Attracting Beneficial Insects to Your Garden

basil, parsley, lettuce, arugula, dill, beans

Portions reposted from http://phigblog.com/2009/06/21/buzz-on-attracting-beneficial-insects-to-your-garden/ This has been very helpful to my organic garden!

LACEWINGS: One of the best predatory insects, these little guys flutter around the garden on delicate green wings at dusk.  Their larvae are known as ‘aphid lions’, but lacewings also attack thrips, caterpillars, mites, and more!  COMPANION PLANTS: Dill, goldenrod, dandelions.

LADYBUGS: There’s a reason these spotted beetles are considered lucky, as their presence helps protect your garden from bothersome pests.  Their larvae look like tiny alligators and voraciously consume aphids, mealy bugs, scales, and spider mites.  COMPANION PLANTS: Yarrow, sunflowers, mint.

BRACONID WASPS: These tiny wasps don’t sting, but gruesomely parasitize everything from gypsy moths to cabbageworms to cornborers.  After laying eggs inside their prey, their young eat their victims alive from the inside out.  How’s that for revenge against your enemies?  COMPANION PLANTS: Fennel, coriander,  Queen Anne’s lace.

DADDY LONG LEGS: Eight legs good!  Like the spiders they are closely related to, these useful fellows feed almost exclusively on all kinds of insects.  COMPANION PLANTS: Comfrey, yarrow, nettle.

How do I attract and keep them in my garden?

• Avoid spraying chemicals. Insecticides are generally indiscriminate, killing good and bad bugs alike. In the long run this will only make your problems worse. The pests will quickly return and, in the absence of predators, their populations will explode and devastate your garden. By the time your natural insect allies return, the damage will be done.
• Feed your insect friends with beautiful flowers. Besides eating pest insects, many beneficials also feed on pollen at different stages of their life cycle. Attract them by planting a wide variety of annual and perennial flowers. Keep them in the garden by making sure you have something blooming in all seasons. Plants with clusters of tiny flowers (the umbel and aster families in particular) are often the best for bringing in beneficials.
• Provide a home for your new garden allies. Ideally you want them to stay in your garden year round as a permanent garrison of pest protection.Dense vegetation, fallen leaves, mulch, and rock piles all provide good shelter for beneficials to live and reproduce. If possible, leave your end-of-season garden clean up until Spring to allow your insect friends to overwinter.Pre-industrial farms always had hedgerows, wild spaces in between fields that provided habitat for a balanced ecology. You can apply the same principle in any sized yard or garden.Consider leaving one corner of a larger property to grow wild at nature’s whim. In smaller gardens, the approach can be as simple as interplanting some flowers with your veggies.
• Create a watering hole. Although many beneficials meet their moisture needs from drinking nectar, others need a water source to stay hydrated or to reproduce. This can be accomplished with something as simple as a birdbath or as ambitious as a greywater processing pond.

Learn more: The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control, Ellis & Bradley; Gaia’s Garden, Toby Hemenway. http://phigblog.com/2009/06/21/buzz-on-attracting-beneficial-insects-to-your-garden/

Click on the Continue reading link to read about my gardening experience (I’m a newbie at this, but having my own horse manure compost helps …)

The image of the herbs above is about a month old. Since then, with all of the rain we have gotten, they have gotten huge, but the lettuce didn’t make it. The arugula seems to love the wet, tho’.  I’ve also planted lemon balm, pineapple sage (doesn’t like the we either & not looking too good yesterday, but may come back when sun is out again), onions, oregano, thyme, & more marigolds.  My tomatoes have gotten huge – the cherry tomato is over 7 feet tall & I keep having to tie it in circles back to the bamboo stakes, plus added another wooden stake so these can be cross-tied for support. It had long overgrown the cage we put around it.  I have to really look for the ripened tomatoes hiding amongst the foliage & get about 10+ a day.  The regular tomato plant has formed another stalk & is in 2 tall tomato cages, supported in the middle with a long stake. There are marigolds on both sides (I’ll put pics up soon – they need resizing).

My green beans are never-ending, producing beans even tho’ there are hardly any leaves left. New beans planted are producing beans now. I have it staked so the beans will grow around the pole. We didn’t do this with the other ones & planted them too close, making it backbreaking to harvest the beans every day – I get from 5 – 15 beans a day. We don’t let them grow really big as we like them young & tender.

My yellow squash had only produced big plants with small squash & I understand that this is because they didn’t get pollinated, so I planted a butterfly plant & it has been attracting bees to pollinate them.  they don’t like the we either, so I will harvest them very young & sometimes eat them while doing so.  I have fried the squash blossoms along with green tomatoes & wow, is that good.  The fried squash blossoms make me want to just pick those off to eat (I read about eating these online).

Anyway, I am having so much fun doing this garden & I can’t wait to do another bigger one next year. We just take our composted horse manure, brought up by the big tractor & dump it on the ground so we have 2+ foot mounds to plant. So, you horse people that want gardens, keep your horse manure in a pile somewhere & in a year or less you will have the perfect crumbly compost. Also add your kitchen veggie & fruit & eggshell scraps to the pile & turn. I keep a small compost pile in a big plastic planter from a plant I had bought. We rake up our leaves & have a grinder, put the leaves in garbage cans, so I add these ground up leaves & manure I have in a pile next to my garden into the plastic compost planter & stir.  It’s full enough now to go out to the manure pile to be mixed in. We have already used almost all of the composted manure we had separated out last year!

Tags: beneficial insects, companion plants, natural insect and disease control, organic gardening

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