GARDEN WARRIORS

Foxwolf illustrates a guide about insects for home gardeners. She may have a slight bias.

GARDEN WARRIORS – Painted Doggie Comic

Panel 1:

The sun is shining through clouds over the roof of a building. In front of the building is a bustling garden behind a rickety fence. The garden contains vine plants climbing a trellis, bushy leafy greens, pepper plants, and cornstalks. Insects flutter and buzz through the foliage.

Panel 2:

A praying mantis climbing up a leaf peers over its shoulder.

GARDEN FRIEND

MANTIS

ATTACK STYLE: Ambush

FUN FACTS:

Thought by ancients to have supernatural powers, such as guiding lost souls home or to the underworld.
They were called “The Devil’s Horses” in the early 1900s.
Have high-resolution vision and special organs that can sense bats’ echolocation.
Can catch and eat hummingbirds, frogs, and lizards.
Some mimic flowers and ants, and they sway side to side to appear as if they are branches or leaves to lure prey.

LIFESPAN: 4 weeks – 6 months

WILL IT HURT ME?

Yes, if you mess with them they will strike with their spiked forearms and attempt to bite. leave them alone!

Panel 3:

A wasp buzzes around above a cabbage.

GARDEN FRIEND

PARASITOID WASP

ATTACK STYLE: Child Soldiers

FUN FACTS:

Lays eggs in or on other insects, which then hatch and eat the host from the inside before bursting from the corpse as fully grown wasps.
Made Charles Darwin doubt the existence of a loving god.
The larvae do not have buttholes until they are ready to pupate and leave the host. This prevents the host from dying too soon of being filled with baby wasp poop.
Some use mind control to force the host to craft a protective cocoon for the wasp babies before dying.
Host caterpillars will sometimes poison themselves in an attempt to kill the eggs within them.

LIFE SPAN: 1 – 2 weeks

WILL IT HURT ME?

Only mentally.

Panel 4:

A ladybug crawls around in the shade on a plant stem.

GARDEN FRIEND

LADYBUG

ATTACK STYLE: Eats slow moving prey alive

FUN FACTS:

Baby ladybugs will start eating their unhatched siblings as soon as they’re born, so some lay extra, unfertilized eggs so fertilized eggs are less likely to be eaten. The adults also eat all the babies.
When they aren’t stuffed full from cannibalism, they like to feed on aphids and mites.
Will fight ants when preying on aphids, because ants farm aphids for their sweet, sweet sugar pee. The ants will throw ladybug eggs away from their aphid herd.
Ladybugs are sluts and riddled with STDs.
“Ladybird taint” happens when ladybugs get scooped up into grape harvests and accidentally pressed into wine. This makes the wine taste like rancid peanut butter and piss.

LIFE SPAN: About 1 year

WILL THEY HURT ME?

They can bite, but you can handle it.

Panel 5:

A worried looking jumping spider peaks out from beneath the leaf it’s hiding under. Beyond the leaf, a wolf spider stalks along looking for prey.

GARDEN FRIEND

SPIDER

ATTACK STYLE: Venom – and cowboy lassos sometimes

FUN FACTS:

Kill up to 800 million tons of prey per year, but they also eat pollen and nectar.
Spiders are loving mothers who carry their babies around on their backs, share food with them, and feed their babies spider milk.
Spiders use their silk for a bunch of stuff, but the cutest is to craft “safety ropes.” The diving bell spider makes an inflatable silk bubble house underwater and periodically refills it with baggies of fresh air.
One species of jumping spider catches big fat juicy blood-filled mosquitoes to flaunt around, and the scent of this delicious dinner mixed with spider musk is irresistible to the ladies. Relatable. Some male spiders caress the females until they’re in a horny stupor prior to mating, as any true king should.
Spiders are just so cool. C’mon don’t squish ‘em. I know they’re spooky, but they’re just lil guys!

LIFESPAN: 1 – 25 years

WILL THEY HURT ME?

They can but they don’t want to.

Panel 6:

A wheel bug stands, ready to strike, on a leaf of kale.

GARDEN FRIEND

WHEEL BUG

ATTACK STYLE: Grab, stab, soup

FUN FACTS:

Really bad at flying but they do it anyway.
They let out a little stink when they get spooked.
One of the only predators brave enough to eat stink bugs.
Highly recognizable by the circular saw blade jutting out of their backs. They have a short fuzzy coat of fur covering most of their body.
Wheel bugs are a type of the very cool-ly named assassin bugs.
Love to patrol sunflowers.
Their eggs look like little glass beer bottles with white caps.

LIFESPAN: 3-4 months

WILL THEY HURT ME?

They don’t give a shit about you, but don’t give them a reason to start. if they do bite you, it will hurt, possibly for months.

Panel 7:

An entire family of harlequin bugs are sucking the life out of a leaf and flipping you off. In the foreground are rows of their flashy, striped eggs.

GARDEN FOE

HARLEQUIN BUG

ATTACK STYLE: Sucking your brassicas dry

FUN FACTS:

Oh sure they’re dressed up real nice, but these little fuckers are why i’m kale and cabbageless right now.
These stink bug hussies store all the cabbage stink chemicals they consume in their bodies to ensure they taste like shit to predators.
They lay wayyy too many eggs constantly. God, there are so many of these things.
A suggested way to get rid of these bastards is to plant a “trap” crop, and then cover the plant in straw and literally BURN IT TO THE GROUND once the harlequin bugs have laid eggs all over it.
They say you should churn up old plant matter after harvest season so harlequin bugs can’t survive the winter in a dead leaf blanket fort, but do the good bugs need a blanket fort to survive the winter? I don’t know. I don’t want to ruin everyone else’s rotting blanket forts.

LIFESPAN: 25 – 41 days

WILL IT HURT ME?

If having no salad hurts you as much as it does me, yes.

Panel 8:

An adult squash bug sucks the last bit of life out of a shriveled gourd while its babies feed on the shaded stem of the gourd plant beyond. The adult flips you the bird.

GARDEN FOE

SQUASH BUG

ATTACK STYLE: Ruining Halloween

FUN FACTS:

Love to decimate squash plants, especially pumpkins.
They suck out all the juices and transmit bacterial diseases to the host plant.
They are so good at killing gourds that for a while, people thought they had toxic saliva.
Squash bugs like to set up for the winter under dead leaves, presumably enjoying an evil sleepover with the harlequin bugs.
They seem less effective at taking over when the plant is trellised up away from the ground in my experience. But I don’t know anything. Why are you listening to me?
Squash bugs develop immunity to pesticides easily.

LIFESPAN: 6 – 8 weeks

WILL IT HURT ME?

It will hurt you to see a bunch of tiny pumpkins and zucchinis that you thought you’d be eating in a couple weeks turn into brown goop.

Panel 9:

Inside a tubular stem, a squash vine borer grub is chowing down.

GARDEN FOE

SQUASH VINE BORER

ATTACK STYLE: Being raised inside a zucchini stem

FUN FACTS:

Fat white grubs grow up inside the hollow of unlucky cucurbit stems.
You can tell which parts of the plant contain a vine borer baby by the yellowy-orangish crumbles of literal shit on the stem where the larva is chowing down inside.
The entire plant above the point of squash borer damage will probably die.
This science article I’m reading says after the larva move out of the stem and into a cocoon in the ground, it takes 750 – 1000 days to hatch into adults??? That’s several years?? What is a “degree day,” science??

LIFESPAN: I have no idea. I don’t speak science well enough.

WILL IT HURT ME?

Yes, fried zucchini is a vital nutrient you cannot do without.

Panel 10:

A Colorado potato beetle sits atop a wilting potato plant – you guessed it – flipping you off.

GARDEN FOE

COLORADO POTATO BEETLE

ATTACK STYLE: Imperialism

FUN FACTS:

The potato beetle has spread east throughout Europe and Asia thanks in part to the American military allegedly dropping them on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
A USSR publication described the situation:

“By spreading this pest in foreign countries and condemning their population to hunger, Wall Street businessmen are attempting to unload on the European market their supplies of chemicals and other products.” (referring to American chemical companies’ aggressive campaign to boost DDT usage worldwide despite its known health and ecological dangers.)

The U.S. denies doing this, but artificially creating a need for your stupid product and then selling it to your victims at a premium is a major portion of the American economy.
Polish publications at the time support the claims, and even include the time and location of the potato beetle drop.
To add insult to injury, the CIA convinced West Germany to drop cardboard potato beetles printed with “freedom” over the afflicted countries.

LIFESPAN: About 1 year

WILL IT HURT ME?

Yes, when they are useful as a weapon of mass destruction to open more markets for some deadly pesticide.

Panel 11:

A weevil with rosy cheeks and a crown stands at the edge of a blade of grass as magical sparkles dance in the background.

PRINCE OF THE GARDEN

WEEVIL

ATTACK STYLE: Stealing your heart

FUN FACTS:

If he got the snoot, and he got the boots – it’s weevil time, baby!
Most can fly, but some just walk around.
Some species are only female and completely asexual.
Weevils helped children in the early 20^th century do better in school by greatly reducing the need for child labor on farms!
They also reduced horrific racism in the American South by persuading black folks to move to the marginally-less-horrifically-racist North!
To recognize all the good deeds weevils did for Alabama, a statue was erected in their honor!
Sometimes when it’s cold, they come into your house. That’s okay. They’re allowed.

LIFESPAN: 4 months – 1 year

WILL IT HURT ME?

How dare you.

From off screen, someone shouts, “HEY.”

Panel 12:

Houndmage stands behind Foxwolf with his arms crossed, looking very critical. He continues his interjection:

“Aren’t weevils bad for plants?”

“Isn’t that a statue of a boll weevil?”

“Aren’t those the ones that decimated cotton crops in the South, which fucked over black communities the hardest and forced them from their homes??”

Foxwolf is sitting at her drawing tablet working on this comic. She’s wearing a graphic hoodie depicting a weevil’s face. There is a sticker on the back of the drawing tablet that says, “unbeWEEVILbly CUTE,” with a little weevil next to the words. There is also a plush weevil next to the tablet and a calendar on the wall in the background displaying the month of August which features a giraffe weevil reared up like a majestic horse. Clutching hard the drawing stylus in her fist and baring her fangs, Foxwolf tearfully screeches a response to Houndmage’s accusations:

“THEY ONLY WANTED A LITTLE SNACK!!”

“THEY DIDN’T MEAN TO HURT ANYONE!!!”