Invite Helpful Creatures to Your Garden

By Teresa Opdycke

Instead of spending your time mixing and spraying chemicals to ward off nasty garden pests, invite a predator to lunch in your garden. While you're at it, you might as well make it a feast for many. You're thinking, but my goodness, whatever shall I serve? Why, serve only the most delectable banquet imaginable. Keep your guests comfortably content and they'll stay for dinner tonight and in fact, for a summer of days and nights.

Plan the invitation list with care. You'll want to include:

the lovely little ladybugs
the dainty lacewings
a preying mantis or two
a brownish green toad
the ever so elegant black and yellow garden spider

Round out your list with hover flies, robber flies, and wasps. Provide them with their favorite foods and comforts and you're going to see a difference in the garden.

All bugs, good or bad, have one thing in common: Insecticides wipe them out. Tuck the sprays and chemicals away in the garage and forget about them. Be patient and allow your new found lunch mates to take care of garden business. Before the lunch date, learn the habits and likes of your guests to keep them around.

Actually, it isn't the adult ladybug or ladybird that needs to be invited, but the wild and wooly teenagers or larvae that will devour aphids that threaten flower and vegetable plants. By luring the ladybug to your garden with umbrella shaped flowers like fennel, dill, cilantro, angelica, tansy and yarrow, you're ensuring that the teens will come along. Be sure to serve up some white cosmos, as the lady dressed in red with black polka dots shows a distinct fondness for them. Plant coreopsis and scented geraniums for the ladybug as well as for yourself.

A lunch guest, not to be overlooked, comes dressed in a light green with twin sets of transparent wings of lace. A lovely predator, the lace wing, like the ladybug, lays eggs on plants that hatch into fierce eating machines, sometimes called aphid lions. These little dynamos, in true teenage fashion, gobble up every scrumptious morsel of mealy bug, thrip, white flies, spider mites, and more. In fact, before becoming adults, the tiny brown alligator look-alikes consume 1,200 enemies of a garden. Again, to keep the adults happy in your garden, you'll entice them with nectar from their favorite flowers.

You'll definitely want to include these flowers on your predators' menu:

sweet alyssum
dill
and plants from the mint family.

A party just wouldn't be a party without including the very elegant chartreuse praying mantis. With his feet brought together in a humble pose, he'll gladly munch his way through leaf-eating pests. A nocturnal garden beast, he’ll have a midnight snack of aphids, beetles, small flies, moths and cutworms. The voracious appetite of the preying mantis extends to anything that moves as it grows older, so be aware that while the majestic insect may eat the bad guys, he'll also dine on the good ones.

A little dinner music, please, is provided by the gardener's friend, the toad. He'll not only leap his way into the heart of your garden with his ribbit chirpings, he'll happily consume slugs, bugs and pesky mosquitoes. Keeping a toad content means providing a toad abode; however, he's not a picky sort. A broken clay pot turned on its side will work perfectly. Of course, if you cherish your little toad, you'll also provide him with water. He likes cool, damp places to hang out during the heat of the day or when he just wants to escape the rigors of garden life.

Every garden should have the very dignified black and yellow garden spider as a resident. Invite the large orb spider to lunch in your garden and strike fear into the hearts of aphids, flies, wasps, and unfortunately, bees. The garden spider weaves a masterpiece web that can be up to two feet across. When drops of dew cling to it you may find it a thing of beauty, but the garden spider traps prey in the lovely web and dines later. It may look fierce and frightening, but lucky is the gardener who enjoys the company of a yellow and black garden spider.

The praying mantis, ladybug, garden spider, toad, and lace wing represent just a few of the many predators that eat the bad bugs. To create an environment that keeps the predators content there can be absolutely no spraying of insecticide. Turn off the bug zapper and keep it off. Bug zappers kill as many good bugs as they do bad ones. Plant a garden or a bed of flowers and plants that attract the good guys and gals. Probably the one plant that most of the creatures love best is the lowly weed with the elegant name, Queen Anne's lace or wild carrot. Set a bird bath on the ground; add stones and rocks for insects to sit on. After all, insects need water, too. Organic gardens need a healthy balance of predators and prey to keep the plants within flourishing. If you don't provide for their basic needs your lunch guests may decide that the neighbors serve up a better lunch than you do. What a shame that would be!

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