This Year, Why Not Zap Your Bad Garden Bugs with Good Ones?

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Spiders come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Some weave webs . . . others constantly stalk the soil and surrounding vegetation for prey. Some varieties—such as the crab and orb spiders—openly sit and wait for their victims . . . others (the majority of spiders, in fact) are elusive and prefer to remain "under cover" until their food comes along.

Closely related to spiders are the mites, which also technically fall into the "arachnid" classification. Here, the gardener has three true friends: the greenhouse mite, the Pacific mite, and the Willamette mite . . . all of which feed on the much-cursed spider mite.

OTHERS

There are, of course, many other "biological control insects" that you'll learn about once your eyes have been opened to this method of zapping the pests in your garden. (Ground beetles, for instance, feed on cutworms, army worms, grasshoppers, snails, and slugs in both the larva and adult stage . . . and they do their best work at night, when you're slumbering in bed.) The ones shown and described in detail here, however, are quite a sufficient introduction to some of the beneficial predators that can do so much good for your vegetable patch. If you succeed only in encouraging the ladybugs, mantises, flies, spiders, etc., listed above, you'll be way ahead of garden pests during the coming summer.

HOW TO ESTABLISH (AND MAINTAIN)
"FRIENDLY" INSECTS IN YOUR GARDEN

Biological control does not mean eliminating all insect pests from your garden. (Obviously, you can't expect the "good" insects to survive without any "bad" insects to feast on.) What it does mean is the establishment and maintenance of a critical balance between the number of plants, friendly insects, and insect pests in your vegetable patch.

To achieve this natural balance, you may well have to "import" a rather large number and variety of predatory and parasitic insects to your garden at first. For instance, ladybird beetles alone may not prove capable of keeping aphids under control . . . but a combination of ladybugs, lacewings, and parasitic wasps might do the trick. Eventually, of course, as the pest population in your garden decreases to a normal "low" level, so will the population of pest-control insects.

To maintain this delicately balanced ecosystem, you'll need to make a concerted effort to keep the "friendly" insects in your garden. Follow three simple rules, and you should have no problem:

[1] Provide water. (Most insects need at least one drink a day.)

[2] Plant many different kinds of plants. A variety of flowering plants, vegetables, and fruit trees will do the best job of providing the pollen, nectar, and honeydew your insect friends need.

[3] Plant new crops for each season of the year. By rotating crops year round (as many farmers do), you'll find that beneficial insects are more likely to remain in your garden and pests less likely to get out of hand.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print