COLLECTING MANTIS CASTINGS

Image Gallery A mantis egg mass glued to briars .... PHOTOES BY DAVID WICKERSHAM AND DARRELL DENNIS

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To supply your own "garden watchdogs", two readers suggest ...

Handpicking is sometimes just too slow and time-consuming — and chemical pesticides are hazardous, of course — so what can the home gardener do to prevent hordes of voracious insects from descending upon the flowerbed or pea patch? Well, he or she can prepare for such an attack by marching right out and getting a biological control, that's what ... preferably one that's just as voracious as the pests are! Something, in fact, like the remarkable praying mantis.

Ready and willing — and certainly able — to eat its way through crowds of the plant — munching bugs that threaten your garden, this giant (up to five-inch-long) green predator can be brought directly to the site before birth and allowed to hatch right in the area it will call home. All you need to do is take a spring walk or a drive in the country, and collect some of the egg cases produced by mother mantises the previous year.

CHECKOUT BRIARS AND BYROADS

Mantis egg cases, or castings, are quite distinctive. Gray, with a sort of foam/paper exterior, and shaped like a broad cone with a flattened bottom, they're usually found attached to twigs, branches, or briars. Sometimes the mother insect will even glue a casting to the side of a barn or shed where she has found plenty of food. Roadside thickets, pasture shrubs, and fence-row tangles on farms where no chemical pesticides have been used are also good bets for the casting collector. North Carolinian Darrell Dennis has found that riverside bushes are treasure-troves in his section of the country, while — in Georgia — reader Roy Dycus had good luck in a farm blackberry patch.

During the months of January and February, the eggs swell in anticipation of spring ... making the cases easy to spot in March. When it's time to gather castings, the whole Dycus family gets into the act: Roy drives slowly down a country road, while the children keep a lookout for the gray cones and call a halt when they spot some.

(The youngsters also keep their eyes peeled for returnable cans and bottles that people have thoughtlessly dumped by the road ... and collecting these helps the family defray the cost of gasoline for their excursions.)

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