and I just have to pay attention and harvest the stuff when it is ready. Not only did we get cauliflower this year (often, in spring, it is like Brussels Sprouts and bolts before it can produce a head), it was full-sized, delicious and matured really early.

Sometimes with the onions, I am getting overly eager for them to hurry up and finish making leaves and to start bulbing up, etc., so I can move on with the succession crop for that bed. This year? As they began popping out of the ground in late April or earliest May, I was standing there sort of wringing my hands and saying "No, no, no, slow down....it's too early." I had been toying with the idea of side-dressing them with some nitrogen to push a little more growth since (I thought) they had plenty of time left to grow, but then I looked at them one day and realized they were mature and that was that. Clearly the words to them to slow down didn't help. When the onions are through, they're through, so now it is just a matter of waiting for the necks to thin out before I pull the plants out of the ground. Since May ran so short on rain so far (about 2" versus our usual May rainfall of almost 6") and I didn't irrigate the onions, they won't be huge. I doubt any will make it to softball sized, but a great many of them are larger than tennis balls and baseballs, and they've achieved that on about 12-13" of rainfall. The standard rainfall or irrigation needed to push onions to achieve their max size is roughly 21" in between the time they're planted in February and harvested in June or July, but mine are plenty big despite not getting even close to 21".

I feel like Alice in Wonderland. It would be so awesome if the garden was this fast to produce huge harvests every year, but it isn't, so I'm just trying to enjoy this crazy year for however long the weather keeps everything so happy and productive. Not having the usual level of pests is great and would be wonderful all on its own. Having everything grow fast and produce early and finish up early is pretty amazing on its own. Having the two things happening together? It is beyond belief.

And, it isn't just me who has early cucumbers either. You cannot find a Mrs. Wages' pickling mix package at all at the Wal-Mart closest to us, and that tells me that someone else other than me has a lot of early pickling cucumbers.

And, to add to the feeling that the garden is running on its own schedule, and not mine, the tomatillos are blooming, and the first zinnias are beginning to bloom, and it isn't even Memorial Day yet. Tim said something a couple of days ago about Monday being Memorial Day and I told him that we aren't even close to the holiday yet--so, you see, the speedy garden even had him thinking it is later in the year than it actually is. The artichokes have produced chokes but since I just have the one plant that survived last year's flooding, I'm not going to harvest the artichokes. I'd rather leave them on the plant and let them bloom so the little flying creatures and I can enjoy them together. There's really not much left to do in the garden----now it is just a matter of maintaining and harvesting.