Posted on 05/13/2023 6:07:30 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you.
If you have specific question about a plant/problem you are having, please remember to state the Growing Zone where you are located.
This thread is a non-political respite. No matter what, you won’t be flamed, and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked.
It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table Recipes, Preserving, Good Living - there is no telling where it will go - and that is part of the fun and interest. Jump in and join us! Send a Private Message to Diana in Wisconsin if you'd like to be added to our New & Improved Ping List.
NOTE: This is a once a week Ping List. We do post to the thread during the week. Links to related articles and discussions which might be of interest to Gardeners are welcomed any time!
Beneficial Insects in the Garden
Which are the most beneficial insects? We’re talking about bugs that are good for plants in the garden and eat pests that would otherwise eat your plants. Find out and start thinking about which plants and flowers attract beneficial insects!
What Are Beneficial Insects?
The average backyard is home to thousands of insects, but you may be surprised to learn that only about a tenth of these are destructive. In fact, most are either beneficial or harmless. Beneficial insects fall into three main categories:
Pollinators: We depend on these insects—including bees, butterflies, flies, and moths—to pollinate our garden’s flowers.
Predators: These insects eliminate pests by eating them. Things like ladybugs, praying mantids, and green lacewing larvae fall into this category.
Parasitizers: Like predators, parasitizers also prey upon other insects, but in a slightly different way. They lay their eggs on or in the bad bugs, and when the eggs hatch, the larvae feed on the host insects. Parasitic wasps are the main member of this category.
Meet the Beneficial Bugs in Your Backyard
Everyone knows their bees from their butterflies, but what about the many other beneficial bugs? It’s likely that you’ve already seen these good guys in your garden, but maybe you weren’t formally introduced. Here are a few you might want to become acquainted with:
Ladybugs
Despite their delightful name and appearance, ladybugs are ferocious predators! Before they get their bright red colors, they start out life as larvae (pictured below), cruising around on plants and feasting on aphids. Did you know that a ladybug larva can eat up to 40 aphids an hour?
Green Lacewings
Adult green lacewings feed on pollen and nectar, but their larvae, which look like a mix between a slug and an alligator, prey upon soft-bodied garden pests, including caterpillars and aphids.
Praying Mantids
A praying mantis will make short work of any grasshoppers that are troubling you; these fierce predators will also hunt many other insect pests that terrorize gardens, including moths, beetles, and flies. Note, however, that praying mantids are ruthless and will also eat other beneficials, like butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds—and even each other!
Spiders
Spiders—though technically arachnids rather than insects—are often overlooked as beneficial, but they are very effective pest controllers. Since they are attracted to their prey by movement, they eat many live insects. Jumping spiders and wolf spiders (pictured) are especially good at keeping pests under control.
Ground Beetles
“Ground beetles” is the name of a large group of predatory beetles that are beneficial as both adults and larvae. They will eat a wide range of insects, including nematodes, caterpillars, thrips, weevils, slugs, and silverfish. While insects like Japanese beetles should be controlled in the garden, don’t crush every beetle you see!
Soldier Beetles
Soldier beetles are an important predator of Mexican bean beetles, Colorado potato beetles, caterpillars, and aphids. Like many beneficials, they are attracted to plants that have compound blossoms, such as Queen Anne’s lace and yarrow.
Assassin Bugs
Assassin bugs look like a strange mix between a praying mantis and a squash bug. They use their sharp mouthparts to prey upon many different types of insect pests in the garden. In their adult form, they can be mistaken for squash bugs, so look carefully before you squish something!
Robber Flies
With their extra-long legs, robber flies are bug-eating machines that we’re thankful to have on our side. They may look intimidating, but unlike horseflies, they do not attack humans (although they are capable of biting when threatened). Instead, they go after a number of common garden pests. Try not to shoo this fly!
Hoverflies
Another good fly to have in your garden, the hoverfly looks like a tiny yellowjacket without a stinger. They feed on pollen and nectar and are extremely important pollinators. Their larvae are voracious predators, killing aphids, caterpillars, beetles, and thrips by sucking the juice from their victims.
Parasitic Wasps
Parasitic wasps are very tiny, so you probably won’t see them at work. However, they are a very effective pest control.
Brachonid wasps lay their eggs on the backs of tomato hornworms and other caterpillars, forming those white cocoons you see on the caterpillar’s back (pictured below). If you see a parasitized caterpillar, don’t kill it. Instead, move it to elsewhere in your garden. The wasp larvae will take care of them for you and turn into more wasps, who will continue to do their good work in your tomato patch.
Trichogramma wasps are minuscule wasps (several of them can fit on the head of a pin) that lay their eggs inside the eggs of over 200 different insect pests, preventing the pests’ eggs from ever hatching in the first place.
The tachinid fly looks like just a small housefly, but is an active parasitizer of corn borers, gypsy moth caterpillars, grasshoppers, Japanese beetles, Mexican bean beetles, squash bugs, and green stinkbugs.
Attracting Beneficial Insects
Like all living creatures, beneficial insects have a basic need for water, food, and shelter. By providing these things, your garden will become an inviting home for them.
A diversity of plants will attract a wide range of insects. Many beneficials appear in the garden before the pests do and need alternative food sources such as pollen and nectar if they are to stick around.
Early-blooming plants, especially ones with tiny blossoms like alyssum, or biennials such as carrots or parsley that have been left to bloom, will help draw beneficials to your yard in the spring.
Later, they will be especially attracted to plants with compound blossoms such as yarrow, goldenrod, and Queen Anne’s lace and flowering herbs like lavender, mint, sage, dill, fennel, and lemon balm.
Remember that if you resort to using chemical pesticides to control insects, you will often kill good and bad bugs alike. Even the so-called “natural” pesticides like pyrethrum and rotenone will kill many beneficial insects.
https://www.almanac.com/beneficial-insects-garden
Good Morning!
The non-beneficial insects are my greatest gardening foe. Cleaned up the front yard garden and got into chiggers and seed ticks. Makes me not want to even go outside. They’re bad this year with all the rainwater they can drink in their travels. I’m buying some Sevin granules today to do my usual band around the house/yard. Also buying a new 5 gal bucket and will make up some permethrin solution to soak a set of clothes in and spray a pair of shoes with.
Six 4 x 8 box gardens (one has perennial strawberries), plus potatoes to go into the large (10 x 10) box garden on top of the hill.
Gardens are prepped and ready to go. We plant and the Lord gives the increase.
I enjoy these garden threads immensely, Diana! It usually takes me days to read them, given the wealth of info they contain. Many many thanks FRiend!
Mom was working in her flower bed (one of them) yesterday and I noticed all these bees flying around. At first I thought they were yellow jackets, but when I looked more closely, there were no yellow stripes & watching them, they were going into individual holes and they did not seem to be aggressive at all. I looked them up and they fit the description of cellophane bees. They are great pollinators, have individual holes, the males have no stingers and while the females can sting, they are not aggressive at all. They will be around for about a month and then disappear. They do not like moist or wet soil and they like building their nest in sandy or dry soil. The soil in mom’s flower bed fits the bill for what they like. Since they are good pollinators, we will just let them be (no pun intended) and they will disappear in a month or so and then they will be back next spring.
We are having a groundhog invasion around here. The county forced the neighbor to clean up his junky property and I’m sure there were quite a few groundhogs living under all the junk. Since the cleanup, they are coming to our place and getting under the horse barn and our pole barns. I spotted number three eating grass off the side of the horse barn last night. Number one has been dispatched and there was an attempt to terminate number two Thursday (very ‘exciting’ - the dog was involved which added to the drama), which may or may not have been successful (I think it ultimately will be). These ‘hogs are so destructive - we have no power in the horse barn because their digging went through the buried electric lines & also caused a leak in the water line so we have to keep the water turned off. No animals in the barn or we’d have to make very expensive repairs.
Grass needs mowing in the yard & around the garden (LOL - what else is new?). The T-storms missed us last night so I will have to water today - garden & new/transplanted bushes look great. Several big projects on the “to do” list .... trying to beat the heat & humidity (we had it yesterday). Beautiful morning - overcast, nice breeze & late spring mild temps. The birds are happy - singing up a storm, which is so cheerful!
Deer & Wood Ticks are big by us this season. All outside hunting dogs, the Beagle and the two cats have all been doused with repellent, but just this morning there was a big, fat Wood Tick on the kitchen floor that obviously fell off of SOMEONE - and was immediately flushed.
Maybe it fell off of ME? *SHUDDER*
Can you do guineafowl? You won’t have a tick on your place! They are also good ‘alarm’ birds, from what I hear.
“Guineafowl are a low-maintenance flock that can be raised in small and backyard flocks. Flocks of guineas can kill and eat mice and small rats, as well as control insects such as wood ticks, grasshoppers, flies, and crickets.”
Good morning...it is like a glorius summer day here (fakes us out for a week in Spring) . I quit feeding the birds so they will eat more insects, maybe? Thanks for the article. Since we don’t spray our property (weed) as much as previous owners, we are seeing more beneficial host plants.
I don’t know of any way to stop one bug from eating another one, Good, Bad or Independent, LOL!
It’s a JUNGLE out there! :)
Got my cattle panels wired in place around last year’s inadequate front yard garden fence. So quick and easy. I’m going to be buying more of them for other things. My shop has turned into a goat shed because it’s open on the front so I can use panels to take care of that. They also get under the house because it’s up on poles and I haven’t finished the skirting. It’s time consuming but slapping up some panels will be a quick temporary fix. Also decided I’ll be fencing in the big garden area where the high tunnel’s going with these panels.
$2 a running foot which is twice the price of goat fence but I don’t have to deal with a roll or tensioning or setting posts sturdy enough for tensioning.
I have a bunch of 1” fiberglass sucker rods that come from the old oil wells. They’re a fiberglas composite really. Super strong and way easier to pound in than t-posts. I could make cheap gates from these panels too. Just add some square tubing for a frame.
Non-political?? hah! It’s almost time for the liberal blood sucking aphid to come out. I’ve had two plants damaged by something chewing on it (doesn’t look like cutworms) and I have fences up. One of my tomato plants had holes in its leaves from something. I can’t be out there every minute watching over my veggies from the ANTIFA bugs but I’m insecticide hesitant until I have to. I have Neems Oil and some Sevin dust but I draw the line at some experimental MRNA genetically altering spray on my foodstuffs. I wanted to hold a rally for the ladybugs but haven’t been able to communicate that to them effectively.
Was thinking about them the other day actually. Thinking about where I could put them. They say you can pen them in for a while and when let loose, they’ll go back to that area every night and sleep up in the trees. I hear they’re loud and some people can’t stand their “voice”/sound.
Guinea Fowl Calls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmw9_N1yloA
Starts out with one and then two of them get going at 45 seconds in.
Mason Bees :
Are solitary, very small feral bees which don't have a hive to protect, so they are reluctant to sting. They only collect pollen and enough nectar to feed their young eggs (larvae)
According to Growingagreenerworld.com (episode 509) Mason bees are much smaller than conventional honey bees,
and are known to be 30 - 60 times more active as pollinators than honey bees.
Mason Bees got their name since they use mud to encapsulate the nursery cell where they lay a single egg with food, and then 'mud it up'.
Also, the greenerworld program tells you how you can you can fabricate and construct your own Mason Bee house and/or purchase Mason bees as well as mid-summer 'Leaf Cutter' bees.
Both are known pollinators for Spring and Summer, especially if your garden lacks sufficient pollinators for vegetable and fruit production.
We were out of town for 5 days to visit with family last weekend, so I am feeling behind on my chores. Still doing spring cleanup but in the beds I’ve finished, I started planting my herbs. Even though I have an HOA, I’m hoping that some of these will fare better in the ground than in pots, which is what I’ve normally done to avoid being cited. I plan on having a few flower beds here and there so that maybe the herbs will be overlooked.
We took down a Bradford pear recently. Husband hated it, and then we discovered they are invasive, so down it came. That opened up some areas getting more sunlight, so I’m hoping I can plant more sun lovers in a few spots.
Just looked out the front window and saw the same. Push mower hasn't been run in two years. Wouldn't start last year so I just weed wacked. Will have to pull the carb off/apart and clean it. Might just weed wack for this weekend.
It was more about keeping the bad bugs away.
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