SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY

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By Rhonda Massingham Hart

Managing beneficial bugs in your garden

Look around any natural garden — that is, any ecosystem undisturbed by human intervention — and what do you see? Are all the plants devastated by insect infestations? Are gophers the only surviving life forms? With the exception of climatic extremes such as deserts and arctic glaciers, wouldn't you expect to see a variety of life, from plants to insects, birds, and animals, coexisting?

The answers are, "no," "of course not," and "well, I certainly hope so!" Nature works in harmony with itself. The food chain follows a hierarchy: plants, plant eaters, and finally, plant-eater eaters. If one category is troubled, the whole system is affected. Not enough plants and the plant eaters starve; not enough plant eaters and the plant-eater eaters go hungry; not enough plant-eater eaters and the population of plant eaters expands until they eat up all the plants. A simple, yet easily disrupted balance.

So it is in your garden. By now you may have come to realize that you are not the only plant eater involved. There are plenty of others eager to get their share. So how does nature handle the problem? Of course — more plant-eater eaters!

Unless your garden has been saturated with poisonous chemicals, chances are that at any given moment scores of plant-eater eaters, or predators, are at work. Cats are catching mice, birds are devouring caterpillars, ladybugs are gobbling up aphids, and lacewings are munching on a variety of bugs. One of the best things you can do for your garden is to encourage this natural system. You can even help nature along by introducing beneficials into the garden.

But how to achieve this success, and what makes it a victory rather than a crushing defeat? A garden full of bugs is a boon instead of a bust when many of those bugs are beneficial insects — those that attack the bad-guy bugs that attack our crops. How you can achieve such a lofty goal is at once very simple and very demanding.

Enticing Beneficial Insects

The number-one demand of beneficial insects is that you use no poisonous chemicals. Pesticide use is easily the primary reason that there are no more beneficial bugs at work today. Other requirements of beneficial bugs vary with the individual species, whether they be predator or parasite, but some general principles benefit all.

Diversify. Plant many different types of plants, particularly flowers and herbs. These supply beneficials with nectar and pollen necessary to many adult forms, as well as rest stops and breeding grounds.

Especially attractive are umbelliferous flowers, those with many tiny flowers arranged in tight umbels, such as members of the carrot family, dill, parsley, angelica, fennel, or Queen Anne's lace. Daisies, strawflowers, goldenrod, yarrow, petunias, cosmos, zinnias, nasturtiums, marigolds, and sunflowers also draw beneficials. Weeds, including lamb's-quarters, wild mustard, dandelion, nettle, pigweed, and knotweed are also important to beneficial insects. Many small-flowering herbs, including garden sage, thyme, oregano, lavender, catnip and other mints, rosemary, carroway, anise, coriander, sweet marjoram, and tansy (not ragwort) attract beneficials.

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