Prior to killing God's creatures, do your research

Matt and I have a no dig garden which is coming along nicely at the moment (well actually we have four of them) but I had noticed particularly on the ground cherries and the eggplant some small black insects. I also thought that the leaves looked a little speckled and eaten. I suggested killing them to Matt, but always the voice of reason, he wasn't too keen. Firstly as a rule we're trying to avoid chemicals, they kill the good insects as well and then the bad ones can really take off when they come back. So occasionally Matt would squash a few of these little black critters to control their numbers, but nothing apart from that.

Today we wandered outside thinking we may plant out our seedlings, however we both realised we were too sick and exhausted and we didn't do it. However when I was looking at my eggplant really closely to see the damage these insects were doing I noticed some red mites (I suspect they are spider mites of some description). This didn't bode well, so I went on the internet to see what to kill them with and what type they were. Which is when I discovered a photo of my little black insect. Which is apparently a spider mite destroyer lady beetle.

I felt very guilty. That was right before I felt annoyed because they weren't eating enough spider mites, our plants were still being destroyed. One of the things Matt thought might work would be to crush our diatomite therefore creating absorbacide which we hoped would only be bad for the mites (although now on further research and all to late I realise it is probably not so good for any of the insects)

Diatomite is a form of kitty litter, but can also be used to grow plants in. It absorbs a lot of water and is one way of creating a water wise garden. So we use it in our no dig garden a lot and we have heaps of it. So I got a scoop of it and used my bamix to cut it up and make a powder. I have sprinkled a reasonable amount of it all around the plants and over the leaves. My own little experiment. At the time I did it I thought the good little beetles would survive it without any worries, but now that I've read about it in wikipedia, I can only hope the good beetles ran away (they seem to jump really quickly and a fair distance). We'll see what happens.