Stumped? Harlequin ladybirds and growing your own garlic

Are ladybirds a pest and other gardening queries
The Harlequin ladybird: not to be confused with a plant-eating pest. Photograph: Oxford Scientific

My neighbour says a ladybird-like beetle is destroying all my plants. She says I have to get rid of the plants and start again or squash the beetles (which look just like ladybirds to me).
Your neighbour may be thinking of the harlequin ladybird, first spotted (sorry) in the south-east in 2004 and spreading north and west. It comes in various colour forms and it doesn't eat plants; it does eat aphids, though. It has a longer breeding season than native ladybirds, so there is a worry it might out-compete them. That's about it, though – not quite the apocalyptic vision painted by your neighbour. Don't kill them or rip out all your plants.

I grew garlic this year and have a fair few seed bulbs. I'd like to grow it from seed but don't know how.
Man has mucked garlic about so much that it has lost its ability to make real seed, so you must be talking about the bulblets on the top of the flower, or, more likely, the cloves. The usual advice is to buy cloves new each year, because diseases build up over time, though you can re-plant your own for a few years. But this means you'll have to eat the disease-ridden, smaller bulbs and save the plump, white ones for planting. If you're talking about the bulblets, they'll take longer to turn into full-sized bulbs – more like a year and a half to two years – but it can be done.

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