Gardening with beneficial insects

I garden rather simply.  It is mostly due to necessity because I don’t have the time to put into gardening to do anything else at this point in my life.  I rarely, if ever, weed the garden area.  I plant and water and let nature do its work.  In the fall I pile on a bunch of leaves onto the garden to stay over winter.  In the spring I turn over the soil so the leaves are worked into the soil.   I do intentionally garden organically, but in the past few years I have come to the conclusion that it is better to start with plants from the nursery than to plant from seeds.  By the time I was starting to harvest vegetables, it was getting too cold for them to produce more.  I don’t have the space to start my own seedlings so I’ve started buying plants.  That gives us more produce during the summer.  I don’t use any fertilizer other than nature and I don’t use any bug sprays.  That does limit some of the things I’ve been able to grow though.  I haven’t yet been successful with watermelon or corn.  But cucumbers and tomatoes always do well here.  I planted 16 different kinds of tomatoes this year with many of them heirloom varieties.  
Lots of tomatoes to pick now.

Earlier in the summer we had a watched preying mantis egg case hatch.  We had released all of them into our yard, but after a few weeks we didn’t find them anywhere.  The other day I was checking on the cucumbers when I discovered one.  It is toward the center of the picture.  Can you find it?

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