July 9, 2008
Attract pest-eating bugs to your garden
by Jen (July 9, 2008)
How do you keep bugs out of your garden without using pesticides? There are a lot of ways to go about this. One tried and true method is to put in your garden plants that attract pest-eating insects like bees and ladybugs. Note: if anyone in your household (or a very nearby neighbor) is highly allergic to bee stings, you may not want to attract bees - just to be safe. Fortunately, there are plenty of other bugs to choose from.
Which plants attract which bugs?
FarmerFred has the scoop on this with a page listing helpful bugs and the plants that attract them. See also The Garden Helper’s page on “good bugs” and Natural Life Magazine’s article.
Not every species of friendly bug lives in every region, so you’ll need to find out which ones are common in your area before you try attracting them. You may be able to find a website for your region by searching for a phrase like “native bugs Florida.” If that doesn’t work, look for books at your local library. Or - even simpler - ask a local gardening shop what bugs you can expect to attract.
Is that bug/cocoon/egg an ally or an enemy?
Once you start attracting bugs, you’ll want to know how to tell friendly bugs from enemy bugs. DGSGardening has some great pictures of bugs to help you identify what you’re looking at. Bugs are classified as “friends”, “some bad habits” and “the enemy,” according to what they do in your garden.
Dave’s Garden has a searchable database of 5,000 bugs, which is very helpful if you have some idea what your mystery bug might be.
More helpful links
- Pioneer thinking has several articles on attracting pest-eating bugs and other natural forms of bug control.
- Beyond Pesticides has lots of species-specific advice for natural bug control.
- HGTV has an article listing some of the best bugs.
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July 9th, 2008 at 8:29 am
Wow, Dave’s Garden is almost entirely useless! It’s just like the weed databases I’ve found online. I don’t know the genus and species, I just know what it LOOKS LIKE. If someone could come up with a searchable database for insects and weeds by physical description, that would be gold, baby!
July 9th, 2008 at 9:42 am
E, I think it’s a bit unfair to say it’s “almost entirely useless.” It’s useful if you’ve narrowed the possibilities down to a few species.
A searchable database by physical description would be great - it would need drop-down menus of traits for people to choose, rather than rely on them using the same terms to describe the traits that the database writer used.
But for now, I’d try Yahoo or Google for searching that physical description.