TYPES OF PEST CONTROL

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Timing

Some people have reported success in avoiding insects by timing plantings so insects are avoided. For example, corn earworms generally do not survive winter much north of New Jersey. If you can figure out when they hatch and how long it is likely to take them to get out of your garden, you can time your planting so the ears form after the first flight and before the second. This won't always work because of variations in winter weather. However, if you have several plantings of corn and some have big problems and other don't, make a note of it. While you may not want to cut out any of the succession crops, you may decide one planting will be better for the bulk of the storage crop than another.

Timing can also be helpful in disrupting an insect's life cycle. Tilling the garden in the fall, for example, puts the cutworm larva up on the surface where birds can find them. I wouldn't recommend this unless I had a major insect problem that couldn't be reasonably dealt with in any other way. The disruption in the problem insect's life cycle is likely to be a disruption to a lot more friendly and benign insects as well.

Sprays

There are only two sprays that I will use: Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and Bacillus thuringiensis var. san diego—the former for cabbage loopers, cabbage worms, and tomato hornworms; and the latter for the Colorado potato beetle. I use them because they are non-toxic and because they only kill the target insects, and even then only if they eat a leaf that has BT on it.

Predator Insects

The two most famous of these are ladybugs and praying mantis. Several kinds of wasps and lacewings are also helpful. You can buy some of these beneficial insects for release in your garden. I won't go into the gruesome details of how many aphids a hungry ladybug can eat in an hour. Consider what that hungry bug is going to do when the food runs out. "Fly away, fly away" to someplace where the food supply is better. I have got some of all of these insects in my garden or close by, I think, though I don't see them often. I'm glad not to, since that means there isn't much for them to eat.

If I come across a tomato hornworm carrying a load of white oval packages on its back, I leave it alone. The packages are eggs of a parasitic wasp. I want them to hatch so there will be more wasps around to seek out hornworms. The wasps are much better at finding them than I am.

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