Like most things that occur in time, the vegetable growing season has a beginning, middle and end. In each of these phases the garden is a different place, owing mostly to what’s growing there, the temperature and the challenges that beset the gardener.

We’re a week or two into the middle phase of the garden season, and tending a vegetable garden now requires different strategies. For starters, the daily high temperatures have become locked into the 80s, with highs in the 90s due this week. This compares to the milder temperatures in the early part of the gardening season, when the sun’s warmth offered garden plants nothing but gentle encouragement.

In the middle phase of the season, vegetable plants are both victims and beneficiaries of the heat. The sun continues to provide one of the primary ingredients for growth, but at the same time becomes a primary source of stress. The antidote, of course, is water, and in a perfectly balanced ecosystem, it would arrive on time and in sufficient quantity. The reality is that for many gardeners, supplemental watering will become part of the drill during the next couple of weeks.

Another significant difference in this phase of gardening is the size and variety of the insect population. You know we’re in the middle phase when the lightning bugs appear and you can’t walk across the lawn without attracting chiggers.

My personal nemeses, the baby grasshoppers, are now about half an inch long, and will grow up to be a real menace. One of my neighbors predicted the other day that we’re in for a bad year. It wouldn’t be such a burden if a grasshopper ate all of a single tomato. The problem develops when it takes one bite out of every fruit on a plant.

This looks to be a good year for other chewing insects as well. The bean beetles already have made their presence known in my garden. As usual I’m fighting back with rotenone, a naturally occurring insecticide that comes in powder form. It’s less harmful to bees, ladybugs and other beneficial insects, and this should be a consideration. It doesn’t do much good to save your crop if the bees can’t pollinate it.

The rotenone also will keep grasshoppers and blister beetles off tomato plants, flea beetles off eggplant and the squash bugs off your cucurbits.

I am somewhat amused by people who recommend handpicking the larger insects, such as bean beetles and grasshoppers, out of the garden. Although I have cut way back on the amount of garden I plant, I still have enough other things to do in a day to leave me little time for bug catching. Grasshoppers are particularly problematic because they move faster than I could ever hope to.

This would sound like a perfect job for children, except for the problem of disposing of the captured insects. I know better than to suggest something as crass as smooshing them, which is exactly the advice I offered several years ago to herb gardeners who were losing their dill to caterpillars. I received several letters and phone calls, some anonymous, some not, but all of them unflattering. The level of emotion I evoked in people was fairly impressive.

I learned some lessons there. Unless I’m willing to keep a bug as a pet, I’d better leave it alone or poison it to death. The aggrieved insect lovers who would even entertain the idea of euthanasia wanted it to be nonviolent.

The second lesson I learned is that the green and yellow caterpillars in question, which turn into butterflies, are beloved, anthropomorphized creatures that probably deserve their own Disney movie. It would be a blockbuster.